Columbians are Laying the Groundwork for Rethinking Monuments

It was May 1, 1940, and heavy gray clouds hung over the South Carolina State House grounds. A light rain fell on the 3,000 people gathered for the dedication of a statue to Ben Tillman, the late governor and U.S. senator.

U.S. Sen. James Byrnes told the crowd why Tillman was worthy of such an honor.  

“No period in our state’s history was fraught with so many momentous problems as that during which Tillman was developing into manhood,” Byrnes said, according to a front-page story in The State the next day. “The Confederate war and the period of Reconstruction which followed brought to South Carolina tribulations which tried the souls of her harassed citizens. The state saw its most treasured ideals and institutions converted into unhappy memories; bankruptcy had overtaken those who had been wealthy. The masses were restive; they feverishly sought a solution for their problem, and they wanted a leader … who would fight unwaveringly for their cause.”

Byrnes didn’t mention what Tillman is increasingly best known for: leading white paramilitary bands to kill and terrorize South Carolina’s black citizens, stopping them from voting and helping usher in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. But the speech is thick with references mourning the end of slavery, and to the belief that Reconstruction — when black South Carolinians voted and served in the legislature, among other gains — was an unjust Northern imposition. 

A pamphlet distributed by the fundraising committee for the monument was more explicit. 

“He participated in the Hamburg and Ellenton Riots of 1876, and aided in the Democratic triumph of that year by frightening prospective Negro voters away from the polls,” the pamphlet read, praising Tillman for giving “the white man a firmer hold on political power.”

The statue unveiled that day stands in a prominent spot in front of the State House, facing the Confederate soldier monument.

“If you read about the dedication of the Tillman statue, there is no mystery whatsoever as to why he was being honored,” says Bobby Donaldson, a history professor at the University of South Carolina. 

Just a few decades later, as Donaldson’s research has shown, black people in Columbia were protesting segregation with sit-ins at lunch counters and other activism. It’s not hard to see the erection of the Tillman statue as a declaration of white supremacy, a pushback against the gathering forces of change. 

There’s a statue of Byrnes at the State House now, too, actually. 

These are just two of the 20-plus monuments on the grounds, and of the dozens of monuments and markers that dot the Capital City. 

South Carolina took down the Confederate flag that flew on the State House grounds in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black people including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney at a church in Charleston. Pictures emerged after the killing of Roof waving the flag. 

In other states since that time, officials and activists have removed statues honoring Confederate generals. It’s the latest flurry of activity in a national conversation about racial injustice over the past several years. And as white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August to protest one Confederate monument’s removal, and President Donald Trump wavered on condemning the marchers’ actions, the whole country was shaken. 

In South Carolina, the issue is more complicated. 

For one thing, the Confederacy is only one era of the state’s troubled racial history, as non-Confederate monuments like the Tillman statue attest. 

For another thing, most of the potentially problematic monuments are on state property, and the conservative legislature isn’t likely to remove them without major upheaval. There’s also a law called the Heritage Act that requires a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate to change most monuments. Though it’s facing a court challenge and one lawmaker has filed a bill to repeal it, the law is likely going nowhere soon. 

That’s why activists’ and historians’ eyes are on the long-term strategy. 

Mayor Steve Benjamin and the group Historic Columbia are eyeing a citywide discussion of monuments, and the South Carolina Progressive Network has launched a project to reinterpret the monuments. 

S.C. House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford also plans to file a bill to add some explanatory wording to the Tillman monument, despite the House Speaker having said he’ll allow no such discussions.

The national furor seems to have died down. But here in Columbia this long-simmering debate is gaining momentum.

Wading through History

Columbia is studded with monuments. Tom Elmore, author of popular histories of the Confederate era and Columbia landmarks, told Free Times the oldest monument he can find is one to USC’s first president, Jonathan Maxcy, designed by Robert Mills and erected on the Horseshoe in 1827. 

