Roxboro residents raising money to relocate Confederate monuments from county courthouse
When you walk toward the Person County courthouse on Main Street in Roxboro, you are welcomed by two Confederate monuments. Now a local group wants to make a change, and it comes with a $25,000 price tag.
Monuments honoring Roxboro soldiers who fought in the Confederacy standing in front of the courthouse doesn’t sit right with many area residents, including Shaina Outland.
“Im from Roxboro," Outland said. "I know the history of what my family had to endure with being here. As a Black woman and what that symbol means to me.”
Luther Perkins agrees.
“What the statue stands for isn’t justice. It’s racism at its finest,” Perkins said.
That’s why a local non-profit, Personians Against Injustice and Racism, has organized protests and petitions outside the courthouse for many months, fighting for a change.
Chance Sanford of PAIR says that the monument should be relocated.
“The general statute in North Carolina states that the monument can be moved to an appropriate place or a place of similar notoriety," Sanford explained. "It can [also] be moved if it poses a safety hazard to the general public.”
Sanford, who’s leading this effort, says the group lobbied county commissioners and showed the division the monuments have created in the community. In an emergency session six months ago, commissioners voted unanimously to use private funding to relocate the monuments to a memorial site.
But it turns out, they didn't have the funds to complete the project. Sanford recently learned that a private donor backed out in August and he says it was hidden from the public.
"It definitely seemed like it was a way to placate people and to kind of ease the tension if you will and say, 'Hey OK, you guys, you got it, you win,'" Sanford said.
"They played us, just to be frank," Outland explained. "They wanted to stop the noise."
Now the group is raising money on its own with a GoFundMe page. The non-profit wants to ease the pain for so many people hurting in the community.
If moved, the monuments would be relocated to a veterans park in Roxboro.
