Our View: Save the Market House

The Market House is an important piece of Fayetteville and North Carolina history. It should not be torn down, as some have called for.

Two men have been charged in fires intentionally set at the Market House during protests May 30 over police brutality. A peaceful protest calling for its removal, organized by ministers and other community figures, was held in front of City Hall on Monday.

We do understand the frustration of people, especially African Americans, who have long seen the structure as a symbol of slavery.

But the Market House has too often been miscast. Many people who oppose its continued existence believe it was a slave market or was even built for that purpose. This has never been true.

This structure was built in 1832 after the great Fayetteville fire that decimated much of downtown. It served as a marketplace downstairs and town hall upstairs, replacing the State House, destroyed in the fire, and which had been located in the same central square of downtown. There, several historical events took place: A visit and speech by Lafayette, the revolutionary and city’s namesake; the ratification of the U.S. Constitution; the chartering of the University of North Carolina.

The most troubling part of the Market House’s history is not its fault: Enslaved African Americans were indeed sold there, often at auctions related to debt or estate settlements. The main problem however, is not this building but a society and government that treated Black Americans as property — human chattel.

The Market House was not the only building where the infernal practice of slavery was carried out downtown. Enslaved humans were sold at the steps of the courthouse and at private businesses.

Ultimately, the taint of evil associated with the slave industry sat like residue upon everything and everyone in the South, and in some respects over northern states, too, inasmuch as they continued trade with southern economies built on slave-produced cotton. The taint did not just stop at the expansive gates of plantation owners.

Complex legacy

Like many American institutions, the Market House has a complex racial legacy. Records suggest that Thomas Grimes, a free Black man of Jamaican heritage, supervised construction of the building, in his role as the main figure in a community of Black artisans and builders, both enslaved and free. Black laborers built the structure, just as black hands built the White House, U.S Capitol and other government buildings in D.C.

In this and other crucial ways, the Market House is different from Confederate monuments that are presently being removed by government action or by protesters across the state and across the South. Most of those rebel monuments were built in defiant resistance to gains that African Americans made during Reconstruction. They were gains whites rolled back through Jim Crow segregation, intimidation and murder, and in Wilmington, the nation’s only coup d’état, in 1898.

But the Market House belongs to this Fayetteville community, to all of us. We should not cede it to the Confederates or the “Lost Cause.” That would be a great loss.

We support those people who say the building should be preserved and repurposed, perhaps making it into a museum that celebrates and advances diversity. It has already been figuratively repurposed into Fayetteville’s version of the National Mall, thanks to its central location and history. It has been a gathering place for numerous protests and demonstrations — political protests, women’s rights events, prayer vigils and events calling for equal treatment of African Americans, or Muslim Americans.

Any repurposing should include the difficult parts of the structure’s history. That does not have to be a bad thing. Fayetteville City Councilwoman Shakeyla Ingram said the Market House causes her to reflect on how far African Americans have come.

A new dialogue

We fully support the City Council’s decision to acknowledge the tenor of the times and approve the words “Black Lives Do Matter” and “End Racism Now” to be painted in the traffic circle around the Market House. We also support Mayor Mitch Colvin’s request to remove the Market House from the city’s seal and other applications. Though an important reminder of our past, the historic building is not the right image to represent a city looking toward the future.

As for the Market House’s own future: The council should hold multiple forums for the community to share its views on what should happen next. In previous decades, city leaders have done an inadequate job of having these conversations about the building’s history and role.

Many leaders instead adopted a reflexive, defensive position whenever anyone began to question the building’s history or status as a city symbol. Some even falsely insisted that enslaved people were not sold there.

We look forward to a new dialogue on the Market House. It is long overdue and the conversations will be difficult. But we believe the preservation of our community’s history is worth the effort.