Alamance County Commissioner Tim Sutton (featured in the top right row of the cover photo) has strong opinions on Confederate monuments (he thinks they should stay put), but it is his bizarre re-write of the history of slavery that is grabbing headlines today. In a Alamance County Commission meeting, monument defenders were trying to make their case for the momuments to stay, despite the fact their removal was not even on the commission’s agenda.
It was during this meeting that Alamance County Commission Tim Sutton made several jaw-dropping comments while decrying “political correctness.” He included a story of his own family history and his preference to call the slaves who worked for his great grand-pappy “workers” instead of slaves. From the Times News:
Commissioner Tim Sutton finalized the board’s comments by admitting he is a chartered member of the Sons of the Confederacy and hinted that his family once owned slaves.
“I will never vote to do anything to take that statue or monument away from here for whatever reason,” Sutton said. “If it comes down, it goes back up. To heck with facts. The emotions have just gone haywire. I am not going to be a victim of political correctness. I am just not going to do it. Label me all you want, say what you will about me.
“I am not ashamed of my great-grandfather,” Sutton continued. “He did what he did. It is my understanding that when he died, from Sarah, my grandmother, that some guys on the farm, you can call them slaves if you want to, but I would just call them workers, that they raised a good bit of my family. When the time came, my great-grandmother gave them land. I am not going to be an assault on logic, an assault on the history of this country and the heritage of this area and this country. Not going to do it.”
Josie Duffy Rice of the Fair Punishment Project (and former Daily Kos contributor) reached out to Sutton to confirm his comments and he didn’t shy away from them one bit:
As Josie Duffy Rice notes, Alamance County has a higher black population than the national average: