SOUTH CAROLINA: Charleston removed statue of John C. Calhoun almost 5 years ago. A fight over its fate continues
The future of a bronze effigy of John C. Calhoun continues to be debated in South Carolina courts — rather than in City Hall — years after Charleston City Council initially voted to remove the figure from its pedestal overlooking Marion Square.
Four of the council’s 13 members, including Mayor William Cogswell, have turned over since that unanimous vote to take the statue down in June 2020. But the current council receives periodic updates in private on the back-and-forth legal battle.
On March 11, council went into executive session to consult their attorney — one of a few exceptions in state law under which public bodies can close their meetings — to discuss settlement terms covering a lawsuit over what to do with the 12-foot-tall statue. No public action or discussion occurred after the 20-minute meeting behind closed doors.
A pending appeal is the latest in a series of legal maneuvers by several of Calhoun’s descendants and the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade — a historic militia which originally owned Marion Square over which a caped Calhoun monument loomed atop a 125-foot stone pillar for over 100 years — in hopes of returning the statue to public display locally.
A recent amicus brief the state’s attorney general filed in a separate suit involving a Confederate highway marker that was removed from outside what’s now the Charter School for Math and Science, appears to have given Calhoun supporters hope that S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson may also support their cause.
The Calhoun attorneys included Wilson’s brief in their appeal, which is pending in the S.C. Court of Appeals.
The Calhoun appealers allege that a Charleston Circuit Court judge erred in dismissing part of a lawsuit the groups filed in 2022 to prevent the city from lending the statue to an art exhibit in Los Angeles.
The judge ruled that only Wilson has the power to enforce the state’s Heritage Act, which protects Confederate statues and other monuments. Wilson has long held that private citizens can bring lawsuits under the state law, according to attorneys for his office and the Calhoun supporters.
Attorneys for the city maintain the Heritage Act applies to war memorials, which the Calhoun statue is not. Wilson said the same back 2020 when the statue was first taken down.
Calhoun, a former U.S. senator and vice president, died a decade before the first shots of the Civil War rang out over Charleston Harbor. He was known as an ardent defender of slavery, the reason for South Carolina’s secession.
A day after City Council’s 2020 vote, Calhoun’s likeness was plucked from his perch and has since sat in an undisclosed warehouse while plans for what to do with it have been stalled in court.
–postandcourier.com
