After sitting in storage for over a year, Charleston’s statue of John C. Calhoun may be headed to the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.
City of Charleston and museum officials have worked out an agreement for an “extended loan” to the museum, according to a Feb. 7 news release. It is pending final approval from City Council and the museum commission.
Under terms of the agreement, the state museum will form a task force to “create and execute a long-term storage and interpretive plan for” the Calhoun statue, the release said.
The potential loan to the museum is being considered in addition to a loan request from a Los Angeles art curator that has stirred up debate over what should be the statue’s fate in recent months.
If the agreement with the State Museum is finalized, the loan request from the L.A. art exhibit will need approval from both council and the appropriate state officials, Charleston city spokesman Jack O’Toole said.
“As I’ve said from the start, I don’t support erasing history, but rather, serious efforts to place complicated figures such as Mr. Calhoun in their full context,” Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg said of the proposed deal. “In this instance, I can’t imagine a more appropriate institution to perform that valuable public service than the S.C. State Museum.”
If the agreement is approved, the museum will be responsible for transporting the statue and conserving it.
“The State Museum looks forward to working with Mayor Tecklenburg and the City of Charleston,” said John F. McCabe, chairman of the South Carolina State Museum Commission. “We believe the museum will be an important resource in determining an appropriate resolution to the care and interpretation of the monument.”′
The state museum has a history of accepting decommissioned artifacts. It currently houses both Confederate flags previously displayed at the S.C. Statehouse. The museum also agreed to store the city of Columbia’s statue of Christopher Columbus, which was taken down in June 2020.
Columbia officials removed the monument from its 7-foot brick pedestal overlooking the capital city’s Riverfront Park after the statue was vandalized multiple times with spray paint amid protests following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. Plaques at the base of the statue were also removed.
Columbia and the State Museum are in the final stages of an agreement for the museum to temporarily store the Columbus statue while the city reaches a final resolution, a museum spokesman said Feb. 7.
The city has stored the monument since its removal in an undisclosed location.
Charleston leaders voted to take the statue of Calhoun down in a similar vein. For weeks before the announcement, the city saw protests against racial violence prompted by Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.
A congressman and vice president, Calhoun died years before the Southern states launched the Confederacy but he is also remembered as a fierce defender of slavery and, to some, represents the city’s dark past.
The Charleston Commission on History, a board of City Council members and volunteers, has been debating what to do next with the statue. Los Angeles-based curator Hamza Walker made a request to the city to borrow the Calhoun statue for his upcoming exhibit. He and his co-curator are requesting loans of decommissioned Antebellum and Confederate-era statues from the across the U.S. They hope to display them alongside newly commissioned works of contemporary art at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art beginning in the fall of 2023.
After lengthy debate over the course of two meetings, the Charleston Commission on History voted to recommend the City Council agree to lend out the statue of Calhoun to the curators, though council has not taken a vote on the recommendation.
The members disagreed over how Calhoun should be described and characterized in a catalogue accompanying the exhibit.
Some pushed back on the idea that Calhoun’s legacy should be strictly tied to slavery, while others said it represents the portion of his legacy that has the most impact on the present day.
Ultimately, they moved to form an agreement with the curators that the catalogue entry would be written by University of South Carolina history professor Thomas J. Brown.
History Commission member Michael Allen said he was surprised to hear about the potential deal with the state museum. He said he hopes that if approved, Charleston will still consider temporarily loaning the monument to the Los Angeles exhibit.
Either way, he said he hopes any display at the state museum prompts important conversations about Calhoun’s legacy that do not romanticize the past.
“I believe it needs to be displayed in a place where there can be a substantive conversation about his impact then and now,” he said.
A lawsuit backed by the conservative advocacy group the American Heritage Association seeks to block the loan to the LA exhibit. The plaintiffs, descendants of Calhoun and the Ladies Calhoun Monument Association — which erected the statue over 125 years ago — argue the statue was never intended to leave South Carolina.
The AHA released a statement Dec. 7 also opposing the potential loan to the state museum.
“The woke movement believes most monuments should be removed from the public square and displayed in museums as oddities of the past,” AHA President Brett Barry said. “From a state policy perspective, this would set a dangerous precedent that the State Museum is now a repository for South Carolina’s monuments.”
–postandcourier.com
