A few weeks ago now, I got to help out with Queen’s University Belfast’s Centre for Public History Conflict, Trauma, and Memorialization Conference, which has been an incredible opportunity to meet scholars from across North America and Europe and listen to them discuss at great lengths some of the topics that are most interesting to me, and sometimes very personal.
Those of you who know me know that in 2017, I was a high schooler pushing for the renaming of my high school named after one of South Carolina’s largest slave owners, a former SC governor, and of course, a confederate general. The petition was published less than two years after Bree Newsom took down the confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse, and just a few months before the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville which would spark much of the action and dialogue about conferate monuments and what to do with them on a national level.
In Greenville, SC, where I’ve lived since I was twelve and have grown up, completed higher education, and stayed very present and active in the local community1, the conversation mostly fizzled out by the end of 2017, with a very brief resignation in 2020, and now… almost nothing.
In 2017, the debate was the typical reactionary backlash that you would expect— “heritage not hate” and “don’t erase history.” My response to both of those was A. the heritage we refer to when recalling the legacy of a slave-owning former confederate general who fought for the continuation of the institution of slavery and governor who used paramilitary violence and threat to get elected *breath* is a heritage of hate and B. no one even knew the history behind the name of the school, the road, the neighborhood, the fire station, etc until I made a fuss about it.
My suggestion was simple: rename the school after someone from our community’s history that better reflects our history, values, and culture. My suggestion was Max Heller, a holocaust survivor and Greenville mayor who is responsible for revitalizing the downtown that is the centerpiece of our city’s life and culture now.
I will save you the discourse (much of which you can still read on Facebook and Reddit threads— which is also where you can find very interesting narratives about me spun by stranger white folks), but I spoke to just about everyone I could about this— the school board, city council, my state reps, etc, and the answer was always a hands up relinquishment of responsibility for being able to make a decision about the name.
My school board representative, Lynda Leventis-Wells, stood in firm opposition to my petition, saying during a community debate panel that as a former (white) student in the 70s, she had never seen racism, so therefore it didn’t exist then or now. Wells would continue to oppose the petition, even in 2020, still saying the decision couldn’t even be handled by the school board.
And she was right about not being able to handle the decision. This avoidance of engaging with the debate by local councils and politicians was partially because of the touchiness of the subject— I mean, “Asha Marie is a f*cking n-word” is written at Bald Rock— but also because of the vagueness of the Heritage Act, a law that began as a bill to put the confederate flag on top of the statehouse and make it so that not even a two-thirds majority vote from the state legislature could remove it.
Included in that bill was a section that protected monuments, markers, and memorials on public property of the state (including streets, highways, and parks) “honoring the memory of the Confederacy or individuals who served in the confederate Army, Navy, and Marine Corps or the Women of the Confederacy or the memory of the civil rights struggle or individuals who participated in such struggle” from being removed without a two-thirds majority vote.2
An amended bill was passed in 2000, more explicitly stating that the bill not only prohibited the removal of the confederate flag on statehouse grounds but also “the removal, changing, or renaming of any local or state monument, marker, memorial, school, or street erected or named in honor of the confederacy”3 without a two-thirds majority vote of the general assembly.
So there it was— my community couldn’t make decisions about addressing our own symbolic landscape. We had to have the approval from people who didn’t even live in our neighborhoods, and absolutely no one wanted to take up the fight of introducing this debate into the assembly.
I kicked my feet for the rest of my time in high school, being loud where I could— writing op-eds for the news that mostly would not get published and occasionally ranting on my social media leading to a few more signatures of the petition, but as older people liked to remind me frequently, including some of our Black community heroes, there were more important things to work on in our community and our state.4
Since my petition in 2017, there have been hundreds of removals and renaming of confederate symbols and monuments across the U.S. A quick Google search says there are over 700 left, as cited by Southern Poverty Law Center, but I suspect there are probably more than are recorded.
Wade Hampton High School is on the map published by SPLC in 2019, as are Wade Hampton Boulevard and Stonewall Lane, the Confederate war monument, and the Robert E. Lee monument downtown. A list of historical markers in Greenville shows that there are more sites with markers, memorials, and/or monuments that are related to the confederacy, and there are other monuments and street names in nearby cities in the Upstate, and of course, they are littered throughout the state— including the other Wade Hampton High School at the opposite end of the state.
A lot has changed for me since the publishing of the petition. I’ve completed an undergraduate degree which allowed me to study political philosophy, sociology, advocacy, and rhetoric, and I’m less than a month away from finishing a masters degree in public history. I’ve studied abroad and visited (and now lived in) countries that are actively dealing with the legacies of intense community conflicts, and I’m going down a path of becoming a scholar of collective memory and symbolic landscapes, and yet I cannot shake the question of what to do with confederate monuments— and more specifically, what to do with OUR confederate monuments, in OUR community?
I think there are more answers than just removing them, and removing them does draw up many more questions. Like, where do monuments go when they are removed?5 If in a museum, how do we make sure that they are being contextualized in a way that fully fleshes out the complexity and tension of the community struggle that these monuments hold? And, when gone, how do we remember the intention behind the erection of the monument in the first place? And who is to say that a monument removed will always be removed?
The weaponization of the symbolic landscape is not an unfamiliar or unintentional feature of white supremacist tactics carried out by closeted and not-so-closeted white supremacists. The goal of capitalizing on the gaps of the collective memory with intentional silences and selective remembering through the dressing up propaganda as “preserving history” is explicit in the mass mobilization of white women in the Daughters of the Confederacy and other “heritage not hate” and “family values” organizations.
