EASTON, MD – Decrying Talbot County’s attempt to have dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Confederate monument on the county’s courthouse lawn, the plaintiffs and their legal team have the following statement:
“We must finally reject the last Confederate monument on public land in Maryland — in Talbot County — because it unacceptably celebrates traitors who fought to keep slavery in Maryland and in the United States. It is indefensible how the three members of the Talbot County Council who hold controlling votes continue to dishonor the lives, struggle, and right to equality under the law of Black residents of their own county. By deciding to keep defending the Confederate monument on the county’s courthouse lawn and trying to dodge their responsibility to represent everyone in Talbot County, they dishonor both the promise of the Constitution and their own role as elected officials.”
The lawsuit contends that Talbot County’s homage to white supremacists and traitors to the United States and to the State of Maryland cannot remain on government property because it is not consistent with the core promise of the Fourteenth Amendment: equality to all Americans under the law. Plaintiff Kisha Petticolas is a Black lawyer who has worked in the Easton Office of the Maryland Public Defender for the last decade. Plaintiff Richard Potter serves as President of the Talbot County NAACP and has fought for removal of the statue since 2015.
The Maryland Office of the Public Defender, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Kisha Petticolas, and Richard M. Potter are represented by attorneys Daniel W. Wolff, David Ervin, Kelly H. Hibbert, Suzanne Trivette, and Tiffanie McDowell of Crowell & Moring LLP, and Deborah A. Jeon, legal director of the ACLU of Maryland.
Go to our website to view the legal complaint and learn more, here.
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