COLUMBIA —A legislative commission tasked with building a monument to Civil War hero Robert Smalls met for the first time this week to begin laying groundwork to permanently commemorate the former enslaved man-turned-congressman on the grounds of the S.C. Statehouse.
There’s much to be done.
The commission, formed by an act of the Legislature this year, still has not established a location for the statue, nor have they procured a design or an artist to carry out the project. They also need a way to fund the project, which — like a previously constructed monument to African American history on the grounds — will be funded solely by private donations.
But in a boardroom of the Gressette Senate Office Building on Aug. 28, each member of the 10-member committee acknowledged the weight of the task ahead: constructing the first monument dedicated to a single African American figure on a 22-acre spread that today remains dominated by memorials to the Confederacy.
And they are everywhere.
A towering obelisk to veterans of the Confederate army sits directly in front of the Statehouse steps. J. Marion Sims, a pioneer of gynecology who experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia, has a statue in a quiet corner of the grounds.
Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton, who enslaved people, has a statue, as does Benjamin Tillman, the former governor and white supremacist whose brother George used violence and intimidation to rob Smalls of his seat in Congress before his colleagues eventually removed him from office.
The monument to Smalls represents something else: a marker of Black achievement and persistence on the grounds of a building that for generations has told only the story of those who sought to keep him down.
Born into enslavement, during the Civil War, Smalls successfully commandeered a Confederate transport vessel, the 147-ft. side-wheeler steamship the Planter, in Charleston Harbor, joined the Union side and later played a key role in convincing President Abraham Lincoln to allow Black men to serve as soldiers.
He later helped draft South Carolina’s Reconstruction-era constitution as a member of the state Legislature, helped establish the state’s public school system and later served as a member of the U.S. Congress.
“I’m really looking forward to the day where I get to bring my children, my grandchildren, up here to the Statehouse grounds and allow them to read whatever’s going to be on that monument, to say ‘these are the soils from which you come from,’ these are the heroes we want you to look up to and exemplify,” Rep. Jermaine Johnson, D-Lower Richland, said at the start of the gathering.
But there’s a lot to be done, and with a Jan. 15 deadline to submit an initial design, not a lot of time to do it.
The commission needs to begin figuring out how it will fund the monument’s construction, including setting up a website and making the phone calls and contacts necessary to begin soliciting donations.
They need to begin identifying artists or firms to conceptualize a vision for the monument and how much it will cost. They need to figure out where to place the monument in a free area of the grounds that can accommodate the proposed design and give it justice.
There will also likely be some compromise involved: notably, during the construction of Ed Dwight’s already present monument to African American history, the design committee worked to remove more contentious themes from the proposed design, such as depictions of lynchings and hooded Ku Klux Klansman, from the final product.
Lawmakers did seem to decide what they wanted the monument to convey.
Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms, said Smalls fought in three different arenas as a slave, pilot and statesman to achieve his freedom.
Throughout his life, Campsen said, Smalls knew that freedom would only endure not just through the craft of law, but also through education — the two passions that would serve as constants in Smalls’ life.
No monument would do Smalls justice, he said, without telling that story.