The complicated past and present of Winston-Salem's Confederate soldier statue

Winston-Salem’s controversial Confederate monument has been moved to its new home in Davidson County.

The statue of a uniformed soldier holding a rifle with its shoulder stock resting on the ground had stood across from an old Winston-Salem courthouse for nearly 115 years.

Calls for its removal intensified in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville monument protest.

It was eventually dismantled in 2019, and had remained in storage until June of this year. Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and other supporters rallied around the statue. They claimed it helped preserve history. 

Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity Corey Walker says Civil War history has always been a battleground around American memory and what it means to be a nation.

"And so, when you have the development of these Civil War statues in the late 19th century, it was about creating a particular narrative of the history of the nation and the history of a region," he says. "And so that narrative was a narrative that served particular purposes."

Walker says those purposes include giving myth and meaning as to why there was a war, engendering noble attributes to those who fought on the side of the Confederacy, and ignoring that those values were predicated on denying the worth and dignity of African Americans who were being enslaved.

He sees similar narratives playing out in recent history with Confederate flags paraded inside the U.S. Capitol during the January 6th insurrection.

"And they’re there to send a particular political narration and genealogy of the nation that those forces that were vanquished in the Civil War, those forces are back with us and are still fighting the long Civil War that is part of the American narrative," says Walker.

Certain questions have re-emerged, like, "Who’s a legitimate citizen? Who has the right to vote? Who has the right to rule?" Walker says it comes as no surprise that the symbols that exemplified a nation at war with itself 160 years ago are being remobilized today at another moment of heightened polarization in the country.

Downtown Winston-Salem’s Confederate soldier statue is now on display in Valor Memorial Park in Denton, North Carolina.