SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
politics & the natioN
BY BARRY YEOMANgraham, n.c. — A s 100 demon-
strators stood in a small down-
town plaza last weekend, chant-
ing racial justice slogans, Barrett
Brown decided to raise the stakes.
Brown, the president of the
NAACP’s area branch, grabbed a
cardboard poster and slipped
across the line of orange cones
that demarcated the legal protest
zone. He crossed a traffic circle
and stood silently next to the Con-
federate monument in front of the
Alamance County Courthouse.
One of the 12 deputy sheriffs
guarding the 30-foot-tall monu-
ment, a marble statue of a Confed-
erate soldier atop a granite col-
umn, directed Brown to leave.
When he refused, the deputy
handcuffed him and charged him
with resisting an officer and im-
peding traffic. Three more pro-
testers, including a member of the
Alamance County Board of Elec-
tions, were arrested a few minutes
later on the same charges.
Civil rights activists in this for-
mer textile-manufacturing city
have been sparring for weeks with
elected officials over limits on pro-
tests and what constitutes free
speech. In addition to the ban on
protests at the monument and
courthouse, Graham Mayor Jerry
Peterman has also declared five
states of emergency, citing the po-
tential for “civil unrest” or “severe
damage” in this city of 15,600.
Most of his emergency orders im-
posed curfews, and one temporar-
ily suspended all demonstration
permits.
“Any group(s) attempting to
protest without a permit, will be
in violation and subject to arrest,”
the Alamance County Sheriff’s Of-
fice posted on Facebook June 26.
Brown felt frustrated by these
restrictions. Cordoning off the
monument, he said, glorifies the
“Lost Cause,” a nostalgic view that
bathes the antebellum South in
“magnolia and moonlight” and
downplays slavery. “I’m tired of
people telling me what I can do,
and where I can stand, and where
I can go,” he said, “and having to
accommodate a system that’s not
trying to accommodate us at all.”
I n July, the NAACP branch and
eight individuals sued Graham
and Alamance County’s top offi-
cials in U.S. District Court. The
plaintiffs claim the leaders have
abridged their First Amendment
rights to free speech and free as-
sembly and their Fourteenth
Amendment rights to due process.
“Proximity and symbolism
matter when we think about
speech,” said Kristi Graunke, legal
director of the American Civil Lib-
erties Union of North Carolina,
one of several groups represent-
ing the plaintiffs. “When you want
to challenge white supremacy,
when you want to challenge the
way that the Lost Cause myth has
been perpetuated by public insti-
tutions and public systems, where
would you go other than the Con-
federate monument?”
The lawsuit also says that neo-
Confederate demonstrators long
gathered at the monument with-
out interference.
The police killing of George
Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis
sparked nationwide protests,
from cities to suburbs to small
towns. The events unfolding in
Graham lack the drama of cities
such as Portland, where federal
forces have used tear gas and flash
bang grenades to disperse anti-
racism protesters. But they raise
similar questions about how
much municipal officials can limit
free speech to avoid unrest.
“The courts have traditionally
recognized that local officials
dealing with the situations are in
the best position to judge how
imminent the threat is,” says Nor-
ma Houston, an emergency-man-
agement-law expert at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina School of
Government. “[But] there has to
be some factual basis. The threat
has to be imminent or actual.”
Law enforcement has shut
down even small, quiet protests in
Graham. In late June, a Facebook
video shows, at least 10 city and
county officers responded to a
one-man sunrise vigil at the mon-
ument. Colin Dodd, now one of
the plaintiffs, said he left before he
could be arrested.
None of the 14 defendants
agreed to be interviewed about
the lawsuit. Peterman said he
could not discuss pending litiga-
tion.
In a June 27 news release, the
Graham Police Department ex-
plained that City Hall had sus-
pended protest permits because
of a “clear and imminent threat to
public safety.” Police said they hadreceived “viable intelligence” that
Graham had been targeted by a
group that “had been involved
with other protests in the state
that had turned violent.”
A few days later, Peterman sug-
gested that he was trying to safe-
guard civil rights activists by lim-
iting protests. Downtown
Graham has been a gathering spot
for self-described “Southern
rights” advocates who display
Confederate flags and sometimes
carry weapons. In June, two Elon
University professors, one pro-
testing racism and the other tak-
ing photos, were assaulted on
camera.
