South Carolina’s State House grounds are home to multiple Confederate monuments that perpetuate a legacy of racism and injustice in our state:

Statue of Wade Hampton, III – a Confederate general, slave-holder and KKK supporter with ties to the Red Shirts of the Southern United States, a white supremacist paramilitary organization that used violence and intimidation to suppress the Black vote and was responsible for dozens of deaths during the 1876 gubernatorial election

Statue of Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman – a white supremacist and architect of the state’s 1895 constitution that stripped Black South Carolinians of the few civil rights they had been granted following the Civil War; leader of the terrorist Red Shirts organization (see above) who defended lynching and boasted of killing Black Americans on the floor of the United States Senate

Statue of James Marion Sims – a “pioneer” in the field of gynecology who conducted hundreds of unethical, non-consensual experimental surgeries on enslaved women in South Carolina; “Each naked, unanesthetized slave woman had to be forcibly restrained by other physicians through her shrieks of agony as Sims determinedly sliced, then sutured her genitalia.” (Medical Apartheid, Harriet Washington)

Rename the Strom Thurmond Federal Building in Columbia, SC and remove monument from state house grounds

The Strom Thurmond Federal building and United States Courthouse in Columbia, SC is named for longtime racist Senator Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate on a platform of racial segregation. In 1957, Thurmond conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and he went on to oppose the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 – insisting that segregation was the “southern way” and that Black citizens should be denied their constitutional rights, including the right to vote.

“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentleman, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” – Strom Thurmond, during his 1948 presidential campaign

Our federal courthouse should be a monument to justice and freedom, not to the legacy of a racist man who made every effort to deny Black citizens their fundamental rights under the Constitution of the United States.

We the people of South Carolina demand that the Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Columbia, SC be renamed.

We are also demanding the removal of statutes and renaming of buildings, roads, schools, and town bearing the names of notorious racist to include but not limited to these men. 

We the people of South Carolina demand the immediate removal from the State House grounds of these monuments to racism and injustice.