NC Policy Watch: “When the sun came up on Sunday morning, Outlaw’s body still hung outside the courthouse. Even his friends and family were frightened to cut him down. The mob had pinned a warning message to his corpse.
“Beware ye guilty,” it read. “Both Black and white.”
Outlaw’s crime? Daring to challenge white supremacy.
Outlaw was murdered more than 150 years ago, but his work is far from over. New generations of activists, organizers, educators and politicians are still battling white supremacy in Alamance County — often at the site of Outlaw’s last stand.
No plaque, marker or memorial honors the remarkable life or horrific death of Wyatt Outlaw. Instead, outside the county courthouse where he was lynched, a 30-foot statue of a Confederate soldier stands as a monument to the seditionists he fought in life and the racist ethos that drove his murderers.
“That statue was put there not after the Civil War but in the Jim Crow era,” said the Rev. Ervin Milton, long-time pastor at the Union Ridge United Church of Christ in Alamance. “Like so many other things at that time, it was a way for white people to say, ‘We may have lost that war, but really we won.’”
Milton has been involved in the movement to remove the statue. He said its presence, towering over the site of Outlaw’s murder, continues to send a strong message.
“It’s an indication, as is Wyatt Outlaw’s story, that if you rise too far above where the powers that be want you, they will take everything from you,” Milton said. “Like Wyatt Outlaw, activists today have a lot of work to do and they still have so much to lose.”
Protests at the Confederate monument have become so fierce and frequent that Sheriff Terry Johnson attempted to ban them — a move struck down by a federal court. At demonstrations sheriff’s deputies often form a protective phalanx around the statue. Some deputies have shaken hands and high-fived members of neo-Confederate groups.
Meanwhile, in October, the same force pepper sprayed and arrested demonstrators, clergy and even a reporter during a voting rights event that culminated at the monument.”