Back in Alamance County this afternoon. Roughly 30 people have gathered to celebrate NC’s secession from the union 160 years ago. Across the street and down the road many more people have come together to show their opposition. Follow along if you’d like. 
The counter-protest has been mostly silent, though for a short period, someone was calling out “Black Lives Matter.” A pickup truck with a horn that plays “Dixie” just drove around the traffic circle.
The driver of an SUV, holding a cellphone in his hand, yells toward the people gathered near the Confederate monument, “Jesus was not white!”
The main speaker of the Confederate event is H.K. Edgerton, the former head of the NAACP in Asheville, NC, who went on to join forces with Kirk Lyons, the white power movement attorney. He just called General Lee a “Christ-like figure in the South,” which was met with “Amen!”
In a video published by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Edgerton made positive comments about the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan. Here in Graham, in 1870, the KKK lynched the town’s most prominent Black man, Wyatt Outlaw, who was elected to the town commission the year before.
If you’re curious about that history, and how it influences events in Graham today, please check out Sound of Judgment, a project from @juliawall_ and me (w/ the help of many others) that published yesterday. propublica.org/article/small-…
The event to commemorate NC’s secession is wrapping up. Several people wanted a photo with Edgerton. Thomas May points out the event was peaceful.
Someone asks May about the meaning of a placard on the back of a pickup parked across the street. He says it’s “insinuating.” May went to the U.S. Capitol riot. He says he did not go inside.
Counter-protesters marched around the square. After a moment of tension in front of Court Square Bar, most people are heading out.
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