Critics Air Concerns, County Moves Forward on ‘Charters’ Project

This article first appeared in The Pilot on March 25, 2022.

A display housing replicas of the United States’ founding documents is set to break ground outside of the courts facility in Carthage this May, organizers said Thursday.

According to its website, Charters of Freedom is the product of the nonprofit educational organization Foundation Forward, Inc., and the concept is based on the rotunda in the National Archives. The North Carolina-based organization aims to install “setting” displays of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights in the state’s 100 counties and, eventually, in all 3,143 counties across the country.

The settings are funded by private donations but are built on public property donated by counties. Donations are pooled from counties with settings across the country and put into a general fund from which money is allocated to settings as they’re requested.

The settings also include a donor recognition pedestal, engraved bricks recognizing donors and a time capsule to be opened on the 300th anniversary of the Constitution in 2087.

An additional pedestal recognizing the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th amendments is being added to Moore County’s display. Those amendments abolished slavery and gave citizens the right to vote, among other protections of liberty.

Frank Quis, chair of the Board of Commissioners, said he was immediately drawn to the project after recalling his experience visiting the National Archives with his granddaughter a few years ago.

“We only had a couple of minutes to look at all of them … We were just kind of encouraged to move along so that everybody could get in there. I understand all that, but you just don't have any time at all — to read and think about what important documents they are and what they say to us,” Quis said.

Having had this experience, Quis said he appreciates Foundation Forward’s efforts.

Final confirmation of the Moore County setting comes nearly a year after it was first presented.

Tom Beddow, chairman of the Moore County Republican Party, expressed enthusiasm about the project.

“We’re very pleased that it's going forward,” he said. “The idea actually started in a Republican group, and we’re glad to see it finally coming along.”

The project has not been entirely smooth sailing. Quis said debate about a suitable location for the setting has held up progress. Veterans groups had expressed an interest in having the setting be installed at the Veteran Memorial site but later opted for a different direction.

Beddow said that his group had also been interested in having it at the Veterans Memorial site in Carthage because there would be less traffic than downtown by the courthouse.

“That was our preference,” he said, “but it looks beautiful, the site they've come up with looks wonderful. I just hope that easy access is available going forward.”

Concerns also came from the Moore County NAACP. O’Linda Watkins-McSurely, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, called the county clerk to request information regarding the writing used in the Charters display and whether the Amendments dealing with Reconstruction would be included. She said she never got a response from the county.

Those occupying leadership roles in the county’s NAACP chapter have aired concerns about the project as well.

“We’re not satisfied with it at all,” Al McSurely, a longtime civil rights lawyer who chairs the NAACP chapter’s Legal Redress committee, told The Pilot in an interview Thursday. He views the project as an attempt to whitewash history.

Lowell Simon, who chairs the NAACP’s Political Action committee, had originally expressed concerns about the project when it first came about. He wrote a letter to Quis, imploring him to properly “vet” the organization before committing the county to a setting. He said the letter was asking the county to make a good-faith effort to investigate the organization before immediately signing off on the project.

“Part of the problem is that anytime something is wrapped up in the American flag, people just believe, because it's wrapped up in the American flag, it's by nature good,” Simon said. “And unfortunately, people aren't always honest.”

Simon decided to investigate the foundation on his own. Based on his research, which he detailed in an opinion column published in The Pilot, Simon believes the organization is trying to present an edited version of history.

“What became obvious about this particular project is that they were being intentional and disingenuous in representing it as an accurate representation of the founding documents by leaving out some amendments,” Simon said.

The original project had only included the ratified amendments in the Bill of Rights, leaving out the remaining 17. He said that including some amendments while leaving out others is a deviation from historical truth. Thus, even with the addition of the later amendments, he argues the project presents a distorted version of history.

“You can't pick and choose the history you like,” Simon said.

He also questioned the fact that the foundation’s co-founder, Vance Patterson, has run for Congress three times as a Republican. Mike Unruh, director of projects for Foundation Forward, confirmed that Patterson had run for office in 2010, 2012 and 2020. However, he said the organization has no political or religious ties.

“From the very first day that Foundation Forward became an organization, we were apolitical,” Unruh said. “We were not associated with any particular party or religious organization, or anything like that.”

Unruh said education is the top priority for the organization. The nonprofit has teamed with Carl White’s Life in the Carolinas to document Charters of Freedom. Life in the Carolinas is producing a series of videos for the Foundation Forward website featuring historical reenactments from Library of Congress actors. Unruh said Foundation Forward is also in the process of building a website with educational materials for children, like crossword puzzles relating to the revolutionary period of American history.

Unruh said Foundation Forward also reaches out to local schools and meets with the superintendent in “every community that we go into.” The nonprofit tries to “get involvement from all of the schools,” reaching out to not just public, but also private schools, charter schools and “even homeschools.”

From there, the organization encourages field trips to the local settings.

“If we're given enough advance notice, we have different groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Overmountain Men, different reenactors that have agreed to come free of charge, dressed up in period regalia,” Unruh said.

NAACP members have questioned the validity of Foundation Forward’s educational mission.

“We see it as a critical attempt to create another distorted and inaccurate and racist view of the history of the English colonies up until 1789,” McSurely said. He noted that the focus on the American Revolution period is misleading, because it leaves out the issue of slavery during and after the American Revolution.

“They’re collapsing three major periods of history into one,” McSury said.

McSurely agreed with Simon that the inclusion of the Reconstruction Amendments does not change his outlook on the project, nothing that those amendments “were ignored and suppressed by the same ahistorical tactics (used) by the slave owners” throughout the 20th century to maintain economic power.

“It was in the 1960s when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations forced a much more complicated, complex view of the American story,” McSurely said.

Unruh noted that, when the Pattersons founded the project in 2013, it was after having an emotional experience viewing the founding documents in the National Archives.

“It didn't have any political reasons, or wasn't tied into any social events,” he said. “It was just that experience, and they wanted to share that experience with the entire country.”