Black North Carolinians have been waiting eight years for a monument at their own state Capitol, and the legislature has now chosen a preacher and a war instead. Union Square in Raleigh still has no memorial to African Americans, WUNC reported Monday, even though a state panel urged one “without delay” in 2018.
What the square does have are monuments to two former governors, Zebulon Vance and Charles Aycock, whom WUNC describes as white supremacists. The state has added new signage explaining who they were. It has not added a Black monument.
The delay is not an accident of the calendar. It is a record of votes.
In 2017, after the Charlottesville rally, Gov. Roy Cooper called for Confederate monuments to come off the Capitol grounds. State law kept the statues in place. In 2018 the N.C. Historical Commission voted that Union Square over-memorializes the Confederacy and urged the governor and the General Assembly to install memorials to African Americans, Native Americans and women “at the earliest opportunity.”
Money for a Black monument was written into Cooper’s 2019 budget plan, at a proposed cost of $2.5 million. The funding was eliminated that year in a budget standoff. The Senate removed it again in 2020, and Republican budget writer Brent Jackson cited “ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, vandalism, and removal of existing monuments” as the reason. In 2021 the state put $1.5 million into Freedom Park in downtown Raleigh instead.
Gov. Josh Stein proposed $5 million for the Capitol monument in 2025. The legislature rejected it. The budget passed in July 2026 prioritized monuments to the evangelist Billy Graham and to the Revolutionary War.
Lawmakers will say the state has many people and events to honor, and that is true. But the Historical Commission, not an advocacy group, found the imbalance on Union Square, and the General Assembly has had eight years and several budgets to correct it. When the money moved, it moved to other memorials.
“It’s equally important to replace those monuments of hate with monuments of historical accuracy that celebrate the contributions of Black Americans beyond chattel slavery,” Emancipate NC’s director told WUNC.
The part of the Capitol grounds that tells Black North Carolinians’ story is the part that remains unmarked. A legislature that can find money for Billy Graham can find $5 million for it.
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