Along Main Street in a small South Carolina city, there is war memorial honoring fallen World War I and II soldiers, dividing them into two categories: “white” and “colored.”
Welborn Adams, Greenwood’s white Democratic-leaning mayor, believes the bronze plaques are relics of the South’s scarred past and should be changed in the spirit of equality, replaced like the “colored” water fountains or back entrances to the movie theater that blacks were once forced to use.
Yet the mayor’s attempt to put up new plaques was blocked by a state law that brought the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome in 2000. The law forbids altering historical monuments in any way without approval from legislators.
Historians, black and white, have reservations about replacing the plaques, saying they should serve as a reminder of the once-segregated U.S. military.
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Will Moredock, a freelance journalist trying to get South Carolina to remove the statue of segregationist Gov. Ben Tillman from the Statehouse grounds, said that is shortsighted. Americans are given the power to change laws and even the framework of its government with amendments to the Constitution. So why should historical monuments be any different?
“Every generation has the right to choose the people and the causes it wishes to enshrine in its public places,” Moredock said.
The mayor planned to put the old plaques in the county museum. For now, they remain on the monument and the new ones sit in City Hall storage, waiting for the Legislature to act.
“I am fully aware this is much tougher than I ever expected,” Adams said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”
