Alex Beall
WMAL.com
LEESBURG (WMAL) — Amid a national debate over the Confederate flag, some Leesburg residents are calling for the removal of a statue depicting a Confederate soldier.
The 12-foot statue created in memory of Loudoun County’s Confederate soldiers sits in front the county’s courthouse.
Phillip Thompson, president of the Loudoun branch of the NAACP, said the location of the statue is inappropriate because African-Americans were sold as slaves at the courthouse. He thinks the statue should be placed at Balls Bluff Battlefield, where Confederate soldiers are buried.
“The people of Loudoun who erected that statue in 1908, that’s who they were. Today, we’re a different Loudoun County and that statue is out of touch with our community,” Thompson said. “It shouldn’t be sitting at a courthouse where, number 1, people come to for law and justice and, number 2, that’s the same courthouse in which African-Americans wre sold as slaves.”
He argued that Confederate soldiers are the only Americans who are still honored even though they fought against the U.S.
However, county officials said that the statue cannot be legally moved. County Attorney Leo Rogers noted a Virginia state code when speaking with the Times-Mirror:
” … it shall be unlawful for the authorities of the locality, or any other person or persons, to disturb or interfere with any [memorials or monuments for war veterans] so erected, or to prevent its citizens from taking proper measures and exercising proper means for the protection, preservation and care of same. For purposes of this section, ‘disturb or interfere with’ includes removal of, damaging or defacing monuments or memorials … ”
Thompson said if the statue cannot be moved, it should be balanced out with other on-site memorials dedicated to Union soldiers or the slaves sold there.
This isn’t a new issue for Virginia. Discussion has existed over the Jefferson Davis Highway, named for the first and only Confederate president, and Lee Memorial Highway, named for the Confederate general.
Daniel Moshenberg, a professor at George Washington University and expert on gender and race relations, said there has been pressure to remove confederate statues in the South as well as on Capitol Hill.
“This is a discussion both of symbolic violence as well as of physical and economic and structural violence, but certainly in this area, the issue of road names and park names has been an issue,” Moshenberg said.
Moshenberg said these symbols don’t necessarily cause tension as much as they can reveal tensions that already exist.
“I’m not saying every person of color, and in particular every African-American, who drives on Lee Highway thinks about the Confederacy,” he said. “But I am saying that at some point that becomes an issue.”
Moshenberg said removing the symbols is part of the process of healing racial tensions in the U.S.
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