South Carolina Statehouse: African American Monument

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I thought I'd post some pictures of the monument to African Americans on the South Carolina statehouse grounds.  The South Carolina capitol grounds are packed with monuments -- to the Mexican-American War, the Confederacy, the Spanish-American War, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman, Strom Thurmond, World War II, and probably some other people and/or wars, which I didn't take pictures of.  I've not seen another statehouse with so many monuments around it.  Though I must say that in terms of monuments, nothing beats Gettysburg in my experience.

Anyway, the monument to African Americans is different from the other monuments around the statehouse -- it's more recent than all but one of the monuments.  (It was dedicated in March 2001.)  And visitors walk inside it.  There are two panoramics of African American history in South Carolina.  A picture of one is on the upper right. One of the things that interests me are the phrases on the monument, "Jim Crow Law," "Black Codes," "Lynching," "Sharecropping," then later on, a few panels down, there's Briggs v. Elliott (a 1952 Supreme Court case that became part of Brown v. Board of Education) and, of course, Brown v. Board of Education.  Quite a lot gets packed into that monument.

Then in the center of the monument is a map of Africa and the United States, which shows some of the places where South Carolina's African Americans' ancestors came from.  It's hard to get a good picture of the map.

Here're some more pictures of the monument.  They put the monument into perspective on the capitol grounds, as well as give close ups of a lot of the panels.

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[Matthew Reid Krell]

"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."