“And the newest is one to Cocky at USC,” Elmore says, citing a shiny gold portrayal of the school’s chicken mascot seated on a bench, erected this year.   

The area’s monuments are a hodge-podge, Elmore says — especially the ones located in other spots besides the city’s Memorial Park or the State House, of which he counts 26. They include a statue of Christopher Columbus at Riverfront Park and a plaque for Casimir Pulaski, a Polish count who fought for the patriots in the Revolutionary War. 

There’s even a monument to a former editor of The State, shot to death by Tillman’s nephew. It sits facing the State House grounds on Senate Street. 

Taking full stock of the city’s markers and monuments is difficult, as there’s no public master database. Some are clearly meant to honor past figures and wars — while others simply mark historic events. Take the Surrender of Columbia monument, a slab of granite that sits a few blocks up River Drive in the front yard of a church. It marks — without either celebrating or mourning the event — the spot where Columbia’s mayor surrendered the city to Sherman’s troops. There’s also a plaque in the Forest Hills neighborhood showing where Wade Hampton III’s house stood. The Confederate general was among the biggest slave owners in the country.

Symbols of the Confederacy abound on the State House grounds. But they can also be hidden in plain sight around Columbia. 

In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report on public symbols of the Confederacy. It found 1,503 symbols in public spaces nationwide, including 700 monuments and statues on public property. 

In Columbia, the SPLC report lists Longstreet Theater at USC, Beauregard Street and Bonham Street, all named for Confederate generals. [Update: A reader notes that Longstreet Theater was actually named for Augustus B. Longstreet, a former president of South Carolina College.] It also lists the Sons of Confederate Veterans commemorative license plate. 

As for Confederate monuments, the State House is home to monuments to Confederate soldiers, to the “South Carolina Women of the Confederacy” and to an equestrian statue of Wade Hampton III. 

But beyond Confederate monuments, there are other monuments that draw people’s ire. Like the bust of J. Marion Sims at the State House. 

Sims, a South Carolina native, practiced gynecological operations on enslaved women without anesthesia. Monuments to Sims in Columbia, New York City and Montgomery, Alabama, have increasingly come under fire — including from Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin, who spoke to national media in August about wanting the monument removed.

The mayor says the Sims monument “pains me personally.”

“I still find it indefensible and do believe we need a conversation about Dr. Sims’ legacy in Columbia, Montgomery and New York,” Benjamin tells Free Times. “But that’s just a minor piece of the puzzle.”

Bulldoze, Balance or Reinterpret?

The conversation over monuments in Columbia isn’t a simple up-or-down proposition. Even among those who want a change, there’s disagreement over what it should be. 

The Black Lives Matter movement has a clear position.

“You could take the Tillman statue and the father of gynecology, melt them down and use them for something else,” says Ty DePass, a member of Simple Justice-Black Lives Matter, Columbia’s chapter.

“We put up statues to remember things we’re either proud of or not to forget things that are utterly shameful,” says DePass, citing Holocaust museums. And the Confederacy, he says, is definitely not something to be proud of.

“What kind of heritage is ‘Poor white men sacrificed their lives for rich white men so poor black men could stay in chains?’” he says he once asked a pro-Confederate demonstrator. “What sounds good about getting duped?

“I could see an obelisk which talks about the Civil War as a rebellion that was designed to maintain a system of slave-based production, and was erected to remind folks that white supremacy was the driving motivation in South Carolina for most of its history. I could see something like that.”

The Black Lives Matter position is at odds with the South Carolina Progressive Network’s position, which they recently re-stated on their blog: “The question activists must ask ourselves is not whether offensive monuments should come down, but how much time and energy are we willing to spend to that end. … So, yes, be outraged about the monuments, but choose your battles wisely. Statues never killed anyone; but public policy does so every single day.”

