Heritage Act stalls veterans’ plan to add black soldiers, rededicate memorial (SC)
Schuyler Kropf
Nov 28 2015 12:00 pm
... A plan to return an aged monument to public view in Marion Square won’t go forward because there’s a strong probability the marker’s list of names is both incomplete and omits black soldiers who died in the Great War.
Desegregating the memorial isn’t as easy as making the plaque larger and adding their names, however. South Carolina’s Heritage Act, enacted in 2000 as a compromise that removed the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse dome while preserving Southern history, requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to alter public displays such as memorials or statues ...
Charleston’s World War I marker, a 7-foot stone monument, was erected with great pomp and circumstance in 1934 near the foot of what was then the city’s bridge to West Ashley off Spring Street during an American Legion gathering that drew several thousand veterans ...
The marker, almost unnoticeable in its place by the bridge, remained there until 1995, when it was removed for a new overpass. For the next 20 years, it was in storage, all but forgotten, in the city of Charleston’s storage depot, where garbage trucks are parked ...
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20151128/PC16/151129385/1006/wwi-memorial-plans-stalled-by-heritage-act
