That Didn't Take Long! Lee Monument in Private Hands and THEY Still Ain't Happy (SC)
Commission member calls for removal of Confederate monument
Commission member calls for removal of Confederate monument
(City Paper) - After the Wednesday meeting of the city of Charleston’s history commission – the first since the sudden December appearance of a controversial 2.4-ton Confederate highway monument in Marion Square – it’s still unclear how it got there.
But the only African-American member of the Commission on History, well-known leader Wilmot A. Fraser, urged his colleagues to push for removal of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Highway marker.
“I am 86 years old and suddenly it reappears,” he said. “It makes you think that the change and decency that Charleston has stood for is not present in the current milieu.”
He said the public needed to understand the implications of re-erecting a Confederate monument now – and especially after the city removed the towering lith topped by a statue of antebellum South Carolina pro-slavery leader John C. Calhoun from the same downtown park in 2020. Calhoun advocated the states’ rights politics that split the nation and led to a bloody 19th century civil war in which as many as 850,000 Americans died.
“These ideas [about white supremacy] have been…