Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier killed in the Civil War, Henry Lawson Wyatt, has leaned into the wind on those grounds for 100 years. Atop a pedestal inscribed, ‘To North Carolina women of the Confederacy’, a mother in billowing skirts reads to her young boy, his hand on his scabbard. Only in adulthood have I done a double take. I was raised in a slightly weird place.
In an era of fungible Walmarts, regional distinction in the US is hard to come by, and I treasure Raleigh’s funk factor. Yet I didn’t grow up around folks who wished the South had won the Civil War and wanted to bring back slavery. For much of my lifetime (OK, NC isn’t in a salutary political place in Trump World), cities like Raleigh have had better race relations than many Northern ones.
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