Confederate monument in Greenville draws renewed call for condemnation and removal
Two years after a deal was brokered to relocate Greenville's Confederate monument, a community activist is once again calling on Greenville City Council to pass a resolution condemning the statue and have it removed.
Bruce Wilson of the Fighting Injustice Together organization addressed City Council at its meeting Oct. 10 and called for action.
"How can we come together in unity when we still have symbols of division and hate in downtown Greenville?" Wilson said. "There is no doubt that the Confederate statue is nothing but a relic of the past — a relic of hatred and racism that was designed to intimidate free Black individuals from the time beyond Reconstruction. And here we are in 2022 with those same symbols."
Councilmembers have said that to move or alter the monument they would need to first vote to request a waiver to the state's Heritage Act, which is meant to protect war memorials on public property in South Carolina.
"State law prohibits relocation. That's clear," Mayor Knox White, who was not at the council meeting, told The Greenville News in a text message. "Working on a way to tell a fuller story on the site."
In 2017, White expressed support for an additional plaque to provide historical context to the monument.
Calls for the monument's removal reached fever pitch in 2020 as racial reckoning swept the city and the nation. At the same time, though, the pandemic and a new police accountability task force seized the attention of City Council, inhibiting further progress on installing a plaque, White told The Greenville News in August 2020.
But in a Facebook Live video later in 2020, Wilson shared publicly a deal to move the statue off North Main Street to inside the gates of Springwood Cemetery, with County Councilman Ennis Fant explaining the deal.
Fant talked about a plan to place the monument on a grassy area inside the cemetery where it's close to graves of Confederate soldiers.
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Wilson has organized protests at the monument honoring fallen Confederate soldiers since 2017.
In previous years, the monument was located in the center of Main Street at what is now the site of the Hyatt until it was moved in the 1920s out of traffic concerns, according to historical accounts.
Neither White nor other members of City Council has announced a timeline for the installation of an additional plaque.
A engraving on the monument today reads, in part,
"All lost but by the graves where martyred heroes rest he wins the most who honor saves. Success is not the test. The world shall yet decide in truth's clear far off light that the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee were in the right."
Dedicated in 1892, the monument's statue was modeled after Greenville Police Chief James B. Ligon, a Confederate soldier known for his “commanding figure” and “fine war record,” according to an historical account of the statue in "God's Little Acre on Main Street" by Lucile Parrish Ward.
A South Carolina Supreme Court ruling issued in 2021 made it easier to remove Confederate monuments across the state. The court struck down a portion of the state's Heritage Act that prevented many of the state's historical structures from being moved or altered without the approval of two-thirds of legislators in both chambers of the South Carolina General Assembly.
Now, only a simple majority is required in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate to move war monuments or change the names of historic buildings.
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Confederate monument in Greenville, SC draws renewed call for removal
