Trying to whitewash history.
Via The State
It was shaping up to be a “celebration of togetherness,” said Greenwood Mayor Welborn Adams.
The small western South Carolina city had raised more than $15,000 to remove segregation-era plaques – honoring the city’s fallen soldiers in “White” and “Colored” columns – and replace them with panels listing the names together.
Then, “the Heritage Act came along and threw a wrench into everything,” Adams said.
Now, some Greenwood residents are fighting the S.C. law, passed in 2000, that says only the General Assembly has the power to change monuments.[…]
In the wake of the shooting, The Citadel asked lawmakers to let the college remove a Confederate naval jack from a campus chapel as a way to honor those who were killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Some Democratic lawmakers say The Citadel, other universities and local governments should be able to make their own decisions about the monuments and memorials, calling for changes to the Heritage Act.
“As a state, we are so against the federal government telling us what to do, yet we are very fond of micromanaging local governments,” said state Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland.
But fearing an onslaught of efforts to raze or remove from public view the vestiges of state history, Republican leaders in the Legislature are reluctant to change the law and cede any of that power.
House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, announced last week that additional monuments would not be up for debate.
State Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, said changing the law is unlikely because it would “unleash battles, symbol by symbol, monument by monument.”