Steve Burns
WMAL.com

ROCKVILLE —  (WMAL) – A statue of an anonymous Confederate soldier has been sitting outside the Red Brick Courthouse in Rockville for 102 years, with an inscription that reads “To Our Heroes of Montgomery Co., Maryland, that we through life may not forget to love the thin gray line.”

“The immediate heirs of Confederate soldiers may have felt somewhat embarrassed and felt the need to justify the Confederate effort. We don’t have that need today,” said Montgomery County Council President George Levanthal. “I think it’s indicative of a time just before World War I where there was an effort to venerate the Confederacy and fog up the real causes of the Civil War.”

As Montgomery County is an “enlightened community,” as Levanthal put it, “we’re trying to handle this in a very collegial way.”

Rockville officials will be holding a meeting, open to the public, this Monday to discuss their options with the statue. Levanthal said groups including the Maryland Historic Trust and the Montgomery County NAACP will be represented, and the public is welcome to comment.

As far as his personal viewpoint, “I think the statue should be moved, I don’t think it should be destroyed. I think we should identify an appropriate site for it,” Levanthal said.

Rockville City Council member Tom Moore is on the same page.

“The best way to cool public passions on an issue like this is for people to talk it out,” Moore said. “Some say (the statue was erected) to heal the sounds of the Civil War. Some people say it was part of Jim Crow coming in, reminding black people where their place was.”

He said something President Obama noted in his eulogy in Charleston struck him. “We’ve walked by these symbols for too long, and not recognized, and not appreciated, the pain they cause a lot of our citizens.”

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