page_title: George Davis Monument
section_title: Inception
hierarchical_section_title: George Davis Monument / History / Inception
caption_attribution_description: English: Script on George Davis Monument
context_page_description: The George Davis Monument is a monument to Confederate politician George Davis in Wilmington, North Carolina erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
  Davis was sent to the Confederate senate and was that ultimately failed government's final attorney general. He was a skilled orator who spoke publicly in March 1861 that North Carolina should secede from the United States of America principally to preserve the economic interest in chattel slavery.
  The statue was unveiled on April 20, 1911 — 46 years after the defeat of the Confederacy — to the chimes of the Delgado Band hired for the occasion for $25.
  In the early morning hours of June 25, 2020, the City of Wilmington removed the statue of Davis reportedly "in order to protect the public safety and to preserve important historical artifacts."
  The dismantling, said to be temporary, was coincident with the firing of three city police officers following the discovery of their "brutally racist" discussions on official police recording equipment. The city government did not disclose the storage location or announce a date for re-erection of the statue. The pedestal, with its false Lost Cause inscriptions, remained.
context_section_description: The idea for the monument was conceived by Cape Fear Chapter 3 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1901 — three years after white mobs used violence to illegally remove a duly elected biracial government during the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, five years after Davis's death and 36 years after the Confederacy's defeat.
  Historians have stated that similar monuments are evidence of a wide effort by the UDC and others, long after the failure of the Confederacy, to insert the false Lost Cause Narrative into the cultural memory, announce to nonwhites the final defeat of Reconstruction, and to support white supremacy.
  It would take all of a decade for Cape Fear Chapter 3 of the UDC to realize its vision.
caption: Spurious "Lost Cause" inscription on monument.
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