We in Move the Monument Coalition wish to thank everyone who turned out for the June 19 march and rally, including those public servants whose work contributed to the safe expression of our First Amendment rights.
All of you helped to make the event peaceful, thoughtful and, we hope, a reminder of the ongoing quest for social justice.
We remain dedicated to our purpose: to remove the Confederate monument from Talbot County’s courthouse lawn. We will continue to work toward this end until the County Council votes to move the statue. Join us in our fight. We are not going away.
The Leadership Team
Move the Monument Coalition
Carol Voyles says
If we wonder why it may be a good idea to relocate the Talbot Boys monument, Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in 1858, could be helpful:
“I hold that this Government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others,” he said. Claiming that he, not Lincoln, was “in favor of preserving this Government as our fathers made it,” he told an audience in Jonesboro, Illinois. “We ought to extend to the negro every right, every privilege, every immunity which he is capable of enjoying, consistent with the good of
society. When you ask me what these rights are, what their nature and extent is, I tell you that that is a question which each State of this Union must decide for itself.” His own state of Illinois, he pointed out, rejected Black enslavement, “but we have also decided that he shall not vote, hold office, or exercise any political rights. I maintain that Illinois, as a sovereign State, has a right thus to fix her policy.
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The Confederacy fought yo preserve slavery; white southern legislators cut Blacks out of the vote in the 1870s and passed Jim Crow laws that lasted for more than 70 years.
Michael Davis says
The Leadership Team also deserves many thanks for the excellent speakers they got for the demonstration. It was an inspirational event.
Also, thank you to Ms. Volyles for finding that quote. In the Lost Cause narrative, the Civil War was supposedly fought over states’ rights without mentioning that the key right the South held sacred was the right to enslave people.