Children are getting restless.
Not just young people who are still locked out of their classrooms most of the week. The older ones, technically adults, who crowd without mask in university bars. That they continue to demand that the University of South Carolina stop studying building names and start replacing building names that they consider to be very much linked to white supremacy. Now.
They ignore the fact that the presidential commission, which recently released its list of buildings that may need to be renamed, cannot rename anything. Neither the president nor the trustees. The Legislature must approve any changes. Even if the school brought together its most powerful lobbying team ever, there is virtually no chance that the two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate needed to overrule Governor Henry McMaster’s veto would vote to rename Marion J. Sims Residence Hall, let alone the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center.
They also ignore, as USC President Bob Caslen reminded me during a meeting with our editorial team on Tuesday, that study it was the focal point of the University’s Presidential History Commission, idealized by and embellished by its predecessor, as its first official action as president.
Cindi Ross Scoppe
Recommending buildings to be renamed was only a third of the commission’s responsibility, along with collecting and presenting the history of their namesakes and suggesting ways to honor the entire history of the university, including “forgotten, excluded or marginalized groups and individuals”.
I would suggest that renaming buildings is the least important of these three missions.
Do not misunderstand me. I have no love for Confederates or Klan prosecutors or gynecologists who have experimented with enslaved women – even though the record about Marion Sims is less clear than critics suggest. Or Mr. Thurmond, who was a great senator, if you believe that a senator’s job is to provide constituent and swine services. I would be perfectly happy if they had never been honored to begin with. Nor am I intrinsically against the repeal of inappropriate honors, like all roads named for contemporary lawmakers. And I don’t think the Legislature should have approved the part of the Heritage Act that gave veto power over all efforts to revoke honors.
But in addition to a handful of truly notorious individuals, I don’t see many clear answers. Even if we agreed that we have the right to judge people by today’s standards, and not by the standards of their day, names occupy an obscure middle ground in the honor hierarchy.
Unlike statues – artifacts from history that probably deserve to be preserved, even if they are not attractive, as some historic buildings certainly are – names can be changed without losing anything historic. Unlike flags, however, they cannot be changed for nothing, because they serve not only as a commentary on history, but also as points of reference – for addresses, directions and context in our daily lives.
And each time we eliminate public references to people who offend us, we lower the standard of how many people should be offended and how offended they should be, and how reasonable it is to be offended.
After all, there is a vast chasm between the sins of Ben Tillman, a white supremacist murderer who was considered a stranger even in his own time, and Fritz Hollings, who is on the USC’s target list because he was governor while the state struggled to preserve segregation. (A thought experiment: Imagine that our country once took for granted what opponents of abortion believe – that abortion is as unequivocally bad as slavery – and erased the honors given to any politician who supported the legality of abortion.)
As important as that, I don’t see a winable fight here. What I see is another shiny ball to distract our lawmakers from work to improve the health, wealth and education of all South Carolinaians. And students and teachers having their hopes only to see them dashed.
That is why I was so excited to see how committed President Caslen is to these two most important parts of the building renaming commission’s mandate. Not simply because they do not require legislative approval and do not involve slippery slopes, but also because both honoring worthy contributions that were ignored and providing the full context for honors that we would not bestow today are fundamentally about education – which is the mission of the university, and ours. only hope of surviving these cultural wars.
Imagine if each tribute to Wade Hampton and Marion Sims and even contemporary figures like Sol Blatt, Marion Gressette and Sens. Thurmond and Hollings came up with a well thought out, well-written and well-displayed examination of the good and the bad, of why each man was honored and why he shouldn’t be. Imagine if, even beyond the USC campus, we gave a meaningful context to all the names and special statues.
Among all the new buildings that the USC is constructing and all parts of the campus not yet named, it should be easy to honor as many worthy African Americans and women and other “forgotten, excluded or marginalized groups and individuals” as all white men killed in the commission target list.
Children may not be happy, but they can learn something.
Cindi Ross Scoppe is a writer for The Post and Courier. Contact her at [email protected] or follow her on Facebook or Twitter @cindiscoppe.