Graham NC's Confederate Monument
Wyatt Outlaw was born enslaved in Alamance County in 1820, said to be the son of an unmarried White merchant and Jemimah Phillips, a Black woman who may have been free or enslaved by another family. He became a skilled carpenter and kept the name of his nominal owner. After the Civil War, Outlaw established his home and workshop on North Main Street in Graham where the First Baptist Church now stands, and helped purchase land for the Wayman Chapel AME Church now located three blocks further north.
Politically outspoken, he emerged a leader at the state’s second Freedmen’s Convention in 1866 and organized Republican groups encouraging Black and white workingmen to vote and serve their community. Republican Governor William Holden appointed Outlaw as a Graham town commissioner in 1868. The voters elected him to continue in that position. In 1869, the mayor selected him to serve on an armed police patrol with four other Black and white men to counter Klan terror.
Elected in 1868 to implement Congressional Reconstruction, Governor Holden, the Republican majority in the General Assembly, and many local Republican officials faced escalating violence from the Klan.
During the night of February 26, 1870, the Klan gathered more than sixty men who dragged Outlaw from his home to the cries of his children and threats against his mother. They hung him from an elm branch pointing toward the courthouse, the site later covered by a building extension at 105 S. Main Street
40 years later this the Graham Chapter of The Daughters Of The Confederacy put up this monument on the same site of the lynching. This monument needs to be removed, it is a disgusting symbol of hate and glorifies terror inflected on minoritys.
Wyatt Outlaw was born enslaved in Alamance County in 1820, said to be the son of an unmarried White merchant and Jemimah Phillips, a Black woman who may have been free or enslaved by another family. He became a skilled carpenter and kept the name of his nominal owner. After the Civil War, Outlaw established his home and workshop on North Main Street in Graham where the First Baptist Church now stands, and helped purchase land for the Wayman Chapel AME Church now located three blocks further north.
Politically outspoken, he emerged a leader at the state’s second Freedmen’s Convention in 1866 and organized Republican groups encouraging Black and white workingmen to vote and serve their community. Republican Governor William Holden appointed Outlaw as a Graham town commissioner in 1868. The voters elected him to continue in that position. In 1869, the mayor selected him to serve on an armed police patrol with four other Black and white men to counter Klan terror.
Elected in 1868 to implement Congressional Reconstruction, Governor Holden, the Republican majority in the General Assembly, and many local Republican officials faced escalating violence from the Klan.
During the night of February 26, 1870, the Klan gathered more than sixty men who dragged Outlaw from his home to the cries of his children and threats against his mother. They hung him from an elm branch pointing toward the courthouse, the site later covered by a building extension at 105 S. Main Street
40 years later this the Graham Chapter of The Daughters Of The Confederacy put up this monument on the same site of the lynching. This monument needs to be removed, it is a disgusting symbol of hate and glorifies terror inflected on minoritys.