The Confederate Memorial was erected in 1924 by the estate of veteran Gabriel James Boney, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and a Confederate veterans association in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. In August 2021, the City of Wilmington removed it from public land and stored it, awaiting the UDC chapter to take possession. The memorial is a 40-foot, 11-ton stele of white granite and a granite pedestal. Upon the pedestal was placed a bronze sculpture of two soldiers. One soldier, standing with a rifle, protects a wounded soldier holding a broken sword. It was sited on the median of a busy street near Wilmington's downtown nightlife district. The memorial has a history of being struck by vehicles and as a target for vandals. Motor vehicles have so damaged the memorial that its granite stele and pedestal have been completely replaced with new stone twice — in 1954 and in 1999. On the pedestal is an inscription in verse. The lines are a rewriting in Confederate terms of an unrelated Canadian poem from the 1870s, "'Tis Christmas". In 2020, the memorial became a flashpoint of demonstrations against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd. In the early morning hours of June 25, 2020, the City of Wilmington removed the statue, citing public safety and protection of historical relics. By June 30, the city government had covered the stele and pedestal with a black shroud, obscuring the inscriptions. The removal of the statue was coincident with the announcement by the city government that three police officers had been fired for "brutally racist" conversations recorded on official police equipment. A few weeks later, the black canvas was covered with khaki-colored canvas, a more neutral color that a city official said was less distracting to drivers. The city government did not reveal the storage location. On August 2, 2021, the City Council approved an agreement with Cape Fear 3, United Daughters of the Confederacy to permanently remove the monument from public land. Donor Gabriel James Boney had been a soldier in Company H, 40th North Carolina Regiment during the American Civil War. He returned to Wilmington after the war and became a wealthy mill owner. He was elected a city alderman and later to the state General Assembly. He was active in a Confederate veteran's association in Wilmington. He never married and had no children. Upon his death in 1915, he left $25,000