Here’s what Charleston’s mayor plans to do with Confederate monuments

Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg says he won’t try to remove any of the city’s Confederate monuments — but will seek to amend them, according to the Charleston Post & Courier.

And there’s been a plan in place to do just that, he said, before last week’s deadly protests in Charlottesville.

The amendment process is likely to begin with a monument to John C. Calhoun, which sits in Marion Square, and could take the form “new plaques and language,” according to the Post & Courier.

Calhoun — a former vice president and senator whose writings were foundational for states’ rights ideology and the formation of the Confederacy — Tecklenburg said, “was an advocate for slavery,” which is not denoted on the monument. That monument, Tecklenburg told the newspaper, should tell that part of the story, too.

“I don’t believe we’ve done a good job of telling the whole story of slavery and Reconstruction and what happened there and Jim Crow,” Tecklenburg told the newspaper. “One hundred years from now, you want people to know the great lengths the white folks who were in charge around here went to try to put racial barriers back into place.”

Also in Marion Square is a monument honoring Wade Hampton, a Confederate general and one of the largest slaveholders in the South who later became governor of South Carolina after a violent campaign in 1876, during which a faction of his supporters — known as “Red Shirts” — killed and intimidated black people.

That monument and the Charleston Defenders of the Confederacy monument at White Point Garden were other examples Tecklenburg referenced regarding amendment, according to the newspaper.

The NAACP and National Action Network called for the removal of the Calhoun monument following the violence in Charlottesville, which centered around that town’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and which left three people dead.

According to the Post & Courier, Tecklenburg’s plan appears similar to guidance offered by Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

That guidance suggests decisions on monuments should be made on a case-by-case basis, that some might be removed or amended and that others might stay in place.

In a June statement, Meeks noted that some Confederate monuments were erected shortly after the war by “grieving Southern families,” but that others sprung up later, “for a more troubling purpose.”

“Decades after the war,” she wrote, “advocates of the Lost Cause erected these monuments all over the country to vindicate the Confederacy at the bar of history, erase the central issues of slavery and emancipation from our understanding of the war, and reaffirm a system of state-sanctioned white supremacy.

“Put simply, the erection of these Confederate memorials and enforcement of Jim Crow went hand-in-hand. They were intended as a celebration of white supremacy when they were constructed.”

Any changes to Charleston’s monuments could require approval by the legislature under South Carolina’s Heritage Act.

Proposed changes will also be reviewed by the city’s History Commission, and other groups.

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 10:50 AM with the headline "Here’s what Charleston’s mayor plans to do with Confederate monuments."