Judge dismisses lawsuit seeking removal of Norfolk's Confederate monument

Pilot ^ | 23 July 2019 | Ryan Murphy

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NORFOLK

A Circuit Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit by activists that attempted to force the city to move its 112-year-old Confederate monument.

In an 11-page order entered Tuesday, Chief Judge Mary Jane Hall said the plaintiffs failed to prove that their constitutional rights were being violated by the continued placement of the Confederate monument.

The suit was filed in late March by Roy Perry-Bey, from Newport News, and Ronald Green, who lives in Norfolk. The men represented themselves.

They argued that the display of the monument endorsed ideas such as secession, slavery, racial segregation, white supremacy and violence and that it thus represented a danger to them personally. Perry-Bey and Green are black.

The monument to Confederate war dead, topped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier nicknamed “Johnny Reb,” has sat on the southeast corner of Commercial Place and East Main Street since it was completed in 1907. It is a product of a time when public sentiment in the South surrounding the Civil War was moving to lionize the Confederacy — the so-called “Lost Cause” ideology. In many cases, these kinds of monuments were meant to continue to assert white supremacy.

Perry-Bey and Green argued in court filings that the statue was infringing upon their rights, invoking the First and Fourteenth amendments.

They sought to have the 80-foot-monument moved to Elmwood Cemetery, as the City Council had promised in a resolution passed in August 2017.

But Judge Hall found that Perry-Bey and Green hadn’t proven that their constitutional rights had been violated.

“As offended as Plaintiffs undoubtedly are by this prominent reminder of a long history of racial oppression," the First Amendment restricts government regulation of private speech and does not restrict the government's own speech, Hall wrote in her order.

Any legal right to freedom from an unwelcome message from the government, Hall wrote, comes "not by a lawsuit but by the political process and the ballot box."

She also noted that she saw no evidence that Perry-Bey or Green had been deprived of life, liberty or property, as promised in the Fourteenth Amendment.

With a lack of convincing evidence for these and other claims, Hall agreed to throw out the suit as requested by the City of Norfolk. The judge also cited a lack of standing from the Plaintiffs and the fact that none of the named defendants — the city, council members and Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring — had personally participated in denying their constitutional rights.

Perry-Bey was as defiant Tuesday as he had been in the courtroom, where he occasionally sparred with Hall.

“We feel that her ruling is improper,” Perry-Bey said, though he noted he hadn’t yet seen the actual order. He said he planned to appeal the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court and called Hall’s actions unethical.

Perry-Bey had argued that there were continued issues of judicial ethics, on the part of the city’s attorneys and Hall.

Norfolk City Council’s 2017 resolution to move the monument was passed in the midst of demonstrations against Confederate monuments in Norfolk and elsewhere in the wake of the Chalottesville Unite the Right rally, which drew thousands and ended in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer.

The resolution included a caveat saying the city would only move the monument once state law clearly permitted it.

In recent years, judges have issued conflicting interpretations of the law, which makes it illegal to move war monuments, including those dedicated to the Confederacy. A challenge that originated in Charlottesville has been stuck in the courts, and the state Supreme Court has declined to weigh in.

After Perry-Bey and Green had filed their lawsuit, Norfolk City Attorney Bernard Pishko said in April that the city would challenge the state law.

Pishko said at the time the city would argue that the laws preventing the movement of war monuments were infringing on the city’s First and Fifth Amendment rights.

However, the city has yet to file anything related to that challenge.

On Tuesday, Deputy City Attorney Adam Melita said that “with this matter resolved, we can now turn full attention to finishing the drafting on the City-initiated case."

[the OlLine Rebel]

LOL as if any of them were “Moor” (piss be upon them). Virtually none of these slaves were Moslem, just primitive tribal indigenous peoples.