Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL) – The debate over the fate of a statue of a Confederate soldier on the grounds of the Loudoun County courthouse continues. Board of Supervisors member Geary Higgins will ask the board next week to send the issue to the county’s Heritage Commission, whose job is to preserve the county’s history, to look into how another statue could be added to the site. He said they could commemorate the county’s enslaved African Americans or the Loudoun Rangers, a group organized by Samuel Means to fight for the Union.
“It would be, I think, a better thing than tearing down statues to put up additional memorials to some of the others,” said board of supervisors member Geary Higgins.
This issue has come up in the past. In 2015, Higgins said the board committed to contributing $50,000 to go towards building a statue about the contribution of African Americans to the county, but nothing came of it.
Also that year, the county unveiled a monument honoring Revolutionary War veterans. The county put $50,000 towards the total cost of $420,000.
Higgins said the Historical Commission would be tasked with finding organizations that would be interested in contributing to adding a new memorial alongside the Confederate soldier statue.
On the other side of the debate is Board of Supervisors member Ron Meyer who would like to ask the state for the authority to move the statue to Ball’s Bluff battlefield where one of the early battles of the Civil War was fought.
“Those who have Confederate soldiers in their lineage can go make sure that they’re properly memorialized, but, at the same time, people who are of the lineage of those who were enslaved in Loudoun also don’t have to walk by a statue of the Confederacy going to our courthouse,” Meyer told WMAL in August.
Meyer doesn’t think it’s fundamentally right for the government to make people whose ancestors were slaves walk by a Confederate statue to do business with the government.
Higgins contends there is precedent for his proposal. Talbot County, MD added a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born in the county, on its courthouse grounds beside a Confederate monument.
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