The Lower Sussex NAACP is calling for Delaware to withhold state grant money to the Georgetown Historical Society until it removes a Confederate monument.
This comes just days after white nationalists and counter protesters clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Delaware has one Confederate Monument. It’s a nine-foot tall obelisk at the Marvel Carriage Museum in Georgetown. It has the names of more than 70 Delawareans who fought with the Secessionists. The fixture includes a Confederate flag on a 25-foot flag pole.
The Lower Sussex NAACP says it believes in a private group’s right to free speech, but it doesn’t want $11,500 dollars in taxpayer money going to support the monument.
State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn represents Georgetown. The Republican said the money is used for utilities, not the display.
“If we have to have a referendum on every line item within the grant-in-aid bill, we would never be able to pass a grant-in-aid bill because somebody would always have some type of issue with a line item that is within that piece of legislation,” he said.
Pettyjohn also noted it’s on private property.
“It’s not in a park, it’s not on taxpayer-owned land, it is in a museum," he said. "And a lot of the rallying cries that we’ve heard over the last week or so have been ‘We need to move these out of public areas and into museums.’ Well, this is a museum.”
Republican State Rep. Ruth Briggs-King, who also represents Georgetown, agrees with Pettyjohn and said Delaware shouldn’t rewrite or deny the past.
