In Taylorsville, a one-man desegregation movement

“One day in the early 1960s, when drinking from the ‘Whites Only’ water fountain on the factory floor [in Taylorsville, my husband, Mike Claman] had had enough of it. He tore off the signs. He then went to the ladies’ and men’s bathrooms and tore off the signs there, announcing that there would be no more segregation within the plant.

“The outcry was horrendous, with delegations marching into Mike’s office. He politely informed the workers that if they did not want to drink the same water, from the same fountains, they could go thirsty; if they did not choose to use common facilities, they would have to wait until they went home….”

— From North Carolina Ends Factory Desegregation—with Backlash” by Edith Claman at Moment magazine

 

Silent Sam’s stony-faced band of Confederates

Tom Vincent, records management analyst at the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, is the latest historian to take on the task of tallying the state’s Civil War monuments (and the first to have compiled a searchable database).

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Tom, how many “standing soldier” Confederate monuments have you recorded?

Fifty-four, out of a total of 110 Confederate memorials. Seven are in cemeteries; the remaining 47 are at more public locations such as courthouse lawns.

The database also  includes the monument to the United States Colored Troops in Hertford, a monument to Union troops in Hendersonville and the monuments in the National Cemeteries in New Bern and Salisbury.

Where did these statues come from?

Many were ordered from catalogs. Companies such as McNeel Marble Co. (Marietta, Ga.) and  American Bronze Co. (Chicago) often advertised in “Confederate Veteran” magazine.

Cooper Bros. of Raleigh supplied some of the stone bases. I’m not sure if Cooper Bros. provided any of the actual monuments.

Was marble the predominant material? Cast concrete? Bronze?

I have file folders full of newspaper articles about the dedications, but I haven’t really collated what the monuments were made of. I think more were granite than marble. Some were bronze, and some were hollow metal skins on a frame (like the Statue of Liberty, I guess). Some of the more inexpensive ones were cast concrete.

How long ago was the last standing soldier dedicated?

The monument in Taylorsville (Alexander County) was dedicated in 1958, which made it a bit of an outlier. Before that, the last was Beaufort (Carteret County) in 1926.

Are you still turning up statues?

I’m reasonably confident I’ve found all the standing soldier monuments in North Carolina, but the database is a work in progress, subject to change. People are still dedicating memorials, though, usually of the “slab” type, like an oversize gravestone. Here is one from 2000 in Surry County.

And the General Johnston monument, on private land near the Bentonville Historic Site, was dedicated on March 20, 2010.

Is “Silent Sam” the only one that provokes calls for removal?

There have been protests against the Confederate monument in front of the Pitt County courthouse in Greenville.

And J. Peder Zane in the Feb. 22, 2009, News and Observer [sorry, link eludes me] called for removal of the Confederate monument in front of the Capitol.

Death noted: A playwright who caught the pitch

“During the Depression, my [physician] father went back to Boone, and I lived for four years of my early life in Boone…. The other plays are OK, at their best, but the pitch of the voices… in my Appalachian plays…  is a little sharper because I heard that when I was a child.”

— Playwright Romulus Linney, recalling for an interviewer in 2002 one of his many North Carolina influences. Romulus Zachariah Linney IV’s great-grandfather was a Taylorsville lawyer and three-term Congressman.

Linney died Saturday at age 80, prolific and widely respected though never having achieved the fame of an August Wilson or a Horton Foote (or of Laura, his actress daughter).