Commission member calls for removal of Confederate monument

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 discredited and need to remain discredited,” Fraser said. “Take that thing down and let it stay down like the Calhoun monument. It’s an insult to freedom-loving people.”

Background on the move

In 1947, the city of Charleston originally donated the marker, which was erected by the Charleston chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in front of what is now the Charleston County Charter School for Math and Science on upper King Street. Some say the monument was part of a campaign to keep alive the “Lost Cause” of the Civil War.

In 2021, the Charleston County School District asked the city to remove the Lee Highway memorial from in front of the school. It did. Then the UDC sued. Last year, the lawsuit was dropped after the UDC and the Board of Field Officers of the Fourth Brigade – the group that owns Marion Square and partners with the city for its upkeep as a public area – reached an agreement.

“The legal easement agreement between the UDC and the Board of

Field Officers that brought the willing parties together and the Lee

roadside marker to Marion Square advances those purposes” to represent Charleston’s place in military service and history, according to a December statement by the board.

Dale Theiling, a member of the history commission who also chairs the Board of Field Officers, told the Charleston City Paper in December, “All we did was move it. It didn’t fall under the purview of a review by the [history] commission.”

On Wednesday, Theiling gave fellow commissioners their first report about the monument’s installation at Marion Square. During a discussion, he noted, “The city of Charleston released the marker to the UDC.”

But there was no explanation of how the city’s decision was made or who authorized it.

The Commission on History’s next meeting is expected to be Feb. 11. Fraser said he would make a motion to facilitate the removal of the monument from Marion Square.

“That would be an important statement by the city on where it stands on lost cause monuments,” he said.