Last summer I blogged some about the monuments around the Tennessee statehouse. Among the things I noted were that Tennessee has, in recent years, placed a monument to the slave trade alongside -- depending on the time of day, perhaps literally in the shadow of -- an earlier monument to Confederate soldiers.
Long-time friends may recall that one of my interests is monument law--the law regarding the placement and removal of monuments, statues, and names (on buildings, stadiums, streets, and the like). Been talking about this some of late, in regard to Harpers Ferry.
Well, it's time to talk about the South Carolina statehouse. A couple of years back I wrote about the Ben Tillman monument at the Columbia, South Carolina statehouse. This time I want to talk about the Strom Thurmond monument.
What I'm particularly interested in here is that the monument was altered after it was put up -- to reflect the fact that Senator Thurmond had five, not four children, as the monument originally recorded. Check out the picture below, where you can see how the monument was altered twice -- once in changing "four" to "five" and once in adding the name of his first child, Essie Mae. Gives new meaning to written in stone, I guess!
One other thing that I find particularly interesting about the Thurmond monument is that it records the institutions that provided funding for the monument. One of the things that really interests me is how people and institutions are asked to provide funding for public monuments. Obviously, this has been much in the news of late -- with stadium names, highway names, and religious monuments funded by private groups on public lands.
Following Kim Krawiec's lead, I'm going to have a series of posts on three monuments on South Carolina's statehouse grounds -- on the African American monument, the Confederate monument, and the monument to the Mexican American War. There are some others (including one to the Spanish American War), though I won't be talking about them. And I'll have a couple of pictures of my friend Jack Chin, who accompanied me on this trip.
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