Charleston has taken major strides to atone for its slavery legacy, but I never thought the city would remove the John C. Calhoun statue.
Mayor John Tecklenburg and the Charleston City Council decided last week to take down the 115-foot-tall Calhoun monument, which towers above Marion Square about three blocks away from Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church, where a white supremacist slaughtered nine church members five years ago.
Vice president during two presidential administrations, a cabinet member and a prominent U.S. senator, Calhoun was a leading spokesman for the South and slavery as conflicts with the North deepened in the 19th century. A series of congressional compromises failed to prevent the Civil War.
Although Calhoun died 10 years before the Civil War began, he was revered across the South as one of the fathers of the Confederacy for his theory of nullification, which held that a state could reject federal law.
Erected in 1896 when Confederate monuments were placed throughout the South following the end of reconstruction, the Calhoun statue standing upon a massive Doric column was a symbol of the Confederate "lost cause" and the return of white supremacy.
The statue's site is one of Charleston's many history-drenched spots. The Citadel military school was located at the square from 1842 to 1922. Its barracks is now an Embassy Suites Hotel.
Once the parade ground for Citadel cadets, the grassy square is now a gathering spot for tourists and College of Charleston students. A Saturday morning farmers market is a pleasant ritual.
Named for Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the square is owned by two exemplars of the city's military tradition dating back to the early 19th century, the Washington Light Infantry and the Sumter Guards. In the 1950s, the grand old military companies stopped plans to turn the square into a parking lot. The bastions of old-time Charleston oppose the Calhoun statue's removal, as does the Charleston Post-Courier, which published an editorial calling for a historical interpretive plaque.
Under Tecklenburg and the council's plan, the monument will be moved to a museum, if any can be found to take it. The statue will be toppled first, and then the column taken down in stages rather than having another statue placed upon it.
Perhaps the Daughters of the Confederacy's Confederate Museum will take the statue, although it would probably have to be placed outside, again giving Calhoun a prominent spot.
If protests against dismantling the statue falter, it will likely molder in a landfill or warehouse somewhere along with other Confederate monuments.
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