Rocky Mount’s long-awaited, 14-foot-tall monument recognizing 70 U.S. Colored Troops — Black men who served the Union during the Civil War — is due to be unveiled on the lawn of the town’s historic First Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon.
“This event will celebrate the first monument of this type in the commonwealth of Virginia,” said Franklin County NAACP President Eric Anspaugh.
The event is the culmination of several years of research, politicking and patience on the part of the Franklin County NAACP, the Raising the Shade monument committee and community volunteers, who were determined to balance the county’s multiple Confederate monuments with an emphatic testament to untold Black history.
Sculptor Rick Weaver, with Paul DiPasquale, was commissioned to design the bronze statue, which is meant to capture how a USCT soldier might have felt at the end of the war, having fought for his own freedom and the freedom of millions of other enslaved people.
The monument was made possible by a $285,000 Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia grant from the Mellon Foundation and support from Virginia Tech faculty and students.
At MAAV, researchers ponder whose stories have been allowed to persist via monuments in Appalachia. Their work has redefined monuments, adopting Philadelphia-based research facility The Monument Lab’s idea that a monument is “a statement of power in public.”
The power of a story
“I used to see statues everywhere, all over the world, and that’s all they were. They were just statues,” Raising the Shade committee member Larry Moore said. Then he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas when a monument was erected there to the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Black Army units that were the first to serve on the Great Plains during peacetime.
“That was the first time in my life that I felt something looking at a monument,” Moore said.
“[The statue] was a powerful Black man on a horse, and understanding what those guys had to go through … Yep, it spoke to me. I knew what it feels like to see a Black man in power,” he said.
As a schoolgirl, Glenna Moore, wife to Larry, didn’t get to experience those same feelings. Rather than seeing herself portrayed in her textbooks and her school community, she stared down at mostly white faces while surrounded by white children.
“We never had each other, never had more than two [Black children] in a class, more than one in a class,” Moore said of her Rocky Mount upbringing. She was one of the first Black students to integrate Franklin County’s school system.
At 13, Moore slipped down in her seat while her teacher “talked about how we were better off enslaved in America than living in Africa and how wonderful the slavemasters were and how they, Virginians, really like to use the word servants rather than slaves — that’s in the textbook,” she said.
“If I had been taught that we were there, that we were fighting for our freedom, I would have felt so much better than I did when I heard the stories I was taught,” she said.
“It is better to know the full story,” she said.
She is now determined to never let Black history be forgotten. After a 2020 voter referendum blocked efforts to relocate a Confederate monument from the county courthouse grounds, she stepped in.
Moore discovered research that indicated that three Black men who were born in Franklin County had gone on to join the U.S. Colored Troops, fighting for the Union in the Civil War. As she continued to dig, she found more and more information — ultimately identifying 70 similar men.
Seeking recognition for those soldiers, Moore and her family took turns at Franklin County Board of Supervisors meetings, reading their names aloud.
Eventually, Moore’s activism snowballed, launching the Raising the Shade project committee. The committee applied for and was awarded funding through the MAAV grant in 2024. They still had an uphill battle; the small town became embroiled in controversy surrounding where the monument would be located.
This was not the first time that a statue honoring Black Civil War veterans had been proposed in Rocky Mount.
It started with a column
Franklin County’s classic Confederate monument, which stands on the courthouse lawn, was first built in 1910 and cost $1,800. That money mostly came from fundraisers and personal donations, Franklin County Historical Society director Linda Stanley said.
Ninety-nine and a half years later, a marble likeness of that same Confederate private was hoisted into the air and settled atop a new granite pedestal in the exact same place at a cost of $162,949. The year was 2010.
Raising the Shade events in Rocky Mount
At 7 p.m. Saturday, Harvard University journalist and historian Joshua Benton will give a lecture on U.S. Colored Troops Pvt. Samuel Smothers at the First Baptist Church of Rocky Mount, 45 Patterson Ave.
