After 123 years, Charleston will try to take down slavery champion Calhoun statue

Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg announced Wednesday that the city plans to remove the once-revered, now reviled statue of pre-Civil War slavery champion John C. Calhoun from a prominent city square in historic downtown Charleston.

Under a resolution that will be voted on next week by the full 12-member city council, the statue — long a towering tribute to one of the South’s no-compromising defenders of enslaving Africans and their descendants — will be relocated to a museum or institution of higher learning, Tecklenburg told a press conference at the base of the statue.

The statue continues to divide Charlestonians because of Calhoun’s “deeply troubling legacy,” Tecklenburg said.

Whether the city council’s planned action next Tuesday to take down the statue, which stands 115 feet above the ground according to the Charleston Museum, can survive a potential legal challenge that might be brought under South Carolina’s Heritage Act is another question.

The Heritage Act, passed in 2000, prevents renaming things like war monuments, and bridges or streets that have historic significance without the approval of super majorities — two thirds vote — in each the state’s two Legislative chambers.

But during the press conference, Tecklenburg said he believes the wording of the Heritage Act is such that it doesn’t apply to the Calhoun statue. He also said he believed in “home rule” and that a South Carolina town or city ought to be free to do something such as remove a statue and put it in a different place.

Tecklenburg said the city doesn’t intend to hide or destroy the statue, but rather put it in a place where “it will be preserved and protected ... where the full story of history can be told.”

Following the press conference, State Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston, said he and other lawmakers are working to come up with a law that would do away with the Heritage Act.

The Heritage Act is unconstitutional, Kimpson said, because it requires super majorities to make exceptions to it. But under the South Carolina state Constitution, only simple majorities are required to pass legislation, Kimpson said.

The press conference came on the fifth anniversary of the 2015 massacre of nine Black Americans by a white supremacist from Columbia, Dylann Roof, who is now on federal death row awaiting execution. Roof, who murdered the unarmed parishioners during a Bible study, said he planned and carried out the killings because he wanted to start a race war. Evidence presented during the trial showed he acted alone, but had been radicalized by extremist Internet sites.

The Calhoun statue stands in Marion Park, a half-block from Mother Emanuel AME Church, where Roof carried out the killings. It is one of the tallest structures in downtown Charleston.

Calhoun, a former U.S. vice president and senator, was known for his fiery speeches and is regarded as one of the greatest orators in all of Senate history. He helped develop the theory that slavery was not a bad thing but a “positive good” for both the Black enslaved and the white enslaver. Calhoun lived from 1782 to 1850 and practiced what he preached — he was a slave owner himself.

Since last month, with the widely-viewed video of George Floyd, a Black man, who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck while he pleaded for air, cries for racial justice and the removal of the old trappings honoring slavery supporters and slave masters have swept the nation.

Protests attracting hundreds of thousands of white and Black demonstrators have been held in cities large and small, including in South Carolina in the capital city of Columbia, Charleston and Greenville, to name a few.

In recent days, the mostly white Clemson board of trustees has announced it wants to remove the name of Ben Tillman from one of the university’s most landmark buildings, Tillman Hall. Ben Tillman, who came to prominence in South Carolina after the Civil War, was a former governor and U.S. senator. He was known for his speeches in which he advocated white supremacy and killing any African American who sought equal rights.

The University of South Carolina has announced it wants to remove the name of J. Marion Sims from a woman’s dorm. Sims, a native of Lancaster County, is honored as the father of modern gynecology, but he experimented on female slaves without any anesthesia. A statue to Sims also stands on State House grounds.

Charleston is going about trying to take down the Calhoun openly and letting the public know what is happening.

Last week, when Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin and some city officials decided to remove a statue of Christopher Columbus from a city park, Benjamin had city workers show up at the park early one morning and begin dismembering the statue without notice to the public.

But a State newspaper reporter was tipped off and arrived in time to get video of a city worker with a diamond-tipped chain saw working on the statue. By that time, only Columbus’ feet were left. The State subsequently wrote a story about the removal.

(The Associated Press contributed to this story.)

Charleston Mayor John T