Dead separated by race
GREENWOOD, S.C. — Along Main Street in a small South Carolina city, there is war memorial honoring fallen World War I and II soldiers, dividing them into two categories: “white” and “colored.”
Welborn Adams, Greenwood's white Democratic-leaning mayor, believes the bronze plaques are relics of the South's scarred past and should be changed in the spirit of equality, replaced like the “colored” water fountains or back entrances to the movie theater that blacks were once forced to use.
Yet the mayor's attempt to put up new plaques was blocked by a state law that brought the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome in 2000. The law forbids altering historical monuments in any way without approval from legislators.
Historians, black and white, have reservations about replacing the plaques, saying they should serve as a reminder of the once-segregated U.S. military.
“Segregation was the accepted social order of that time,” said Eric Williams, who spent 32 years as a historian with the U.S. Park Service. “If we alter the monument, we alter its historical integrity.”
The memorial is owned by the American Legion Post in Greenwood and is on city property. On two of its sides, it lists soldiers who died in World War I and World War II that were from Greenwood County. A third side lists Korean and Vietnam War dead from the county without any racial distinction because the military was integrated by that time.
Adams said he asked other South Carolina mayors and doesn't know of any other similar memorials in the state. Several historians also said they haven't heard of a monument where fallen soldiers are separated by race.
About a year ago, American Legion Post members asked the mayor if he thought he could raise $15,000 privately to change the monument. He was so sure he could, he took out a loan to pay for the new plaques so they could be dedicated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Forty-three donors, almost all white, came through with the money. Adams wrote a $1,000 check himself.
But there was opposition, in part because of a quote from the mayor in a December story in The Index-Journal of Greenwood. “I think if history offends people it needs to be rewritten if possible,” Adams said.
The mayor acknowledged he didn't choose his words carefully. He later said he meant that while history doesn't change, the way a community presents itself does.
Days before the King Day ceremony, opponents threatened to try to have Adams arrested — perhaps on a misconduct in office charge — if he went forward with the new plaque. The mayor said he cried in his office when the city's lawyer told him opponents were right about the law.
“I wonder if some of the opposition is racism hiding behind history,” said Adams, who was elected mayor in 2008 in this city of 23,000, where about 45 percent of the population is black.
The Confederate flag law says no historical monument, erected by the state or by a local government, may be relocated, removed, disturbed or altered without a two-thirds vote from state lawmakers. The law lists 10 wars, including the “War Between the States,” — the genteel, Southern name for the Civil War.
The purpose of this part of the law was to appease people who worried 15 years ago that Confederate memorials and street and park names in honor of generals would be torn down in wake of the flag being removed from the Statehouse dome and being put in front of the South Carolina Capitol alongside a Confederate soldier monument. The flag is still a sore point for the NAACP and other black leaders.
