Charleston Currents

PHOTO ESSAY: Calhoun statue comes down in Charleston

Staff reports | Contributing photographer Rob Byko captured the moment Wednesday (above) that a statue of John C. Calhoun cracked away from its pedestal after workers sawed and chiseled for 17 hours to free it.

After Charleston City Council voted Tuesday night to take down the statue, work crews arrived shortly after midnight Wednesday to start the removal process. Originally, officials thought it would take a few hours to unattach the bronze statue from the 115-foot pedestal at Marion Square, but workers discovered they had to saw through a metal rod inserted more than a century ago to provide stability, particularly from hurricane-force winds.

Throughout the day, hundreds stopped by to watch the workers’ progress. Just after 5 p.m., the statue came down. It then was loaded onto a truck and taken away. Read more about what happened Wednesday.

by Rob Byko · 06/29/2020 · Comments are Disabled · Photo Essay, Photos

FOCUS: Council vote may bring down Calhoun statue this week

Staff reports | Charleston City Council is poised Tuesday evening to vote on a resolution forwarded by Mayor John Tecklenburg to remove the statue of John C. Calhoun from atop a 110-foot pedestal at Marion Square.

Calhoun, a former vice president and powerful senator in the years before the Civil War, advocated and developed the political theory of nullification, which holds that states should be able to invalidate federal laws. Never legally upheld in federal courts, this principle of state’s rights was used by slave-holding states to break away from the United States when, most historians agree, the war was caused for economic reasons to perpetuate the system of human bondage of enslaved Africans.

If the Wednesday vote, which reportedly has the backing of all members of council, is not challenged in the courts, observers say the statue could be down as early as Wednesday morning, a relatively swift end to a controversial statue that has been a thorn in the side for the city’s African Americans for more than a century.