Seattle—The Make It Right Project’s public awareness billboard in Seattle has been garnering coverage from media outlets across the city (scroll to the bottom of this post to see). The sign was erected to ensure widespread awareness in the city of the existence of a local Confederate monument. Located in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s iconic Capitol Hill neighborhood, the Confederate marker has stood on the site for more than 90 years. The monument was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy—the organization behind most of the 1,700 Confederate markers in the U.S.—the same year that the group dedicated its monument to the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. The billboard, which includes a picture of the monument, tells the city, “Hey Seattle, there’s a Confederate memorial in your backyard.” The sign is located at 103 15th Avenue East in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

“It notable that Seattle’s tribute to the Confederacy was carved from a 10-ton piece of Stone Mountain—the site where the Ku Klux Klan held its rebirth ceremony in 1915—that was shipped across the country from Georgia to Washington,” said MIR Director Kali Holloway. “The UDC sought to ensure that white racist terror was, both figuratively and literally, an elemental part of this monument. While the marker is surrounded by Confederate graves, there are no bodies directly beneath it, meaning it serves only to glorify the army that fought to maintain black chattel slavery. It is not a headstone, but instead a sculptural assertion of white supremacy and power.”

“The Loren Miller Bar Association joins the Make It Right Project in calling for the removal of Seattle’s Confederate monument,” said Loren Miller Bar Association president Erika Evans. LMBA is the Washington affiliate chapter of the National Bar Association, the oldest minority bar association in the U.S. and largest organization of African-American lawyers in the country. “We strongly believe our namesake, Loren Miller, who dedicated his four-decade career in law to fighting racial injustice and discrimination—and whose father was born into slavery—would undoubtedly support this effort to remove a symbol of the virulent racism he fearlessly confronted. Particularly in this moment, much like the moment it was erected, when hard-fought African American civil rights are under attack.”

“The Lake View Cemetery Confederate monument was put up during an era of intense racial violence in the South—a period that had also seen the Klan expand across Washington and Oregon, when lynchings became a common way of terrorizing black communities around the country,” said Michelle Merriweather, president and CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. “It continues to send the message it was erected to convey. The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle—which has been fighting on behalf of Seattle’s most vulnerable communities for as long as this monument has stood—is loudly calling for its removal.”

The Make It Right Project is dedicated to working with multiple groups—activists, artists, historians and media outlets—to remove Confederate monuments and develop post-removal protocols to tell the truth about history.

Media Coverage:

MyNorthwest: Group Puts Up Billboard Calling for Removal of Seattle Confederate Monument

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Campaign to Take Down Seattle’s Confederate Memorial Gets a Billboard

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Charlette Report: Hey Seattle, There’s a Confederate Memorial in Your Backyard

The Ron & Don Show: A Billboard Calls for the Removal of a Confederate Monument in Seattle

The Skanner: Billboard in Seattle Spotlights Local Confederate Memorial

Capitol Hill Seattle Blog: Campaign Against Confederate Monuments Targets Memorial in Capitol Hill Cemetery

The Heyward Shepherd memorial is an overtly pro-slavery monument erected in 1931 in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In recognition of John Brown Day, please check out an article of mine published in the Spirit of Jefferson, adapted below, about the many reasons the marker should come down.

Beneath that are photos from the protest of the Confederate plaque on the Charles Town, West Virginia, courthouse on Friday, October 12. Among the protesters was the group of women whose joint letter launched the campaign for removal last year. Members of the West Virginia Women’s March were also involved in the demonstration, titled “Let’s Make It Right: Remove the Plaque.”

The following is adapted from “Heyward Shepherd ‘Tribute’ Is a Racist Relic That Must Come Down”:

The inscription on what’s now known as the Heyward Shepherd memorial in Harpers Ferry makes clear that while it is a monument to many things—racism, slavery and oppression above all—Heyward Shepherd the human being is not among them.

Shepherd (whose actual first name was Haywood) had been a free black man, a baggage handler on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and a husband and father of five. As the first person killed in abolitionist John Brown’s failed 1859 attempt to incite an armed revolt among enslaved people, Shepherd’s accidental death was an historic casualty. The latter fact made Shepherd into a person of interest to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). After learning that students at Storer College, an historically black institution in Harpers Ferry, had put up a plaque honoring Brown and his rebellion, the UDC endeavored to create an oppositional monument. Under the guise of honoring Shepherd, the Daughters savvily envisaged a way to exploit black death for their own propagandistic ends.

It ultimately took 10 years for the UDC to find a location that would permit installation of what they tellingly referred to as the “Faithful Slave Memorial.” Community opposition, which had been led by students and faculty at Storer College, was eventually overruled. In 1931—five years after erecting a monument to the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, and five decades before installing an honorific to Confederates on the Jefferson county courthouse that replaced the building Confederates once destroyed—the UDC put up their monument along Harpers Ferry’s Potomac Street. Though it briefly acknowledged Shepherd as a “colored freeman,” it also contorted historical fact to disingenuously characterize Shepherd as having “exemplif[ied] the character and faithfulness of thousands of Negroes who, under many temptations throughout subsequent years of war, so conducted themselves that no stain was left upon a record which is the peculiar heritage of the American people, and an everlasting tribute to the best in both races.”