The Raising the Shade Monument unveiling ceremony will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday at the historic First Baptist Church Grounds, 135 Angle St. A reception will follow at the Harvester Performance Center, 450 Franklin St.
After the unveiling, the public is invited to two free events focused on the lived experiences of these soldiers:
At 11 a.m. Jan. 24 at the Franklin County Public Library, Virginia Tech researcher Sarah Plummer will talk about the lives of the Franklin County-born U.S. Colored Troops who were enslaved and sold as children.
At 2 p.m. Jan. 28, also at the Franklin County Public Library, a discussion will be held about the soldiers who returned to Virginia.
In between, the late Morris Stephenson, a longtime Franklin News-Post writer, became one of the first people to arrive on the scene when the statue was demolished in a car accident in 2007. Stephenson would later describe the statue’s scattered blocks of granite as resembling a huge pile of quarters that had slid across a slick table.
At the rebuilt monument’s dedication ceremony, local historian Francis Amos, who has since died, also recognized 300 “freed slaves” who had participated in the Confederacy’s efforts in 1862.
Initially, Amos and a committee of county residents, both Black and white, had intended to dedicate a second, smaller monument on that day. At a proposed cost of $3,400, it was to be a 4-foot granite column to commemorate “the contributions, service, and sacrifices on the homefront and on the battlefield by people of color, enslaved or free, from Franklin County, during the War Between the States (1861-1865),” according to a Franklin News-Post description of the proposed inscription.
“They didn’t want to put names on it,” Stanley said. The committee wanted the statue to “cover everybody.”
Though some community members argued that this new monument would tell an untold part of history, the NAACP disagreed. According to Glenna Moore, the phrase “Black Confederates,” which committee members were using then and have tossed about in the years since, indicates that the enslaved men who were forced to serve the Confederacy were serving under their own free will. She has a problem with that.
“Just be honest about why they were in there, how they ended up in those Confederate camps,” she said.
“I think the surprise was that we contested it,” she said. “They really thought they were doing us a favor.”
“Honoring us,” Larry Moore added.
The board of supervisors tabled that proposal, citing a lack of consensus.
Most, if not all, Black men who served the Confederate forces did so by coercion or force, whether they were enslaved or free men.
In the field, the Black men took care of the soldiers’ horses and made sure the troops had supplies. They worked alongside white people doing the same jobs, Stanley said.
Most of the Black men wouldn’t have been armed, they wouldn’t have held ranks and they wouldn’t have been considered soldiers until the very last weeks of the war, Larry Moore said.
Arming the people who were enslaved was a continuous debate amongst Confederate leadership. While Jefferson Davis asserted that these Black people were property, he nevertheless suggested that, at the same time, they were people who owed allegiance to the state. Addressing Congress in 1864, Davis stated that 40,000 enslaved people should be requisitioned by the Confederacy to be used as “pioneer and engineer laborers,” according to Civil War historian Philip Dillard, author of “What Price Must We Pay for Victory? Views on Arming Slaves from Lynchburg, Virginia, to Galveston, Texas.”
The Confederate army relied on enslaved laborers to build breastworks, 4-foot mounds of earth that protected soldiers from enemy fire. Petersburg boasted 10 miles of these fortifications and other entrenchments built by enslaved people and free Black laborers.
A step back in time
Franklin County’s original Confederate statue topper welcomes guests to the Historical Society’s front porch — the marble soldier survived the 2007 car accident that destroyed its base.
Inside, there are rows and rows of grainy black-and-white photographs of Franklin County’s Confederate soldiers filling a single floor display. Four hundred and fifty stern jawbones and unsmiling faces stare out at visitors in one room alone.
Among them are the photos of two Black men who had served alongside the Confederates: John Pinkard and Samuel Walker, their portraits read.
Stanley had made a list; she was up to 49 confirmed, 20 suspected and another 20 or 30 other men whose families claim they served the Confederacy, but for which she had no additional proof.
