Officials in the historic city of Charleston announced their plans to remove a statue of slavery defender John C.
Calhoun nearly 124 years after it was erected.
Mayor John Tecklenburg announced his decision to send a resolution to remove the statue to the City Council during a news conference on the fifth anniversary of the racist attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where eight black church members and their pastor Dylann Roof was shot and killed by a white man.
Tecklenburg called John C. Calhoun, the former vice president and senator, “South Carolina’s most prominent national statesman, and also its most consequential defender of slavery and white supremacy.”
“That we as Charlestonians must reckon with Mr. Calhoun’s towering and deeply troubling legacy is a given,” he said. “That we must allow his memorial to continue to divide our city while we do that reckoning, however, is not a given. And that is why, today, I will be sending our City Council a resolution calling for the relocation of the Calhoun statue to a local museum or other academic institution where that necessary and long-overdue reckoning can truly begin.”
He further states that his purpose was “not to erase our long and often tragic history, but to begin a new and more equitable chapter of that history.”
City council member and member of the Emanuel church William Dudley Gregorie said that a newly formed commission on equity and racial conciliation would be examining all statues in Charleston, and would recommend to erect new statues of the enslaved people who helped build the city.
“The removal of this statue is just the beginning,” Mr. Gregorie said. “We are not on our knees praying today — we are taking action today.”
“It’s a great day for me personally, as a member of a family that understands brutality, that understands the shooting death of loved ones in this city,” Gregorie added.
“Racism is violent and evil, and is the foundation of an unjust America. This system, it’s not broken — it was founded and designed on violent, vicious evil racism.”