Outside the activist community, opinions on the matter are all over the map. The latest Winthrop Poll, released a few weeks ago, found 40 percent of Southerners saying monuments to Confederate generals should stay where they are, 24 percent wanting a plaque added and 27 percent saying they should be moved to a museum.  

Even among historians, the conversation is tricky.

“I sort of walk the middle ground about the future of these monuments,” says Donaldson, the professor, who is black. “My instinct is to bulldoze and pulverize Ben Tillman’s statue. And yet my moments when I’m a detached, objective scholar, it’s a kind of history I think needs to remain visible.”

He disagrees with the argument that removing or altering monuments would “sanitize” history.

“One thing I’ve always argued is the sanitized versions of history are those monuments. It would really push all of us to think how we could reinterpret, offer an accurate representation of the Ben Tillman monument. That’s more challenging, more difficult to do.”

One idea that’s emerged is to erect new monuments to “balance” the narrative. State House monuments have been proposed to honor Robert Smalls — a South Carolinian who escaped slavery, fought for the Union and served in the state House and Senate and U.S. House during Reconstruction — and Rev. Joseph DeLaine — a key figure in the desegregation of schools. A pair of conservative state lawmakers proposed a monument to black Confederate soldiers — even though historians says there’s little evidence any black people actually willingly fought for the Confederacy. 

But in South Carolina, legislative change comes slowly and painfully. So even adding new monuments is a long-term proposition. 

In the meantime, people are looking for ways to retell the story. 

Reinterpretation

This time next year, you might be able to take an alternate history tour of the State House grounds — either in person, or using an app. 

Or maybe when you visit the State House, there’ll be a person standing next to the Tillman monument holding an interpretive sign.

A Progressive Network group is working on a project tentatively called The People’s Monument Tour, “where the history is reworked to be more accurate, less whitewashed,” says Sarah Keeling, an organizer with the group.

“The goal is to teach people the real truth behind the people the monuments represent, teach the fact that a lot of these weren’t put up while these people were alive, but as a fighting back against desegregation.”

Even something like the African-American Monument requires interpretation, she says — explaining the compromise that led to its construction, or why the sculptor wasn’t allowed to include figures like Denmark Vesey, who plotted a massive slave revolt in Charleston and was executed.

While Keeling says she can see both sides of whether monuments should be removed or reinterpreted, she says the idea is to do something.

“Our tour is more of a short-game strategy,” she says. “Even if people fight for it they’re probably not going to come down for a while.”

Others have brought attention to the monuments through protest. In September, a group of poets held a poetry marathon at the Sims memorial, telling Free Times, “Rather than a monument that honors [Sims] as a hero we’d like to start a dialogue that complicates that legacy.”

Meanwhile, the mayor has asked Historic Columbia to take on a long-term project to assess monuments. The nonprofit advocates for preservation and manages historic properties around Columbia and Richland County. 

“Most of the discussion nationally hasn’t been a positive discussion from a position of strength,” Benjamin tells Free Times. “The hope was that when things died down nationally we could have a constructive conversation guided by Historic Columbia.”

Robin Waites, executive director of Historic Columbia, says she’ll ask the board to endorse the mayor’s idea. 

A constructive conversation, she says, is going to take time, and require lots of information. 

“I think it’s time for people to move beyond this unfortunate idea we have in the South that the Lost Cause is a real thing, that the Civil War was not about slavery and that anything representative of the Civil War is not somehow also representative of the oppression of the majority of our population at that time,” Waites says. She’s referencing the long-perpetuated idea among white Southerners that the Civil War was a noble cause, even if a losing one, and that the Civil War was fought against Northern oppression rather than to defend slavery. “I think in having whatever conversations can happen next, there needs to be some agreement about what the truth of our story is.”

She’s seen it happen, though, at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home managed by Historic Columbia, which was redesigned a few years ago to tell the story of Reconstruction-era Columbia. 

“The goal of the shift in interpretation at that site was to show people what Reconstruction really was, and part of that is debunking this Lost Cause myth,” Waites says. “You have to understand the fallacy in that if you are going to accept the truth of Reconstruction.”

