Neo-Confederates worked with other far-right groups in failed efforts to preserve monuments

By Jason Wilson, The Guardian

Emails, documents and videos reveal the Sons of Confederate Veterans collaborated to keep statues and memorials intact

North Carolina members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) collaborated with other neo-Confederate and far-right groups in failed efforts to preserve Confederate monuments in the state, according to emails, documents and videos reviewed by the Guardian.

Members of the coalition of groups protesting the removal of Confederate monuments include a man with simultaneous membership in SCV and League of the South (LOS), and at least one person who attended the rally at the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January, which turned into an attack on the building.

The SCV is a neo-Confederate group dedicated to preserving what it sees as southern heritage, in particular Confederate statues and war memorials, in spite of the rise of Black Lives Matter antiracism protests, which frequently target such statues as memorials to racism and slavery.

James Smithson, a member both of SCV and the SCV’s Mechanized Cavalry (SCVMC), a motorcycle-riding “special interest group” attached to the organization, sent an after-action email to members after a 14 September 2019 rally in Pittsboro, North Carolina, organized in defense of a statue of a Confederate soldier that had stood outside the city’s courthouse since 1907. The email reported on the rally as a “win” for the organization, though the statue was removed by the city the following November.

Smithson noted the presence of 32 SCV members at the event, including James Shillinglaw, an SCV and SCVMC member who is also a member of LOS, which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a hate group. Shillinglaw, who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, was also in attendance at subsequent rallies in Pittsboro, even after the SCV had ordered members to stand down from the increasingly contentious events.

Stone is [the head of North Carolina’s SCV and] also the co-founder and self-styled “general” of the Mechanized Cavalry (SCVMC), a motorcycle-riding “special interest group” attached to the organization. That group’s motto, “Ride as you would with Forrest”, refers to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a prominent Confederate cavalry officer whose troops massacred hundreds of men who had already surrendered at the Battle of Fort Pillow, and who was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. He was its leader when it adopted terror tactics in the face of Reconstruction from the late 1860s.

Stone also sits on the SCV’s national executive council, as department commander of the Army of Northern Virginia Department, one of a number of regional sub-groupings of several states whose arrangement is patterned on the command structure of the Confederate army during the US civil war.

Stone works as a probation officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, in a state where, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 61% of incarcerated people are black.

Stone has reportedly been implicated in an investigation by the North Carolina Board of Elections into the SCV-connected NC Heritage PAC, which has allegedly illegally shuffled money from SCV members to state Republicans.

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