Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg called for a statue of John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery U.S. senator from pre-Civil War South Carolina, to be moved to a local museum at a press conference on Wednesday. Tecklenburg said he would be sending a resolution to the city council to request the move, which was poised to escalate a challenge to state law.
The proposal came as Confederate statues across the country are being removed by cities and torn down by protesters. “The time has come to take down the monuments to honor the evil that was done in the name of Charleston,” the Rev. Nelson Rivers III said during the press conference.
The decision came on the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that killed nine Black parishioners.
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