She’s seen people question what they thought they knew about the era.

“I think it’s evidence that when you are careful in your conversation and allow people time to process, people can go, ‘Oh yeah.’”

It’s the kind of process that needs to happen citywide, she says, when it comes to monuments. 

In discussing concrete ways the reinterpretation might happen, she points to work by the Atlanta History Center, which developed templates for learning about Confederate monuments. The template includes questions like who erected the monument, when it was put up and what was said at the dedication. The templates could be used for educational sessions, creating plaques or other purposes. 

In reinterpreting monuments, historians and activists hope to give them more context. 

But even adding information to a monument might run up against state law. 

It’s the Law 

The Confederate flag used to fly on top of the State House. It was moved to the front lawn as part of a compromise in 2000 that included the construction of the African-American History Monument — and the creation of the Heritage Act, which essentially froze in time most monuments on public property in the state, and prevented the renaming or alteration of things named for historic figures.

The act requires a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate to make any such changes. It’s tough to get a supermajority — but that’s exactly what happened when the legislature voted in 2015 to remove the flag from the grounds altogether.

The only other alteration to a statue on the State House grounds since the Heritage Act passed was when the legislature voted unanimously in 2004 to add the name of Strom Thurmond’s black daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams, to his monument.  

So there’s certainly precedent for changes — but lawmakers have tried to slam the door on any future changes.

House Speaker Jay Lucas said in 2015 he wouldn’t allow any further debate or votes on “the specifics of public monuments, memorials, state buildings, road names or any other historical markers” during his time as speaker.

Still, some lawmakers are keeping the discussion alive.  

Rep. Wendell Gilliard, a Charleston Democrat, has filed a bill for the coming legislative session to eliminate the Heritage Act. He did not return calls seeking comment.

The legislature is unlikely to discuss the Heritage Act this session, says Rep. Todd Rutherford, the House Minority Leader.

He maintains that the act is unconstitutional — because it passed on a simple majority vote, but attempts to bind future majorities.

“That bill was only voted on by the majority,” he says. “I don’t think a majority can require a two-thirds majority.”

That’s among the arguments of a lawsuit against the state brought by a group of Greenwood County military veterans who want to change a city monument that divides up soldiers killed in action as “white” and “colored.”

That suit, filed in 2015, has languished in court. So for now, South Carolina is stuck with the monuments it has. But that might not always be the case. 

Tillman First?

The Tillman statue has long been a target for people concerned about the story South Carolina is telling those who visit the State House grounds. In 2014 Free Times ran a cover essay by Will Moredock titled “Take Tillman Down.” Everyone interviewed for this story, from activists to historians, singled it out for criticism. 

Even a prominent secessionist, opposed to removing monuments Confederate and otherwise, says the Tillman statue requires some explanation.

James Bessenger is head of the South Carolina Secessionist Party. He cites the Hamburg massacre, during which Tillman and other whites were convicted but never punished for murdering black people ahead of the last election of Reconstruction, as evidence that Tillman isn’t a hero. 

“A lot of our people are opposed to context placards,” he says. “But me, if the thing is written unbiasedly without emotional charge I don’t have issue [with] that.” 

Even with all the groundwork that’s being laid for rethinking monuments, Donaldson says it’s going to take something dramatic for actual change to come.

“You’re going to need something tragic or cataclysmic to pierce the conscience of people,” Donaldson says. “Charleston proved that. All of us who were paying attention knew that Gov. Haley was very clear just a few months before the shooting that there was no effort to remove the Confederate flag.”

But DePass, the Black Lives Matter member, says the change will come. 

“I don’t even see the state laws being a permanent impediment,” DePass says. “Political cultures change. Right now you can see the lines of conflict really sharpening. People are saying, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not just.’ White folks are finally getting over their indifference to what’s going on.”