{"id":71,"featured":0,"modified":"2025-01-24 22:13:06","latitude":32.75135149731509187631672830320894718170166015625,"longitude":-79.89769091300951231460203416645526885986328125,"title":"Fort Johnson Monument","address":null,"thumbnail":"https:\/\/discovering.curatescape4.reclaim.hosting\/redirect\/files\/square_thumbnails\/fc1445eda2524874c8adba759e4b05e8.jpg","creator":["Joe Kelly","Committee on Commemoration and Landscapes"],"description":"The Charleston Confederate War Centennial Commission, chaired by Mrs. J. C. Long, gave this monument to the College of Charleston on the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Civil War. College of Charleston History Professor Elmer L. Puryear, also a member of the Commission, presided over the dedication ceremony on April 13, 1961. The monument, the ceremony, and the Confederate War Centennial Commission itself were all part of a larger cultural campaign to perpetuate the racial caste system known as Jim Crow.
The monument commemorates the Confederates' firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1961 (see image 1). The bare facts stated on the monument are accurate, but they deliberately obscure the fact that Southern states seceded and started the war in order to establish a new nation based not on the truth that all men are created equal, but on slavery and racial inequality. (See Image 2.)\u00a0
At first, the war seemed to give the United States its \u201cnew birth of freedom,\u201d as Abraham Lincoln called it in his Gettysburg Address. Union troops\u2014many of them Black soldiers\u2014liberated Charleston on February 18, 1865. The entire insurrection collapsed a few months later. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution abolished slavery; granted full citizenship to everyone born in the U. S., regardless of race; and assured all citizens of the \u201cequal protection of the laws.\u201d During Reconstruction, more than 80,000 Black South Carolinians registered to vote, ratified a new state constitution, and exercised their inalienable right to self-government for the first time. They elected many Black legislators to both houses of the General Assembly.
But the proponents of inequality were resilient.
Almost the moment the Confederacy collapsed, certain white southerners began re-interpreting the Confederacy not as a mission to preserve and spread slavery, but as a noble cause of self-defense. Known today as the \u201cLost Cause\u201d interpretation of history, this view holds that in 1861 northern aggressors disrupted a just society in which relations between Blacks and whites were cordial, stable, and in accord with nature. Nature itself made the races of humanity unequal. White people were manifestly superior in intellect and moral capacity, while Black people, suited to brute manual labor, were not fit and could not be made fit to exercise self-government. Democracy, they believed, was doomed by human nature.
While most white Southerners conceded that slavery was not coming back, many continued to insist that white supremacy was the proper basis of government. White supremacists intimidated and murdered Black and Republican voters. At first, the federal government intervened, using the Army to maintain civil rights in the South. But eventually, the white proponents of equality suffered what historians call \u201cmoral fatigue\u201d and lost the will to protect civil rights. Between 1876 and 1896, a series of court cases, culminating in the notorious Plessy v Ferguson, allowed the states of the old Confederacy to re-establish inequality. South Carolina became a fake democracy in which a privileged minority imposed a segregated caste system, which came to be called \u201cJim Crow,\u201d on the majority of its citizens.
The triumph of Jim Crow was reflected in mainstream culture. Monuments glorifying the Confederacy went up all over the South. The Calhoun Monument in Marion Square, erected in 1896, and the Monument to the Confederate Defenders of Fort Sumter at White Point Gardens, dedicated in 1932, are good examples of how public memory explicitly promoted the \u201cLost Cause\u201d interpretation of the Civil War and implicitly reinforced the ideology of Jim Crow. \n
<\/div>\nBlack Americans in every generation fought against Jim Crow, and by the 1950s they had begun to rouse the nation from its \u201cmoral fatigue.\u201d The modern Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and began to threaten Jim Crow.
The centennial of the Civil War became a referendum on civil rights. E. Milroy Burton, the director of the Charleston Museum, insisted that Charleston must get its act together or the \u201cNorthern point of view\u201d\u2014that the Civil War was about racial equality\u2014would prevail. An all-white commission was organized to protect the \u201cLost Cause\u201d version of history.
The commission\u2019s work began with its name. The national organization was the \u201cCivil War Centennial Commission,\u201d but the local branch named itself the \u201cSouth Carolina Confederate War Centennial.\u201d In 1961, calling the Civil War the \u201cConfederate War,\u201d the \u201cWar of Secession,\u201d the \u201cWar Between the States,\u201d or the \u201cWar of Northern Aggression\u201d communicated one\u2019s allegiance to Jim Crow.\u00a0
The national Centennial Commission had planned to convene in the Francis Marion Hotel, but that hotel was segregated, and Madaline Williams, a commission delegate from New Jersey, would not be able to stay there. Controversy ensued, and President Kennedy ultimately moved the Commission to the Naval Base in North Charleston, while the \"Confederate War Centennial\" continued to uphold its values.\u00a0
On the eve of the centennial, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond gave the keynote address to at the Confederate War Commission\u2019s banquet. Equality, he explained, was never a principle of American political philosophy. It was a \u201cMarxist idea,\u201d and he called on \u201coverzealous radicals\u201d to give up their \u201cintegrationist idealism\u201d so that America\u2019s caste system might \u201ctriumph over the forces of communism.\"
\u201cThere was no bigger day for white Charleston\u201d than the centennial, the journalist, Steve Bailey regretfully remembers. The ten-year old boy saw Alhambra Hall in Mt. Pleasant \u201cdecorated and awash in people who had come to watch the reenactment of the bombardment of the Union forces.\u201d Everyone \u201ccheered wildly\u201d when the Confederates won. \u201cThere was never a question that day about whose side we were on.\u201d