A second petition has started over the Confederate memorial on the Decatur Square, this time in support of the relic.

The petition on change.org was pushing 1,400 signatures after 3 p.m. Thursday, while the moveon.org petition to remove it had drawn more than 2,100 since last week.

The pro-monument petition page says there is an “all out assault on history” across the country that must be stopped.

“The Decatur Confederate Monument was designed for one purpose,” the page says, describing said purpose as “to remember the soldiers who served and died in defense of their homes.”

The other petition site says: “The statue refers to those listed on the monument as a ‘covenant keeping race’ and thus, the statue serves as a shrine to white supremacists like those we saw in Charlottesville,” referring to the recent violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia.

The Decatur memorial rose in 1908, a year before the NAACP was formed to fight for equality in the Jim Crow era.

DeKalb County owns the monument, which is on the grounds of the historic DeKalb County Courthouse. It is protected by state law that bars removing such monuments, though some are now calling for a change in the law.

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Joseph Erves
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