A Charleston, South Carolina, group aiming to preserve southern United States history is suing the local government and school board to return statues of Vice President John C. Calhoun and Confederate General Robert E. Lee to their original displays after they were removed by leftists during the 2020-2021 Black Lives Matter movement.
Brett Barry, president of the American Heritage Association (AHA), gave Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle the run-down of why the two statues are important, and why they should be reinstated:
“I moved to Charleston in 2015, largely because it was a town that truly respected and remembered its history. But then, in 2020, it took a complete change,” Barry explained. “We had former Mayor [John] Tecklenburg in office — and when the woke mobs started rioting, he actually became an extension of that riot… The rioters were calling for the removal of the John C. Calhoun monument, but they couldn’t take it down, so he ordered it removed.”
The 115-foot tall monument, which stood at the center of Marion Square in Downtown Charleston since the late 1800s, was removed after a unanimous vote by the Charleston City Council, about a month after the death of George Floyd.
“And not only did he remove the statue, but then he had the 130 year old granite base and column actually jackhammered into rubble,” Barry said of the Democrat ex-mayor.
Noting that Calhoun was a member of the “Great Triumvirate” in the U.S. Senate, Barry pointed out that he was a “part of all the major policy debates” who “laid a lot of the groundwork for some of the early philosophical debates over the U.S. Constitution.”
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While the bust of the Calhoun statue was removed, not destroyed, it has sat in an “undisclosed warehouse” for the last five years {snip}
“{snip} That’s really how our organization got started — because we needed somebody to stand in the void,” Barry continued. “And a lot of people were running for the hills at the time — from the wokeism movement. So we launched a lawsuit about three years ago that has been ongoing {snip}”
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A similar legal battle is playing out over the 2021 removal of the Robert E. Lee memorial from Charleston School of Math and Science, with the AHA also launching a lawsuit against the Charleston County School Board.
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