A 128-year-old concrete chair presented by the United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Selma to the city has been stolen, allegedly by a group calling itself White Lies Matter who say they would only return it if the donors of the chair hang outside their headquarters, a banner with an inscription of Assata Shakur’s words.
White Lies Matter say they stole the chair from Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama. If the United Daughter do not hang the banner by 1 pm on Friday April 9, the chair would be turned into a toilet.
Alabama news outlet AL reported that it received mails from White Lies Matter on Tuesday, April 6 containing photographs of the chair among others with the message to the United Daughters. Shakur’s words, which White Lies Matter wants to be shown on the banner declares: “The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.” The banner has apparently been delivered to the United Daughters by the alleged thieves.
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“Failure to do so will result in the monument, an ornate stone chair, immediately being turned into a toilet…If they do display the banner, not only will we return the chair intact, but we will clean it to boot.”
But the timing of the request to hang the banner is historically significant. It falls on the 156th anniversary of the defeat of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War. The chair itself was presented to Selma in 1893, in celebration of Jefferson Davis who was president of the southern Confederate States. He had visited Selma some twenty years before the chair was made.
Shakur has been living in Cuba for over 30 years, after escaping from prison where she was serving a sentence for allegedly killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973.
The step-aunt and godmother of the late Tupac Shakur is regarded as the first woman to ever make the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list.
The United Daughters on the other hand, is considered a White Supremacist movement by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