This is why confederate monuments do what they’re meant to. They become so normalized in our day-to-day interactions in the symbolic landscapes of our communities that we don’t even notice them, or at least we don’t think much about them, but they are still beacons of rhetoric, and they send messages about community values and culture. The message may be vague enough to claim harmless and good-natured historical remembrance, but if we know our history, there is no denying the history, values, and culture that these monuments draw up.
That’s why when I stepped into Wade Hampton High School as a teenager and saw the giant mural of the two swords Wade Hampton III used in battle to keep my people enslaved and when I was told to “lead like a general” every morning, I couldn’t help but think of the values that Wade Hampton III held, and the kind of culture he was fighting for his community to keep. Values and culture that would not have seen me as a person let alone valued my education and the pavement of a bright, equitable future for me and my peers of color.
I still think Wade Hampton High School should be renamed. I still think Max Heller would be a great rename. But I also think that we need to remember Wade Hampton and remember that the school was named after him and why.
Students deserve to know their local history. Everyone does. And most of us don’t (and it’s not entirely our fault.) Students can engage in important dialogue about our history and the implications of modern acts of commemoration. At the very least, there should be a plaque that gives a true overview of who Wade Hampton III was— the good and the bad.
At the heart of my petition and my desire to change my school’s name has always been honesty and transparency. It’s okay for us to feel both pride and shame about our pasts.
I feel this tension deeply as a South Carolinian in a state that I feel has so much potential but consistently lets us all down.6 And in some ways, these monuments are a reminder of what gives my community, my state, and my region its soul: the lineages and legacies of resistance, advocacy, and fights for justice in the face of white supremacy, systemic disenfranchisement and oppression, and efforts to erase history and culture that challenges the white status quo.
As for the other monuments, I don’t know what the answer is, but I know there are many options that aren’t just removal or bust. Some communities have put their monuments in museums, others now have rituals of defacing their confederate iconography creating visual tensions of rhetoric and understandings of the past, and some have suggested melting down the statue into something else entirely.
The beauty of local community is the ability for neighbors to come together to create the kind of space they want. To create unique, complicated, maybe even contradictory spaces that tell our stories and share our values. Our symbolic landscapes are co-created, and they should be as flexible as we are. I understand the urge to protect monuments from reactionary changes, but we deserve to have the ability to make our own decisions about the symbols, monuments, and memorials in our community, IN our community.
I am open to considering many different ideas on what to do with our confederate monuments. I wish we had more genuine dialogue about monuments and about our shared histories because right now, there’s none. The part that complicates all of this, and that I am not overlooking or underestimating, is the severity of our political moment. I understand the times we’re living in; I understand that it is harder than ever to find common ground with our neighbors, and I am not advocating for a naive “love your neighbors” come-to-Jesus solution.
There will never be true justice and reconciliation without true acknowledgment of and repair of the harms of the past, and real change to the systems and institutions that uphold the legacies of slavery and white supremacy.
I’m not sure when we will get ourselves to a place where we can have the kind of dialogue I’m advocating for, but I know it must happen anyway. Our fights to protect schools and libraries against censorship and to protect freedom of speech is more important than ever.7 Again, we all have a right to our history, and vague propagandistic monuments are not the history we should point to when seeking to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going.
We need to engage with our symbolic landscape in general— more rituals of remembering and commemoration, more counter-narratives, more forgotten histories, more oral histories, more podcasts and vlogs and other digital humanities projects, more plaques, more tours, more classes (inside and outside of institutions), more, more, more.
I’ve been away from my community for a year now, and I’m getting ready to move away indefinitely to start (and finish) my PhD, but I’m always thinking about home, and my research will always circle back to our community. Maybe I’ll have more answers for you in a couple of years— but for now, I’m back with my every-couple-of-year reminder that this conversation should not end with hands in the air saying it is not our problem or that there are more important things to focus on.
This dialogue is far from over. I mean, even people in Belfast, Northern Ireland, are talking about it in the middle of June in 2023… so Greenville, why aren’t we talking about it?
I note this in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way because at one point there were reddit threads suggesting I was a wealthy political plant from the North sent down here to cause a ruckus.
Section 10-1-240. https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess111_1995-1996/bills/1.htm
Ok, yes, directly after the confederacy, it also says it protects civil rights movement-related monuments, markers, etc— but literally, where are the civil rights monuments in SC?? Very few and far between. See more here: https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess113_1999-2000/bills/4895.htm
There were kind people who tried to assist with legal connections and ideas to push against the collective refusal to engage from council members and state representatives, but I was seventeen, my mom drove me everywhere, and most of the scrappy ideas never materialized for one reason or another.
A special shoutout to Kevin Gaines at UVA who visited QUB for the conference and gave an interesting talk on confederate monuments and what communities are doing with them, and who answered my big questions earnestly and with grace. :)
Here I’m referencing the fact that South Carolina consistently ranks among the worst in the country for poverty, education, and other life outcomes. Even our infrastructure is so poor, we can only joke about it.
Shoutout to those doing work with Greenville Freedoms in Libraries Advocacy Group and others mobilizing and resisting against crazy lengths to ban books and censor knowledge spaces.
Asha this is SO good and I'm so glad to continue reading your thoughts on all of this as you study in Ireland! I'm so glad you of all people are getting those advanced degrees, you're so brilliant and I can't wait to hear more on these thoughts. (PS- I finished my thesis and, in the hullabaloo of the end of the year, forgot to send it to you. I'll send it over tonight, of course no pressure to read, but thank you again for letting me explore the topic & for your interview!)
Girl. It's like you were speaking all my thoughts from my recent trip to SC into existence. There's such a wealth of knowledge that could foster such meaningful conversation and I love that you have taken the steps to continue this discourse even when the internet has had its fill. I also appreciate how you are willing to take it beyond the conversation and bring action into the picture! Loved reading this, your are so thoughtful and this post was VERY thought provoking, thanks for teaching me something new!