One Man's Fight to Reclaim a Racist South Carolina Monument
Friday, November 6, 2015
by Sally Kuchar
In the center of North Augusta, in front of a fountain on the lawn of the town's oldest house, there's an obelisk memorial to a white supremacist who died massacring a black town ...
The engraving thanks Meriwether for his "service" as one of the 200 white supremacists who rode into the town of Hamburg in 1876, capturing 25 to 30 people and executing six of them. To make a point about blacks participating in politics, they cut out the County Commissioner's tongue and chopped off his head ...
Hamburg is arguably one of the most important towns in American political history. In the 1860s, it offered a brief glimpse of a Golden Age for racial equality, as a self-governed freedmen's town which became a post-Civil War hub for black Republican politicians like state legislator Prince Rivers, State Senator Charles D. Hayne, and state Speaker of the House Samuel J. Lee. Most residents fled after the massacre ...
The town isn't exactly out of the way. It takes about two seconds to drive from the Augusta, GA, riverfront, turn down a dirt road to a golf course, tramp through some bramble, and find it: an ancient concrete mews, a maze of hallways and large open rooms about 10 feet high with occasional raw picket fences and screen doors leaning against the walls, a large wooden cross, letter cutouts on the floors, some old soup cans and toilets, and even a rusted-through railroad car deep in the bushes. Just down the river, there's a row of mansions that just stops at Hamburg. Fifty feet away, people are golfing on the town center ...
http://curbed.com/archives/2015/11/04/south-carolina-racist-monument-reconstruction-augusta-hamburg-meriwether.php
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