Our View: Lump of coal for the College of Charleston

Reserve a special lump of coal for the College of Charleston for its scheduled Dec. 20 unveiling of a portrait of its former president, Glenn McConnell, on the 162nd anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union.

To mark McConnell’s presidency just about any other day wouldn’t cause a stir, but his thrall with the Confederacy over his long career sours the occasion. What should be a day of celebration for the former lieutenant governor is a wound by the college that’s self-inflicted at best.

As a city, as a state, as a nation, we don’t need to keep perpetuating the Lost Cause of the Confederacy — a racist myth that the Civil War was a just, heroic and honorable conflict about economics, not slavery. Wrong. The Civil War was nasty, gritty and brutal. More than 600,000 Americans died in a four-year conflict that at its essence was all about slavery.

So it’s a slap in the face to millions of people across America to unveil a portrait on Dec. 20, the day that South Carolina seceded from the Union. And it makes one wonder just what the College of Charleston was thinking.

Did officials at the college, which has its own department of history with more than two dozen professors, just not know that Secession Day was the same day they picked for the private ceremony at the Sottile Theatre to laud a portrait for McConnell, the former local state senator who owned a Confederate memorabilia shop and steered the effort to raise the Civil War Hunley submarine now being conserved in North Charleston?

Or did they get led down a primrose path by someone, unaware of the coincidence?

Or are they just plain tone deaf to the message they send by linking a college celebration to a day inexorably linked to the split of the Union that set the South back for generations?

Whatever happened, the college should have postponed the ceremony to send the clear message that it supports diversity and inclusion — and won’t have anything to do with furthering the myth of the Lost Cause.

Please note: This editorial criticism isn’t directed at McConnell, who had a long, distinguished career in the state Senate before becoming lieutenant governor — a job he really didn’t want but took because of his sense of honor. In 2012 when McConnell was serving as president pro tempore of the state Senate, the lieutenant governor’s office became vacant. That meant the state’s second top position in the executive branch fell to McConnell. He could have played rule games to bypass the job. But he didn’t. He did his constitutional duty.

There were some protests two years later when McConnell became the college’s first graduate to become its president. But during his tenure, he made strides to bolster inclusivity and diversity — two things that current President Andrew Hsu has pushed forward even more.

But some of that momentum is now off because of the date picked for the portrait unveiling. It shouldn’t have happened.