A group considering the location of South Carolina’s first congressional monument to an African American has decided that the statue of Robert Smalls should be placed higher than that of a notorious white supremacist.
The statue of Smalls will stand on the promenade where thousands of schoolchildren on field trips get off the bus to Congress each summer.
Born into slavery, Smalls stole a Confederate ship during the Civil War to sail his family and dozens of others to freedom.
He later served a decade in the House of Representatives, helped amend the South Carolina Constitution to give black men equal status after the Civil War, and then fought hard when racists returned to power and rolled back nearly all of the gains Smalls had fought for.
The proposal was unanimously approved Wednesday by the Robert Smalls Memorial Commission. Another group will now seek the millions of dollars needed for the Smalls statue to join more than two dozen others, many of Confederates and other racists, that have dotted the site where the state Capitol building has stood for more than 230 years.
Robert Smalls was born in 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina, and died in 1915, a free man in his life, but somehow forgotten and marginalized by a society determined to keep blacks of inferior status.
But Smalls’ story was too powerful and admirable to disappear.
In May 1862, during the Civil War, disguised in a Confederate uniform, he took command of a ship at night and passed several checkpoints before turning it over to Union soldiers, winning the freedom of his family and other slaves aboard.
For the rest of the Civil War, Smalls helped the Union. After the South was defeated, Smalls was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and Senate before being elected to the federal House of Representatives.
He bought his slave owner's house in Beaufort, partly with the money he received for surrendering the ship to the Union, which provided his wife with a place to live when she was widowed.
Smalls would see a new South Carolina constitution in 1895 strip African Americans of the right to vote, at a convention led by "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman.
Tillman, a former governor and senator, bragged about leading mobs of white men to kill black men trying to vote in the 1876 election, which led to the return of white power and the collapse of everything Smalls had stood for.
Some civil rights groups have advocated for the removal of statues of Confederates and white supremacists, such as Tillman, but state law requires legislative approval to remove them or even just to add captions to the monuments detailing their racist practices, which has been an impossible task in a state dominated by conservative Republicans.
