A self-manufactured crisis.
Via WISTV
Along Main Street in a small South Carolina city, there is a 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.
“Segregation was the accepted social order of that time,” said Eric Williams, who spent 32 years as a historian with the U.S. Park Service. “If we alter the monument, we alter its historical integrity.”
The memorial is owned by the American Legion post in Greenwood and is on city property. On two of its sides, it lists soldiers who died in World War I and World War II that were from Greenwood County. A third side lists Korean and Vietnam War dead from the county without any racial distinction because the military was integrated by that time.[…]
Activist Joseph McGill, who spends the night in old slave cabins to get attention to preserve them, agrees. He says talk about switching plaques reminds him of schools that don’t want students reading “Huckleberry Finn” because racially offensive language from the 1800s is in the book.
“That could just spread the perception that segregation did not exist or wasn’t that bad,” McGill said.
Chad Williams of Brandeis University near Boston has extensively studied black soldiers in World War I. He said he understands the desire to correct a historical injustice, but another sign explaining why the soldiers were separated by race is much more powerful and historically accurate.
“I think it is important to acknowledge the specific context in how African-American soldiers had to serve in the military,” Williams said.