North Carolina’s Republican leaders are calling for law and order and blaming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper for not intervening when protesters pulled down two Confederate statues at the State Capitol on June 19 and, in a ghastly echo of the lynching era, hung one from a light post.

If anyone, the Republicans should be pointing the finger of blame at themselves.

It was Republican state lawmakers who incited the mayhem. And it is Cooper who acted to end it on June 20 by boldly having all remaining Confederate statues removed from the Capitol grounds. He should tell local governments they are free to do the same if they’re worried about threats to public safety.

At the heart of this trouble is the law the Republican-led General Assembly passed in 2015. They acted to block a backlash against Confederate monuments after a white supremacist slaughtered nine black church members in Charleston, S.C. The law, with a few exceptions, bars state agencies and local governments from removing any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”

With that, the match was struck and the fires keep burning. There was the pulling down of a Confederate statue outside the old Durham County Courthouse after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville. Then came the toppling of the Silent Sam Confederate statue in Chapel Hill. More bitterness arose around the removal of a Confederate statue in Pittsboro. And on June 19, fueled by the national George Floyd protests, protesters again acted to take down symbols of racism that the misbegotten state law protects.

Cooper asked that Confederate statues be removed from state property in 2017. “We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery,” he said. “These monuments should come down.”

The law blocked his request and the legislators refused to change it.

Now the architects of this obstacle to reconciliation are complaining about the unrest it’s causing.

“When our leaders turn a blind eye to chaos, destruction and discord, society begins to unravel,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a Republican candidate for governor. Senate leader Phil Berger issued his own pronouncement: “Leadership is not ceding the law to a mob.”

Someone should provide these supposed defenders of North Carolina history with a history book. They might offer “Wilmington’s Lie,” a new book by North Carolina journalist David Zucchino, which chronicles the 1898 attack by a white mob on a black-owned newspaper that left dozens dead in Wilmington. Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, a Confederate Army veteran, was among the speakers who exhorted a white crowd to rise up because Blacks had won political control of the city. He said: “We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses!”

Three years earlier, Waddell had spoken at the dedication of the 75-foot-tall memorial to the Confederate dead that includes the two bronze statutes that were pulled down on June 19.

Some condemn the white supremacists, but also those who tear down their monuments. “There is a process,” they say, for peacefully removing them. But there is no real process. There is a law that blocks proceeding. The people who put that obstacle there are responsible for the anger that spills over it. It isn’t about law and order. It’s about a law that ignites disorder.

If Republicans won’t repeal it, they too, in November, should be removed.

— The Charlotte Observer