Beaufort will consider its monuments amid broad reckoning over Confederate memorials
Beaufort has started a conversation about the future of its historical monuments amid a national reckoning of the role of Confederate memorials in modern society.
Outgoing Mayor Billy Keyserling played host to historians and community members during a City Council work session Nov. 24 in what Keyserling said was an effort to start a dialogue about city monuments and historical markers.
A downtown resident contacted Keyserling to ask about a small waterfront park named for Stephen Elliott, a Beaufort native and Confederate general.
The city park includes a sign recognizing Elliott for his “bravery and outstanding leadership in defense of Beaufort,” and the formation of the Beaufort chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy spawned in a home across the street. The area is one of the few memorials to the Confederacy in northern Beaufort County, historian Larry Rowland said during the meeting this month.
“Because the history of Beaufort very distinctively was one of the beginning of the reconstruction of the American South,” Rowland said. “Fortunately, we have with the help of Mayor Billy over many years a national park to celebrate that piece of history.”
Union troops occupied the area early in the Civil War, a period when newly freed Black people attended school for the first time, participated in government and started businesses. Beaufort’s noteworthy heroes from the time include Robert Smalls, a once-enslaved Beaufort native who famously stole a Confederate ship in Charleston and piloted the vessel to freedom.
A bust of Smalls is displayed on the grounds of Tabernacle Baptist Church and there’s an ongoing effort by the church’s pastor, former state Rep. Kenneth Hodges, to erect a statue to of Harriett Tubman on the property.
Hodges noted the start of a broad movement after a white supremacist killed nine Black worshipers at a Charleston church in 2015 that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds. The conversation then was about the prospect of adding monuments to the grounds and not removing them, Hodges said.
“I have not been a proponent of focusing on removing monuments,” Hodges said. “My focus has been on trying to tell the full story.”
In addition to Stephen Elliott Park, a marker at the former courthouse on Bay Street paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy recognizes Confederate soldiers who died. That memorial was added in 1957 but wasn’t intended to coincide with the civil rights movement, Beaufort chapter president Mary Somerville said during the council meeting.
“The memorial and the marker that we paid for and erected were not put up to make any sort of a racial statement or even to celebrate a Confederate cause,” Somerville said during the meeting this month. “The memorial is simply a heartfelt remembrance of the Confederate dead.”
Council member and mayor-elect Stephen Murray said the conversation could eventually lead to a new policy on monuments, though more immediately a broader community conversation.
“I think it’s certainly worth researching and seeing how other communities are addressing this,” Murray said.
