Last week, Kerwin Pittman joined the ACLU of North Carolina and Durham Community Bail Fund on a tour of Confederate monuments in front of North Carolina’s county courthouses.
The tour criss-crossed the State of North Carolina to see so many of these reminders of the recent past of slavery and Jim Crow in our state’s history. Whenever people have to go to court in North Carolina, they are most likely going to have to pass by a monument to enslavers and segregationists in order to get inside.
The group met with local communities in Rutherford and Gastonia about efforts to remove these monuments. In Gastonia, a bomb threat was called in, causing great disruption and upheaval. Emancipate NC supports all efforts to remove monuments to hate, including the advocacy campaign by NC CRED, the NAACP litigation in Alamance County, and the self-help ventures that took place in Durham in 2017.