Council issues official apology without strong support from West Ashley councilmen
Last month, Charleston City Council voted to officially apologize for the role it played and how it profited from the institution of slavery.
But Council’s apology carried only a single “yea” vote from this mostly-white side of the river. The 7-5 vote included “nay” votes from all of the West Ashley city councilmen: Lewis Waring, Marvin Wagener, Bill Moody, Kevin Shealy, and Harry Griffin. In West Ashley only Peter Shahid voted in favor of the apology.
West Ashley is home to 20 former slave-stocked plantations, like Drayton Hall, Middleton Place, Magnolia Plantation, and Ashley River Plantation.
Charleston’s port is estimated to have accepted almost half of all black slaves sent to America, and slaves built much of the “history” travelers from around the world come here to see, and many of those working in the region’s vaunted hospitality industry are descended from slaves.
And while the national media sources have lauded Charleston’s final vote, several West Ashley councilmen have been harshly criticized publicly for their positions – especially Griffin, who originally signed on to serve on the work group with the apology’s primary author, Councilman W. Dudley Gregorie.
Wagener stirred the pot further with comments in the Post and Courier that slavery was needed to “build the country”.
Waring, the only black member of Council to vote against it, says the apology didn’t do enough to address the growing disparities in the city.
“The city of Charleston has on its books today some laws that go back to the Jim Crow era,” argues Waring. As evidence, he says that requiring an elected City Council to have a three-fourths vote of all its members to override a decision made by an appointed Planning Commission, plays into the hands of the wealthy.
“Think about who is that designed to help? A well-influenced person, or a person of low to moderate means?” asks Waring, who further posits that low to moderate citizens “have no pigmentation.”
“I also have an appreciation for whites today who say, ‘I had nothing to do with slavery and I try to do my best to live my life in a righteous way,’ and I say that as the descendant of a slave,” says Waring.
Waring wants to see the city address how it spurs gentrification through similar policies.
“At the end of the day, if we do not change how we do things, the same thing that happened on the peninsula,” he says, referring to the Trail of Tears exodus of formerly black neighborhoods being gentrified downtown, “it could happen in West Ashley.”
Local black political activist Daron-Lee Calhoun II doesn’t condemn the apology like Waring does. He calls it a “stepping stone” that is still a “small rock.”
Calhoun says the apology recognizes the “truth” of the slave trade in the beginning and ongoing wealth of Charleston, but agrees that it stops short of addressing modern economic and social disparities.
Calhoun is a resident of West Ashley, and the newest member of the Dist. 10 Constituent Board, as well as the coordinator for the Race and Social Justice Initiative at the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston.
Calhoun does not share Waring’s acceptance for whites who “personally did not own slaves, as the City of Charleston, as a whole, profited from the intergenerational wealth from that slavery.”
Invoking biblical language, Calhoun says that he will try to “slay Goliath” using the “small rock” of an apology, perhaps calling for the removal of the “watchful eye” of his namesake statue, John C. Calhoun, from Marion Square. “I’m going to use that rock.”
Griffin has already been rocked by the backlash against his vote on the apology. “it’s a tough thing to talk about,” Griffin says of the debate in chambers over the apology.
Griffin holds that everyone he spoke to in his district was against the apology, and that after getting deeper into the effort, he changed his position.
The language of the apology in its original draft “had a very broad call for action at the end that if read out of context could lead to implications like taking down monuments or statues,” he says.
There are several paintings hanging on the walls of City Council chambers of men who owned slaves, including Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and even George Washington, Griffin points out.
“I am trying to do whatever is helping us as a city move forward, not backward, and I want us to be aware and understand that we cannot pick and choose in our history of Charleston: we have to take the good and the bad,” he says.