Like all Confederate markers, the Harpers Ferry monument perpetuates the ahistorical Lost Cause mythology that asserts the Confederacy’s treasonous fight to maintain black chattel slavery was valorous and that slavery itself was an ultimate good. But what’s particularly remarkable about the monument—an otherwise unremarkable 6’ tall slab of granite—is how it lays fully bare the intentions of those who put it there. The UDC’s outright support for racism is literally inscribed on its face. It is an explicit ode to slavery, a wistful longing for a time when black people knew their place, set into stone. The “best” blacks, it argues, did not fight for their freedom—not because they were outgunned and terrorized, victimized by a brutally violent and inhumane system—but because slavery actually wasn’t so bad. Consider that the UDC is credited with having erected the vast majority of the estimated 700 Confederate statues and monuments that dot this country. The story of the Harpers Ferry monument offers clarity on the ideas and beliefs that guided that work.

For good and obvious reasons—decency and morality among them—criticism of the monument continued after its placement. One scathing critique in the African-American press noted the marker proved whites in the South “still hanker[ed] for the filthy institution of slavery.” Those criticisms largely faded when the tablet was placed in storage in the 1970s due to construction, at least until the UDC demanded its return in the early 1980s, launching another round of justifiable outrage by groups including the NAACP. In response, the National Parks Service covered the monument with wooden planks, reportedly until the Sons of Confederate Veterans and UDC made direct appeals to Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. The two Southern senators, whose legacies on race are both well-known and abysmal, saw to it that in 1995 the tablet was returned to the Harpers Ferry site where it still stands.

Even amidst a glutted field of racist markers, the Harpers Ferry monument stands out. The recent national conversation about the removal of Confederate iconography has pretty much omitted the Heyward Shepherd marker, but it should be a feature—as should the Charles Town Confederate plaque. In 1986, more than 120 years after the war’s end, the local UDC placed a marker to an enemy army that fought for slavery on the county courthouse, as if posting a literal sign about who could expect to receive justice inside. Defenders of Confederate markers frequently express fears that removing monuments that honor the Confederacy will magically “erase history.” They also argue that Confederate memorials weren’t intended to glorify slavery, and that calls to take these monuments down are the result of a new and misguided strain of “political correctness.” The Heyward Shepherd monument disproves both claims, despite what has been endlessly repeated by neo-Confederates from the streets of Charlottesville to the White House. Calls for removal around the country aren’t the result of some new PC movement. They’re the outcome when voices that have been ignored forever demand to be heard.

These monuments were put up to erase history and replace it with lies. To take them down, then, would be a corrective.

Last week, the North Carolina chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—the organization that has done more than any other to put up Confederate monuments and ensure they remain standing—held their annual multi-day gathering in Durham. They were met by a group of anti-racist activists. Organized by Heather Redding and other members of Hillsborough Progressives Taking Action, the demonstration also included activists from local chapters of other anti-racist organizations. Protesters sported t-shirts provided by the Make It Right Project emblazoned with messages opposing the UDC’s neo-Confederate agenda.

Check out photos of the action below. More on the UDC’s history and current actions—which include erecting a monument to the Ku Klux Klan, ensuring Southern children’s textbooks properly schooled them in the tenets of white supremacy, and successfully spreading the Lost Cause mythology, which twists history to turn the Confederate fight for slavery into a noble cause—is available here.

(l-r) Susan Christine Reynolds and Heather Redding of Hillsborough Progressives Taking Action.

Chapel Hill, NC—The Make It Right (MIR) Project put up a billboard in Chapel Hill this week calling attention to North Carolina’s “Heritage Protection Act,” a law put in place to ensure Confederate monuments remain standing. MIR’s signage was erected a little over a month after activists toppled the Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam,” which had stood for more than a century at the main entrance to the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The heritage law, in tandem with inaction by college administrators, had prevented the statue’s removal despite 50 years of protests and legal challenges from students, faculty and community activists.

“North Carolina’s heritage law—which prevents localities from removing Confederate markers without approval from the Republican-dominated legislature—protects more than 95 Confederate statues and other monuments to the army that fought to defend slavery,” said MIR Director Kali Holloway. “These markers defy the realities of history. In passing this law, North Carolina’s state government has said unequivocally that it supports this corruption of historical fact, and remains invested in a system defined by its racism and oppression of black people.”

“The 2015 Heritage Protection Act was signed into law when challenges to Confederate iconography mounted after the 2015 murder of nine black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina,” said UNC–Chapel Hill historian William Sturkey. “The law was enacted with the explicit intent to disenfranchise and disempower North Carolinians. It was a tacit statement of support for white supremacy.”

“More than 20 people have been arrested since Silent Sam was taken down, and all but one were anti-racist activists protesting white supremacists who continue to gather where the monument stood,” said Maya Little, whose demonstration against Silent Sam last April galvanized hundreds of other activists. “For years, police officers guarded Silent Sam 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring the statue’s safety. The monument came down in August, but tributes to the Confederacy around the state are still protected under the law. Apparently, North Carolina’s state government is more concerned with protecting its Confederate monuments—overt symbols of white terror—than in protecting its black and brown communities.”

The MIR billboard is located on U.S. Route 15, also known as 15-501, a heavily traveled stretch of road that connects Durham and Chapel Hill. The billboard image features multiple Confederate statues, along with the message, “North Carolina Is Still Protecting Dozens of Confederate Statues.” The billboard follows other MIR billboards demanding Confederate monument removal erected in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Make It Right Project is dedicated to working with multiple groups—activists, artists, historians and media outlets—to remove Confederate monuments and develop post-removal protocols to tell the truth about history.