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The Make It Right project will conclude its Standing/Still series on Wednesday, June 19 at the Halsey Gallery.

On the anniversary of Juneteenth, Make it Right hosts its third event in as many months downtown. Wednesday’s event will feature playwright and LGBTQ activist Vanity Reid Deterville, Dance Matters, and Charleston Reconstructed, a grant-based media innovation project involving a team of Columbia University and Stanford students. Dance Matters set poet Marcus Amaker’s Coming to Monuments words to movement during this year’s Piccolo Spoleto festival.

The Make It Right project was founded in 2018 to identify and organize around monuments around the South that depict Confederate-era figures. The monument to John C. Calhoun at Marion Square is one of 10 targeted for the removal by the group. Calhoun’s ideals and rhetoric laid the groundwork for nullification and the defense of slavery by Confederate states in the lead up to the Civil War.

In a City Paper op-ed last month, Kali Holloway, Make it Right’s senior director said that Confederate monuments have “remained a keystone of white South Carolina’s retaliatory response to black folks’ meager Reconstruction-era civil rights gains.”
[content-3] Wednesday’s event starts at 6:30 p.m. Afterward, attendees will walk to the Emanuel 9 Commemoration Committee’s “Prayers for America” event in front of the Gaillard Center.

The group says the event is dedicated to Millicent Brown, who integrated Charleston public schools and has spent her life continuing her trailblazing work as an activist and advocate.

Juneteenth is marked each year on June 19, the anniversary of the day when the abolition of slavery was first announced in the state of Texas on June 19 1865. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect in U.S. states on Jan. 1 of that year, but troops fighting for the Confederacy in the West did not surrender until June.
This week, two people were arrested and accused of throwing red paint onto a prominent Confederate monument near the landmark Charleston Battery. That event took place the day before the anniversary of the white supremacist murders at Mother Emanuel.  [content-4] Standing/Still‘s first event was held at Redux in April, with a second performance in front of the Calhoun monument in Marion Square happening last month. It is a collaboration between the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Redux Contemporary Art Center, and Make it Right.

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