Group demands banner be hung for return of $500K Jefferson Davis chair

A Confederate monument worth $500,000 was stolen from a cemetery in Alabama last month, a local official confirmed, adding that a group is now demanding that the United Daughters of the Confederacy hang a large banner outside its headquarters for it to be returned.

According to AL.com, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair, a Confederate monument located in a Selma cemetery, was stolen last month.

In emails to the news outlet, the group White Lies Matter reportedly took responsibility for the theft and said that it would give the chair to the United Daughters of the Confederacy if the organization agrees to display a banner outside its Richmond, Va., headquarters on Friday, which is the anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender in the Civil War, and leave it up for 24 hours.

The banner, which the group said has already been delivered to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, reportedly features a quote from Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army activist wanted by the FBI for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper.

“The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives,” the banner reads, according to AL.com.

White Lies Matter reportedly wrote in one email that the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s failure to hang the banner “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,” the group said, according to AL.com.

“Like most Confederate monuments, [the chair] mostly exists to remind those who’s freedom had to be purchased in blood, that there still exists a portion of our country that is more than willing to continue to spill blood to avoid paying that debt down,” it said.

“We took their toy, and we don’t feel guilty about it. They never play with it anyway. They just want it there to remind us what they’ve done, what they are still willing to do. But the south won’t rise again. Not as the Confederacy. Because that coalition left out a large portion of its population. All that’s left of that nightmare is an obscenely heavy chair that’s a throne for a ghost whose greatest accomplishment was treason,” the group added.

Selma District Attorney Michael Jackson confirmed in an email to The Hill that the chair was stolen and the group is making demands for its return.

Selma police also confirmed the theft to AL.com and said that authorities were aware of the ransom demand.

The Hill has reached out to Selma police and the United Daughters of the Confederacy for comment.

According to a Selma police report cited by AL.com, the robbery occurred sometime between midnight and 3 a.m. on March 19.