Though his picture isn’t on the board, Stanley tells the story of Joe Menefee, who served alongside Franklin County slave owner Addison Menefee. When Addison Menefee was killed at war, Stanley says, Joe Menefee took up the uniform and fought in Addison Menefee’s place. He rode Addison Menefee’s horse home from the war and was considered a hero, marching in parades thereafter, she says.
“He was a proud Confederate veteran,” Stanley said.
For Stanley, a soldier is anyone who serves their state. For the historical society to record them as such in their files, Stanley requires a little more information: a record of their military pension and courthouse documentation in the form of a military roll or other government form.
In the building’s library, she flips through tall metal filing cabinets. She keeps dossiers stowed away neatly. Inside: copies of birth, death and marriage certificates; draft cards; photographs; ancestry printouts; and notes on how the county is bound together by a string of family names.
A first look
Last spring, 15 members of the Raising the Shade monument committee traveled to sculptor Rick Weaver’s studio in Charlottesville to lay eyes on the wax prototype for their much-anticipated statue. They rode together on a church bus, the excitement building with every mile.
When the group walked into the studio, the statue was right there, Glenna Moore said, her eyes crinkling like a mother remembering her baby’s first steps.
“We were like, ‘ohhhhhh,’” she said, an exhale so deep that it is impossible to dismiss. She marveled at seeing her dream standing right there, 7 feet tall. At 5-foot-2 herself, she was forced to look up at it, at him.
“It just seemed so massive,” she said.
In that moldable wax form, the sculptor could make any changes the group requested — altering the USCT soldier’s expression, his stance or even his facial hair.
The likeness wears a field uniform and, at that time, one cuff was turned up and the other down. Larry Moore, the history buff, quickly corrected that, Glenna Moore said. The sleeves had to match: both up or both down. Larry Moore also provided advice about where lines fold on a Black man’s face and how his features should appear.
Once the changes were made and the carving finalized, the next step would be to send the statue to Florida for bronzing.
Digging in
Meanwhile, Stanley and the historical society volunteers have dedicated hours to researching men they had not previously heard of.
One person in particular captured Stanley’s attention: USCT Pvt. Samuel H. Smothers. In the 1830s, when Smothers was born, his family — also known as Smithers — lived as free Black people in Franklin County. The Raising the Shade committee has found research to indicate that Smothers was a USCT soldier who was born in Franklin County, enlisted in Ohio and went on to become an influential educator to white and Black students in Texas.
Those wishing to confirm this information, however, will hit a wall almost immediately when they find that a Samuel H. Smothers was born after the Civil War ended. Another Samuel H. Smothers, born around 1830, died before 1860. Yet another was born in 1800 and would have enlisted as an old man, if at all.
“Coming up with history is fun, but it is also maddening,” Stanley said. “There are so many people with the same name.
“We don’t want to miss anything. We want to be sure we get it right.”
She laments that she doesn’t have all of the same research that the Raising the Shade committee has gathered. She has asked them to share what they have when they are done, she said.
“I want to know how they got there [to their conclusions], which is what you want to do to figure out how they’re right,” Stanley said, reiterating that she hopes that the information coming from the Raising the Shade project is accurate.
Community researchers and Virginia Tech faculty and students spent hundreds of hours documenting the lives of these men in preparation for the Raising the Shade monument. On Jan. 24, postdoctoral associate Sarah Plummer will give the public an up-close view of the kinds of documents that she and her student researchers used to illuminate the lives of the USCT soldiers.
“What we uncovered are powerful and important stories that I hope community members will find as moving as we have,” Plummer said.
Set in stone
Over a period of two days this week, the bronzed Raising the Shade statue and its base were erected in downtown Rocky Mount. Glenna Moore was there to witness its arrival.
She looked out the second-story window of her guest house just in time to see a large truck driving down High Street, she said. When the truck had almost completely passed her, she saw it — the statue and three sets of stones. It was the monument.
She walked down to the church, where work started immediately, with the base being lifted into place by a small crane. The sculptor and committee members signed the marble before the USCT soldier took his place, staring into the distance.