“[W]e are being sued by some
of the very people we set out to
protect,” the mayor wrote on Face-
book. He later deleted the post.
After the lawsuit was filed, the
two sides reached an agreement
on one issue. The Graham City
Council repealed a 1978 ordinance
requiring permits for any assem-
bly of “two or more persons for the
purpose of protesting any matter.”
The ordinance also allowed police
to limit gatherings on busy streets
to six people.
Still unresolved are the mayor’s
emergency orders and the ban on
protests at the courthouse and
Confederate monument. On Tues-
day, the plaintiffs asked the court
for a temporary restraining order
that would, in effect, prevent a
repeat of the weekend’s arrests.
The new motion said Graham’s
emergency orders are “unsup-
ported by actual or imminent
emergencies.”
The history of Graham’s court-
house square makes the accessissue particularly charged. In
1870, during an outbreak of white-
supremacist violence, members of
the Ku Klux Klan kidnapped a
Black town commissioner named
Wyatt Outlaw. They dragged him
to the courthouse and hanged him
from a tree. According to a news
report, witnesses found a card
pinned to his body that said, “Be-
ware! you guilty parties — both
white and black.”
One of those implicated in the
murder, but never convicted, was
Jacob Long, the leader of two local
Klan chapters. In 1914, Long
helped unveil the Confederate
monument. “It is well for us... to
recall the achievements of the
great and good of our own race
and blood,” he said that day.Race relations here remain
tense. In 2016, Alamance Sheriff
Terry Johnson signed a settlement
with the U.S. Justice Department
to dismiss an appeal of a federal
lawsuit accusing him of targeting
Latinos. (A lower court had found
in Johnson’s favor.) In May, at an
Alamance County Board of Com-
missioners meeting, commission-
er William Lashley, a former po-
lice officer, said of today’s law
enforcement standards: “You
can’t do now what we could do
when I was on. We used to beat the
hell out of them.” He later apolo-
gized.
In June, a video circulated on
social media of someone showing
off a gun at a downtown store and
saying, “No looting in Graham.”According to the Burlington
Times-News, the business is co-
owned by Jennifer Talley, a city
council member. Talley did not
respond to interview requests but
told the Times-News that she had
not authorized the display of fire-
arms.
“There’s a pall over the city,”
said the Rev. Tamara Kersey, asso-
ciate pastor at Graham’s Wayman
Chapel AME Church and a plain-
tiff in the lawsuit. “There’s like this
cloud.”
Graham city manager Frankie
Maness, a defendant, said City
Hall is working to improve the
racial climate by talking with resi-
dents, recruiting minority job
candidates and adopting policing
policies like a ban on chokeholds.
“People of color are certainly wel-
come [in Graham],” he said. “If
you experience anything contrary
to that, I would like to know about
it. I would like to address it.”
As the lawsuit awaits a hearing,
more than 300 elected officials,
faith leaders, business owners and
others have called for the reloca-
tion of the Confederate statue.
The list includes the mayor of
nearby Burlington and the presi-
dent of Elon University.
A 2015 state law makes it diffi-
cult to remove monuments from
public land absent a “threat to
public safety.” In an email to coun-
ty commissioners advocating for
relocation, Bryan Hagood, the Al-
amance County manager, raised
the specter of a violent confronta-
tion between law enforcement
and protesters. “I believe this
would be a terrible thing for Ala-
mance County,” he wrote, “to have
someone seriously injured or
killed by one of our deputies or a
Graham Police Officer in an alter-
cation that began as protecting
the memorial.”
At the recent rally, speakers
took comfort in the mounting
calls for relocation. After leading a
round of chants, emcee Azurre
Walker-Roberson pointed across
the traffic circle to the deputies
guarding the monument. “If we
weren’t close to winning,” she
said, “I promise you, they
wouldn’t be over there.”
[email protected]A small N.C. town spars over protests and public safety
BARRY YEOMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Anti-racism protesters rally July 25 at Sesquicentennial Park, across f rom the Alamance County Courthouse and the
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