EDENTON, N.C. (April 3, 2025) –– Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) filed an updated lawsuit today involving a group of Eastern North Carolina residents suing the Town of Edenton and the Chowan County Board of Commissioners over plans to move a Confederate monument to the grounds of the Chowan County Courthouse.
The original lawsuit was filed earlier this year in Chowan County Superior Court — on behalf of Sherronne Battle, Stella Brothers, Debra Miller, Rod Phillips, and the Rev. John R. Shannon — and alleged the Edenton Town Council and Chowan County Board of Commissioners brokered an unlawful deal to relocate the Edenton Confederate monument to the grounds of the Chowan County Courthouse in downtown Edenton. It also alleged the secret agreement violated the North Carolina Open Meetings Law, and that the placement of the monument at the courthouse would violate the North Carolina Constitution.
After the lawsuit was filed, the Edenton Town Council and Chowan County Board of Commissioners announced it would terminate its earlier agreement. Shortly thereafter, however, the town and county agreed, again, to relocate the Confederate monument to the grounds of the Chowan County courthouse.
Based on those developments, an amended complaint was filed on April 3, 2025. As detailed in the filing, the monument was commissioned to be built and placed in Edenton during an era of acute racial animosity against North Carolina’s Black population.
Read the amended lawsuit here.
The cornerstone and base for the monument was originally placed on June 3, 1904. Francis D. Winston, a prominent eastern North Carolina judge and former state legislator, was invited to Edenton to offer his remarks. Winston was renowned for helping to lead the so-called “White Supremacy” campaigns in 1898 and 1900 across North Carolina. When he spoke in Edenton to celebrate the monument, he had only recently, and successfully, introduced an infamous state constitutional amendment intended to take the right to vote away from the state’s Black citizens.
Five years later, when the monument was formally unveiled, Edenton invited North Carolina Secretary of State J. Bryan Grimes to offer his remarks. Grimes, too, had been a central figure in the “White Supremacy” campaigns that heralded a post-Reconstruction era of Black subjugation and Jim Crow.
“This lawsuit seeks transparency and accountability,” said Jake Sussman, Chief Counsel for Justice System Reform at SCSJ. “It also lays bare the deeply troubling origin story of this monument, whose impact remains deeply embedded in public memory.”
The battle over Edenton’s controversial Confederate monument has been ongoing but is particularly significant given President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to restore statues and monuments that may have been removed or relocated because they celebrated our nation’s ugly history around slavery and racial oppression.
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Southern Coalition for Social Justice, founded in 2007, partners with communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the South to defend and advance their political, social, and economic rights through the combination of legal advocacy, research, organizing, and communications. Learn more at southerncoalition.org and follow our work on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.