Proposed NC budget lacks money for Black history monument. ‘This was not the time.’
It doesn’t look like North Carolina will have a monument to African Americans on the State Capitol grounds anytime soon.
In the works for several years, the planned monument to teach the Capitol’s primary visitors — children — about Black history and the Black experience in the state has hit a roadblock.
Until now, the project had been in a holding pattern, waiting on $2.5 million in funding to come through from the state budget. The funding was in Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget proposal and was a priority of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which is part of the executive branch.
The Senate released its budget this week, and it didn’t include any money for the African Americans monument. On Tuesday, some Democrats hadn’t yet noticed that there was no funding for the project in the Republican-written budget.
“Really? That’s an insult,” Sen. Gladys Robinson, a Guilford County Democrat told The News & Observer on Tuesday.
“I mean, people have worked on that, they have gotten statewide support for it. It ought to be acknowledged,” Robinson said when told about the lack of funding.
“So, why not? I could understand if we didn’t have the funds. But certainly it ought to be. African Americans are a significant part of our history and our state, and the monument should be funded,” she said.
The Senate’s lead budget writer, Autryville Republican Sen. Brent Jackson, said the Senate decided not to put it in the budget this time, even though it had proposed funding the project in a previous year’s proposal and in a different bill last year.
“That was discussed, and the decision was since the monuments were being taken down, or they got vandalized during all the protests and they were being taken down on the Capitol square, we just felt like this was not the time to put something back up there of any type,” Jackson told The N&O on Tuesday.
In the 2019 state budget that never became law, there was funding for $2.5 million for the African Americans monument on the Capitol grounds, which is also called Union Square and is in the center of downtown Raleigh. At the time, the grounds included several statues to the Confederacy. During the summer 2020 protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, some statues of Confederate soldiers were torn down by protesters and others were later removed by Cooper’s administration.
It was a week later that the Senate’s funding of the monument in a different bill, which had been passed and sent to the House, died in committee.
The removal came despite a state law passed during former Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration that had made it difficult to remove publicly owned monuments. The Republican legislature passed that law in 2015 as Confederate monuments came under national scrutiny in the weeks after the killing of nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
What was finally funded, and had also been in the 2019 budget, was $1.5 million for Freedom Park. A separate project that also has private funding and designed by the firm of the late architect Phil Freelon, Freedom Park broke ceremonial ground in the fall of 2020. It will include public art called the Beacon of Freedom at the center and pathways and tributes to the Black experience in North Carolina. However it won’t be on the Capitol grounds. It is on a block between the Executive Mansion and the Legislative Building on Lane Street, at the intersection with Wilmington Street.
“We did fund Freedom Park,” Jackson noted Tuesday.
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“I figured, and in discussion on this, we decided to see how all this shakes out, what monuments are going to stay and what monuments are coming down eventually,” he said.
There is still a chance of the African Americans monument being funded in the budget this year. The Senate budget is just the first of a three-round voting process. After the Senate passes its budget — expected this week — the House will pass its own budget, likely in July, and then a third and final legislative budget called the conference budget. That could be passed and sent to Cooper’s desk to sign or veto in late July or August.
“We figured that was one hurdle we could at least discuss in conference [budget] and see if there is any appetite in the House to do it,” Jackson said. He said that while the Senate didn’t include it in its budget, they have supported it in the past and could again in the conference budget.
In April, Cooper told The N&O during a news conference that he hoped the monument can be part of the final budget this year.
The governor said then that the removed Confederate monuments were in storage, and that the N.C. Historical Commission would make the decision about where they will be moved next.
There is some other funding for African American historical projects in the Senate budget.
There is $150,000 appropriated via a direct grant to the Umoja Group, Inc. for an African American pictorial wall. The money would allow the wall’s images and content to be digitized and the wall preserved. Umoja Group is a nonprofit in Fayetteville.
The African American Heritage Commission, which already receives $281,000 in recurring funds, will get an additional $135,000 to fund an education and interpretation specialist and pay other operating and project costs.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published June 22, 2021 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Proposed NC budget lacks money for Black history monument. ‘This was not the time.’."
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