‘Embarrassed about the name,’ Cottontown residents want this street renamed
Some Cottontown residents say they are “embarrassed” by the name of Confederate Avenue and want it changed.
The Cottontown/Bellevue Historic District Neighborhood Association has formed an exploratory committee for the possibility of changing the street’s name, association president Will Thrift said.
The street — a main thoroughfare through the district connecting Bull Street to north Main Street and beyond — is believed to be named after a Confederate soldiers cemetery in the area.
The group is “just getting started,” Thrift said.
Columbia City Council member Howard Duvall said the council has been briefed on the request and is looking at procedures renaming streets require.
Renaming Confederate Avenue is the latest in a string of actions to eliminate statues, memorials and names that many feel are offensive. The initiatives come after the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police officers sparked protests around the nation.
The board of Clemson University has asked the General Assembly to remove the name of Ben Tillman — one of the university’s founders and an avowed white supremacist who served as South Carolina’s governor and its U.S. senator in the late 19th Century — from its Tillman Hall. There are also efforts to remove Tillman’s statue from the State House grounds.
The city of Charleston wants to remove a statue of John C. Calhoun from Marion Square. And the University of South Carolina has asked the legislature to remove the name of J. Marion Sims from a building on campus. Sims is known as the father of gynecology who experimented on enslaved women.
Cottontown, part of the Bellevue Historic District, is located between Elmwood Avenue, Anthony Street, Sumter Street and Bull Street, according to the neighborhood’s website. It was supposedly named after cotton storage warehouses located there, although the origin is murky.
Flavia Lovatelli is an artist who lives on the corner of Confederate Avenue and Sumter Street. She has a Black Lives Matter sign prominently displayed on the front of her house.
She said she and her husband, Thomas “JJ” Mackey, loved the house when they saw it on Zillow in 2016, but were put off by the street’s name.
“We passed on it three times,” she said. The name of the street, “just bugged us. . . . We were embarrassed about the name because the Confederacy stands against every grain of who we are.”
Lovatelli said, “we got over ourselves with regard to the name,” because they loved the house so much.
Now, “we are all about changing the name,” she said, suggesting that it should be changed in the spirit of Columbia “continu(ing) in the direction of naming more streets after women.”
She suggested Mary McLeod Bethune, a native South Carolinian who was an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida.
“Wouldn’t it be just glorious to rename a street that celebrated a way of life that glorified racism and slavery to a freed black woman who went ahead and became an advisor to Roosevelt in all Black matters.”
This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 2:33 PM.