Nobody Wants to Pay for It. Black Replacement Monument Flounders Without Funding (SC)
With location and design selected, SC’s Robert Smalls monument needs funding The monument is expected to cost between $1 million and $2 million for the cost of the sculpture, lights and security.
With location and design selected, SC’s Robert Smalls monument needs funding The monument is expected to cost between $1 million and $2 million for the cost of the sculpture, lights and security.
(Southern Partisan) - The Statehouse’s planned monument to Civil War hero Robert Smalls has a location. It has a design.
What Smalls’ monument, the first on the grounds honoring an individual Black person, needs next is funding.
The monument, which legislators unanimously approved adding to the Statehouse grounds in 2024, will likely cost between $1 million and $2 million, Mike Shealy, who oversees special projects for the Department of Administration, told a commission of legislators Thursday.
That will include the cost of lights, cameras and, of course, the sculpture itself, which legislators selected Atlanta-based artist Basil Watson to create after receiving proposals from six artists.
Watson’s design depicts Smalls, who escaped slavery on a Confederate steamship, in a three-piece suit, as he would have worn when he served in the Statehouse and in Congress.
That’s similar to what the University of South Carolina paid for Watson’s monument depicting the first Black students admitted to the…
He sounds like quite the opportunist.