Charleston school board sued by American Heritage Association over removal of Confederate monument By Adam Parker and Valerie Nava Nov 15, 2024 In an explicitly partisan public notice tied to Donald Trump's White House victory, a local heritage group announced it is suing the Charleston County School Board for its decision to remove a Robert E. Lee marker from the Charleston School of Math and Science, and challenging Charleston City Council for its removal of the John C. Calhoun monument that once stood in Marion Square.
The group also took issue with the renaming of Memminger Hall which, because it’s managed by Spoleto Festival USA, now is called Festival Hall.
"With support from the newly elected Presidential administration, it's time for SC Republican leadership to fulfill their duties and uphold state law, restoring illegally removed monuments in Charleston," American Heritage Association Vice President Jim Lechner said in a Nov. 14 statement.
The group objects to the state of South Carolina’s failure to enforce the Heritage Act, which requires a two-thirds majority vote in the Legislature in order to change or remove a public monument.
Because the Calhoun monument was located on private property, and because the owner of that private property agreed to the monument’s removal, city attorneys determined that the Heritage Act did not apply.
This is not the first effort by the American Heritage Association to challenge the removal of monuments in Charleston. In 2022, the group filed suits against the city, the school board and Attorney General Alan Wilson over the decisions to take the Lee monument from the charter school and the Calhoun monument from Marion Square. Those challenges were dismissed several months later.
This latest lawsuit was filed July 15 in state court in Charleston, the state's Ninth Judicial Circuit, naming the school board and school district as defendants. The group served the lawsuit to the district board on Nov. 14.
Charleston County School District spokesman Andrew Pruitt confirmed the district has received the suit.
"Our legal counsel will prepare an appropriate defense," Pruitt said in an email.
The American Heritage Association is working with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the plaintiff, which in 1947 erected the Lee monument. The association "is providing financial support and is pleased to assist this group of local Charleston ladies.”
The association noted that at the time of the removal of the Lee and Calhoun monuments, City Council and the school board “were governed by a Democrat majority,” according to the release, which used a pejorative form of the word “Democratic.”
In actuality, both government bodies are non-partisan, but both now have conservative majorities while the monuments remain in storage, the American Heritage Associate noted.
"In the wake of successive local elections which repudiated the extreme left, now is a great opportunity for Republican and moderate Democrat (stet) members on city council and the school board to undo the wanton damage perpetrated by radicals committed to the desecration of our history,” heritage association board member Preston Wilson said in the release.
The Calhoun monument in Marion Square, long a point of contention, was taken down by the city in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. It was part of a nationwide racial reckoning and an effort to remove objects whose historical authenticity was deemed questionable and which tended to offend large numbers of residents.
Defenders of the monuments insist their removal amounted to an erasure of history, and that even the uglier parts of the past ought to be preserved for consideration.
About one year later, the school district and city agreed to remove the Lee marker at the Charter School for Math and Science on upper King Street, a 1947 monument erected like so many others throughout the American South by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It was part of an effort to promote the “Lost Cause” narrative of heroic Southerners who fought the Civil War not to sustain and expand slavery but to exercise their state’s rights.
When the American Heritage Association in 2022 was involved in challenging the removal of the two monuments, the city justified its actions on the grounds that the monuments honored individuals, not their service in war, something the Heritage Act requires, city attorneys said at the time.
The previously named Memminger Auditorium was in honor of Confederate politician and Cabinet member Christopher Memminger.
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