In the early hours of Sunday, September 1, 2025, the city of Edenton, North Carolina, quietly removed a Confederate statue from its prominent waterfront location. The bronze figure, a longstanding symbol in the town’s public landscape, was carefully lifted from its stone base just after midnight and transported to storage at the county jail. Town officials have announced plans to relocate the statue to a veterans' memorial park behind the Chowan County Courthouse—a decision years in the making and fraught with public debate, legal challenges, and national controversy.
This latest removal comes at a time when the United States is embroiled in a heated reckoning over how history is commemorated in public spaces. According to The Washington Post, Edenton—a picturesque town with a 60 percent Black population—has been the site of weekly protests against the monument for the past three years. Demonstrators, led by local activist Rod Phillips, gathered every Saturday to call for the statue’s removal, arguing that its presence in such a central location was a painful reminder of a legacy of racial injustice. “It’s a great sense of relief,” Phillips told the paper, reflecting the sentiment of many who felt the monument’s removal marked a step toward healing and progress.
Yet, for others in Edenton and across the country, the statue’s relocation is far from a victory. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that filed a lawsuit to prevent the move, argued that relocating the statue outside the courthouse would violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by intimidating Black residents attending legal proceedings. Though a judge dismissed this lawsuit last month, clearing the way for the removal, the group’s commander, Michael Dean, voiced his dismay on social media: “Like a thief in the night, the town removes the memorial under cover of darkness. No fanfare or honor guard.”
The statue’s journey through Edenton’s public spaces is itself a reflection of the town’s complex relationship with its past. Erected in 1909 at a historic Colonial-era courthouse, the monument was moved to the waterfront in 1961, during the height of the Civil Rights protests. At that time, Golden Frinks, a prominent local leader and lieutenant to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., organized demonstrations in Edenton, and Dr. King himself was a frequent visitor. The statue’s latest relocation was recommended several years ago by a racial reconciliation commission, aiming to address longstanding community divisions.
Mayor W. Hackney High Jr. defended the town’s approach as a compromise that sought to honor the perspectives of both supporters and opponents of the statue. “To those who advocated for the monument’s relocation or removal: your efforts brought about meaningful change. The monument is no longer in its original, most prominent location at the foot of Broad Street,” High wrote in a public statement. “To those who opposed its removal: your voices helped ensure the monument is preserved and relocated respectfully, not destroyed or discarded.”
Despite the compromise, tensions remain high. Phillips, who rushed to witness the removal, emphasized that “the struggle is not completely over.” His group’s mission, he said, is now to “keep this thing from going back up anywhere.” The ongoing debate in Edenton mirrors a broader national conversation about how the country confronts its history—particularly the legacy of the Confederacy and the Civil War.
On the national stage, President Donald Trump has launched a campaign to restore Confederate memorials removed during the racial justice movement that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which criticized efforts to reinterpret or contextualize U.S. history. The order claimed that institutions like the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and directed federal agencies to reinstate statues and displays that had been removed or altered to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
Trump’s campaign has also included efforts to restore the names of military bases to honor Confederate soldiers—names that had been changed during the Biden administration. Some statues that were previously removed are slated for replacement, and the administration has ordered reviews of museum exhibits that, in its view, do not portray the country in a sufficiently positive light. According to a U.S. Army official cited by The Independent, the restoration of a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is expected to cost approximately $10 million over two years. The monument will feature new panels sharing the history behind it, and its base will be refurbished and replaced.
This federal pushback against monument removals has reignited debates among historians, activists, and local leaders. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, published an op-ed arguing that the political left has been as complicit in “erasing history” as the Trump administration. He pointed to the removal of monuments like the 1891 New Orleans statue honoring white supremacists and the “Silent Sam” statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zimmerman contended that “we need to see these symbols…to understand who we are, how we got here and where we need to go.”
Others, however, push back against the idea that removing monuments erases history. As one commentator in History v. Memory wrote, “No history has ever been erased and no one has ever been denied the opportunity to learn about any historical subject. You have never needed a monument to study the past.” The author argued that the removal and permanent storage or disposal of a monument can itself serve as a form of community reflection and transformation. “Monuments are not history lessons,” the writer insisted. “Their dedication and placement in a public space is a reflection of the collective memory of an organization or community at a specific moment in time that may or may not reflect the values and collective stories all those concerned.”
The recent removals, the author concluded, are “democracy in action, not erasure of history.” Far from turning away from the past, these grassroots efforts represent a community’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its history with its present values. In Edenton, that struggle is still unfolding, with both sides vowing to continue their advocacy, whether to keep the statue in storage or to ensure its respectful display in a new location.
As debates over monuments and memory continue to play out in towns and cities across the United States, Edenton’s experience highlights the challenges—and the opportunities—of confronting the nation’s complicated legacy. For now, the Confederate statue awaits its next chapter, a silent testament to a community’s evolving understanding of its own story.
