NEWS: Calhoun statue coming down in Charleston

JUNE 24, 2020  |  The statue that loomed over Charleston’s Marion Square for more than a century is coming down.  

Crews worked early this morning to chisel the statue of John C. Calhoun from the base of the 115-foot pedestal on which it has served as a reminder of slavery for generations. 

Charleston City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve a resolution to remove the statue of the former vice president and powerful U.S. senator whose advocacy of slavery helped to tear the country into a civil war a dozen years after he died in 1850. Hours later, a crew was at work to remove the statue as commuters made their way to work.

Ausy McConnell, 47, of Goose Creek arrived at 5:30 a.m. to watch the statue’s removal. 

“The thing that makes me mad is we were never taught this in school,” he said from a lawn chair at Marion Square.  “People are still hurting.  How can we ever forget about the oppression that has never been released if we are constantly reminded of it?”

In an editorial published today, the Charleston City Paper said it was time to remove the statue.

“For too long, the statue has been a vivid reminder of a white elite that built Charleston’s antebellum wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans.”

It also encouraged the city to leave the pedestal in place to remind people of how Charleston’s antebellum wealth grew from the backs of enslaved Africans.

“There’s been talk of removing the 110-foot base on which the Calhoun statue rested for years,” the editorial said. “A better idea may be to leave it where it is, empty as the rhetoric of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps it can be a visible display that no one should really be ‘put up on a pedestal.’”

After a public comment period before the council’s historic Tuesday vote, members made remarks.

“I’m asking my colleagues to go along with me,” Councilman Robert Mitchell said. “Being a person that was out here for a long time in the civil rights movement, I know how the City of Charleston was all those times back in the ’50s. None of us talked about heritage, we talk about peace, coming together — it wasn’t that way. It didn’t happen. Now is the time, we need to have some healing process. I don’t think a statue is a place that is going to bring a healing process if we let it stay there.”

Councilmember Karl Brady cited the history of the monument as a statue erected during the era of Jim Crow laws, and put on a pedestal after it was continuously defaced.

“Statues and monuments are put up during specific times in specific places for specific reasons, and their effect is often to try to rewrite and reframe the actual history of an era,” he said. This was put up, “so that everyone who passed by would be forced to literally and figuratively look up to his memory of white supremacy, and his likeness could both literally and figuratively look down on those who he considered his unequals and would have gladly enslaved just generations before.”

Mayor John Tecklenburg also faced the argument that history is being erased by removing the statue, one of the most frequent criticisms. “The purpose of this resolution is not to discard any of our past, but to honor our lessons,” he said. “Not to erase any of that history, but to write a new chapter.”

“This motion will preserve and protect the statue and put it in a place, an appropriate place where it’s history can be told,” he added, calling for a commission to advise where the monument will go.

“The first step is to remove the statue,” Tecklenburg said, before an appropriate site for it is determined.

Editor and publisher Andy Brack and the Charleston CIty Paper’s Heath Ellison contributed to this story.