Path hasn’t been smooth for Franklin County monument to its Black Civil War soldiers

Retired educator Glenna Moore has spent the last four years researching, documenting and telling folks about 70 Black Franklin County-born men who fought for the United States in the Civil War. Those men will soon be honored with a monument recognizing their efforts.

The only question is, where should it go?

Rocky Mount’s Veterans Memorial Park seems to be the current consensus.

Several Franklin County organizations, elected officials and appointed individuals agree — head down to Rocky Mount and ask the mayor, the town manager, any of the seven members of the town council, the president of the local branch of the NAACP, the chair of the monument committee, or a majority of the members present at the recent Veterans Commission meeting, which maintains Veterans Memorial Park.

Out of everybody who had a say in this decision, you’ll find five out of 11 people who did not voice support for placing the monument in Veterans Memorial Park when a vote was taken at the Rocky Mount Veterans Commission meeting on Thursday evening.

Twenty-four hours after the vote, three commission members had resigned, including the chairman and the vice chairman. All three had voted in opposition to the statue’s placement in the park.

Some people have questioned why the commission members resigned following the vote, according to Rocky Mount Mayor Holland Perdue.

“It’s like, ‘Why resign after?’ And I don’t have that answer. We didn’t get that answer when they called or when Cherie [Compton, the town’s community development assistant] was told they were resigning,” Perdue said.

“It’s not the first controversial [or] semi-controversial issue that’s come up,” said Larry Moore, chairman of the statue committee and Glenna Moore’s husband. He referred to the county’s 2020 debate over the Confederate statue that continues to stand in front of the Franklin County Courthouse.

“I didn’t resign from the board [over not] taking down the Confederate statue,” Moore said.

The night of the vote, Lucas Tuning and Derek Spencer were introduced as two new members to the Veterans Commission, and town manager Robert Wood sent his designee, Mark Moore, to fill his place. According to Perdue, this was business as usual.

Following introductions, the commission went into a closed session. Members discussed the upcoming vote.

“[The monument] completes the county’s history. You’re talking about 10 Black men that fought under the Civil War. They fought on the Union side. That has not been addressed. But you have a monument here for the Confederate soldiers from this county. Honoring what? And you want to pretend like this doesn’t exist,” Tuning said.

“I don’t have a problem with the Confederate monument in their honor. But what I didn’t understand was, how can you dig your heels in and say, ‘Well, we don’t want this.’ So give me a reason why. And [their reason] was nothing that was holding water,” he said.

Those in opposition said that the statue wouldn’t fit the aesthetic of the park, Tuning said.

Following the vote, in which the monument’s placement in the park passed 6-5, Vice Chair Eddie Hawks stood and addressed the room. He accused the new members of being in the room to sway the vote, Tuning said.

The town council has the jurisdiction to appoint new members to the Veterans Commission. Each member is a permanent appointee, Perdue said. He explained as much to those present.

For four days prior to publication, Cardinal News attempted to reach Hawks, former Chairman Gary Solomon and Olyn Peters, who also resigned from the commission, for comment. Phone calls, text messages and Facebook Messenger messages were all left unanswered and unreturned.

“This is a veteran issue. It’s not politics. It’s not race. This is where the statue or monument belongs. That’s where it’s going,” said Perdue.

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This monument has been several years in the making. The project is called “Raising the Shade 1850-1910” and has been spearheaded by Franklin County NAACP branch president Eric Anspaugh, Cathie Cummins and Larry Moore, according to Anspaugh. There are 60 others working behind the scenes, some from across the country, Glenna Moore said.

The Moores have been working to educate the Franklin County community about Black history since they moved back to the county to retire in 2020.

Not long after they returned, Glenna Moore became involved in the movement to relocate the Confederate statue from the courthouse lawn. The request to move the statue to another location — to a museum or to the Jubal Early Center — ultimately went before the county board of supervisors, which sent the issue to vote in a referendum. The vote was 69% in favor of leaving the statue on the courthouse lawn.

Glenna Moore began speaking up at board of supervisors meetings, telling the story of Franklin County’s Black history. She spoke at nearly every meeting, according to a Roanoke Times article .

She started researching Franklin County’s Black veterans, specifically those who had enlisted as U.S. Colored Troops and had fought with the Union during the Civil War. Moore started with a list of three such men. That list soon grew to 70.

