The monument was dedicated on May 10, 1924, almost six decades after the war it commemorated had ended. The inscription on the front read In memory of "The boys who wore the gray." The right side read This memorial erected by the people of Durham County. The plinth held the bronze soldier, two lampposts, and a pyramid of four cannonballs. Like most Confederate monuments in the South, it had not gone up immediately after the war. It went up during the Jim Crow era, when white governments across the region were systematically dismantling Reconstruction-era civil rights and erecting monuments that recast the Confederate cause as noble. Durham's soldier was one of hundreds raised in this period.

The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, ended with the murder of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who had come out to counter-protest the white nationalist gathering. The footage of James Alex Fields driving his car into the crowd traveled fast. Across the country, the question of what to do with Confederate monuments shifted overnight from a civic conversation to a moral one for many communities. Two days later, in Durham, the activists did not wait for the question to work through the courts or the legislature. They brought a rope. The statue was hollow bronze and not solid. It crumpled when it hit the ground. The damaged shell was placed in storage by police.

North Carolina had passed the Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act in 2015, specifically designed to prevent local governments from removing Confederate monuments. The law required permission from the state Historical Commission and limited any approved relocation to a place of equal prominence on the same site. Durham County's position was that the law did not apply because it did not address damaged monuments, and the soldier was now badly damaged. In early 2019, a Durham City-County Committee on Confederate Monuments and Memorials recommended displaying the crumpled statue inside the county administrative building, leaving the pedestal in place, and adding outdoor markers honoring Union soldiers and enslaved people. The committee said the damaged form would add important context.

On August 18, four days after the toppling, a piece of paper reading "shame" was taped onto the front inscription, so that it read In shame of "The boys who wore the gray." Below it, in marker, someone had written "Death to the Klan." Rumors of a Ku Klux Klan rally that day brought additional protesters out. The rally did not materialize. The amended inscription stayed up briefly, then came down. Between midnight and 3 a.m. on Tuesday, August 11, 2020, almost three years to the day after the original toppling, county officials quietly removed the granite base itself and trucked it to an undisclosed location. The corner outside the old courthouse was now bare. The soldiers it had commemorated had been dead for more than a century. The argument the monument represented continues.