A Confederate statue. A black college. And simmering small-town resentment.

BY MARTHA QUILLIN
April 20, 2018 05:00 PM
Updated April 21, 2018 08:53 PM
LOUISBURG

Will Hinton has brought a half-dozen public art projects to life in his beloved town of Louisburg, with the help of funding and physical labor from the town and his students at Louisburg College, where he's a one-man art department.

But his current proposal — to relocate a Confederate monument from the middle of the road on the highest hill of Main Street in town — has brought claims that this time, Hinton isn’t trying to add something significant, but erase it ...

The monument has stood there since 1914, when it was erected with at least $3,500 contributed to the United Daughters of the Confederacy five decades after the Civil War. It’s one of more than 700 Confederate monuments across the U.S. and about 90 in North Carolina, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many were factory produced and sold from the late 1800s to around 1920, when states were enacting Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black Americans and canceled the social and political gains they had made ...

When the monument was built, Louisburg College, a Methodist-affiliated school that's one of the oldest junior colleges in the country, did not allow black students to attend. The school occupied just one side of the road then, but it has expanded — and diversified. Today, about 70 percent of the school's 700 students are black, and as they travel between buildings, they cross back and forth over North Main Street beneath the soldier’s feet ...

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