She and her family took turns standing before the board in July 2020 and read the soldiers’ names.

“[Each speaker gets] 3 minutes of public comments. And so it took more time than that to name them and their units. So with the three of us, we were able to present it to the board,” Glenna Moore said. It was her first-ever presentation to the board.

At that meeting, Franklin County Board of Supervisors Chairman Tim Tatum said that those men should be recognized, Glenna Moore recalls.

Larry and Glenna Moore decided that if the county wouldn’t remove the Confederate statue from the courthouse, they would find a way to erect a second statue to honor those Black men from Franklin County who fought in the U.S. Colored Troops.

“They need to be celebrated. And the county needs, the town needs, to acknowledge them,” Glenna Moore said.

In August 2023, a project committee was born.

Cummins discovered that Virginia Tech was offering monument grants through its Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia project, funded by the Mellon Foundation. She led the charge to apply.

“There were 30 applicants. The competition was exceedingly tight,” Cummins said.

The project will soon receive a $285,000 grant from MAAV, which received $3 million in funding to facilitate the creation of monuments that recognize diverse and untold stories in communities like Franklin County. While the town of Rocky Mount announced the award in a news release on Monday, it will officially be announced by MAAV with other round two grant recipients on July 1.

When completed, the Raising the Shade project will include a copper statue memorializing 70 known Black men who were born in Franklin County and who enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops.

Of the award amount, $210,000 will go towards the design, construction and installation of the statue, Anspaugh said. The rest will be applied to the project’s educational component, he said.

Sculptor Paul DiPasquale of Richmond has been chosen to create the bronze sculpture, Anspaugh said. DiPasquale has created some of Virginia’s most notable artwork, including the Arthur Ashe Monument in Richmond and King Neptune’s likeness on the Virginia Beach boardwalk. He also has worked as a consultant on projects to remove several Confederate statues in Virginia.

The team will look to the community for input on the statue’s final design, Larry Moore said.

This will be the first western Virginia monument to Black soldiers serving in the U.S. Colored Troops. It will join three other monuments in the state, and only a handful across the South.

Later this summer, DiPasquale will visit Rocky Mount. The purpose of his trip is twofold: He will gather community input, and he will examine the proposed location for the statue. At the same time, he will visit the alternative locations that the team has in mind.

There’s always a Plan B.

Ideally, the project team would like to see the monument placed in downtown Rocky Mount, by the farmers market — even more so than placing it at the Veterans Memorial Park, according to Anspaugh.

There’s a lot of foot traffic by the farmers market. A lot of people pass through there. It serves as the town center, the site of festivals and holiday celebrations.

The project team has not yet requested that the town council consider placing the statue at the farmers market, Anspaugh said. Its only written request has been that the town consider the Veterans Memorial Park as the monument’s location, Perdue said.

Regarding whether the town council would consider allowing the monument to be placed at the farmers market, once the NAACP project team makes that request, Wood, the town manager, said, “I think they’re willing to consider those things. But I will say that so far in the discussions, they’ve been pretty clear and pretty firm that Veterans Park makes the most sense for this particular project.”

“Irrespective of the location issue, these were men that fought for something that they believed in. It was very personal to them,” Wood added.

Veterans Memorial Park is situated on the outskirts of the town of Rocky Mount. It features a large obelisk listing the names of members of the military who have died during the United States’ numerous wars, including the Civil War.

The Franklin County branch of the NAACP has not yet requested that the U.S. Colored Troops names be added to that monument, Glenna Moore said. It is unclear whether they will make that request in the days ahead.

The park’s plaza is lined with brick pavers, engraved in memory of loved ones. Benches ring the area. Flags are planted nearby. Visitors hear the sound of the nearby Pigg River. The setting is serene — there’s no controversy here.

“Vietnam was when two sides, blacks, whites, everybody fought together and we had each other’s back,” Larry Moore said.

“Most of them will come around once they’re educated about what’s going on and why it’s going on,” he said.

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Clarification 1 p.m. June 25: This story has been updated to clarify sculptor Paul DiPasquale’s previous work with monument in Virginia, and to say that the news about the Franklin County grant was released Monday by the town of Rocky Mount.

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