By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | At the risk of irritating — and alienating — a majority of South Carolinians, here’s a question: Why do we even need something called a Confederate Relic Room?
Before you spit out your coffee, consider that South Carolina doesn’t have a separate Revolutionary War Relic Room or an exclusive World War II Relic Room or a stand-alone Vietnam War Relic Room. Instead, the state has the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.
Its mission is broad — “to serve as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving and exhibiting South Carolina’s military material culture from the colonial era to the present.”
So if it’s got this broad mission, why does the first word have to be “Confederate?” Maybe it’s time for a little rebranding work.
“Confederate Relic Room” is the shortened, usually-used name for the state’s third oldest museum. It currently shares space with the South Carolina State Museum in a revitalized old mill building in Columbia. The relic room got started in 1896 at the start of Jim Crow South Carolina and first was located in the Statehouse. Later moved to a building adjacent to the University of South Carolina campus. Then it moved in 2002 to its current location.
While the attraction’s website hails the diversity of its collection across wars, there’s no undoing that the first word pays tribute to a lost cause that some see as heritage and others see as history.
“There’s a difference between history and heritage,” notes longtime civil rights activist The Rev. Joseph Darby of Charleston. “History is the objective record of something. Heritage is the fond embrace of history.
“While the Confederate States of America is a part of history, it is not part of every South Carolinian’s heritage. I have no love for the Confederacy. You don’t need a separate museum to glorify that history.”
The Confederate Relic Room has been in the news of late because it will be the repository for the Confederate flag removed in June from the Statehouse grounds. In December, a consultant proposed spending $5.3 million in taxpayer dollars for a new wing of the Relic Room and Military Museum to display the flag. Commotion ensued. Then the commission approved a revised $3.6 million proposal for the plan.
Next, state Rep. Mary Tinkler, D-Charleston, filed a bill for private donations, not tax dollars, to be used for any upgrades to display the flag. Then this week, a Republican colleague from Charleston, Rep. Chip Limehouse, proposed to move the Confederate Relic Room to North Charleston to boost attendance at Hunley Museum, where a Confederate submarine (the world’s first) is being preserved. And then people from the rest of the state got upset because they say Charleston already has too much state stuff.
Enough. We all seem to agree the flag should be in a museum. But should it be housed in a place generally referred to as the “Confederate Relic Room?” Doesn’t mere use of that name focus more attention on one war — a war that may not be heritage for everyone — at the expense of all of the others? Even more to the point: Is it appropriate in a state that is home to 1.3 million African Americans residents to continue to institutionalize, or glorify as some would say, a bloody conflict that ended in 1865?
Names matter. Ever hear of Philip Morris? After being battered in the tobacco wars, it became the nonthreatening Altria. ValueJet? It’s now Airtran. That big financial company AIG? After its image was damaged following the recent Wall Street bailout, part of it became Sagepoint Financial.
Rather than the state continuing to prop up a war that ended more than 150 years ago, let’s rebrand the Confederate Relic Room to focus attention on historical items for all wars. How about simply the “South Carolina Military Museum?”
Next, let’s keep it in Columbia.
And then let’s head to the hardware store, spend a few hundred dollars on supplies and get a skilled carpenter to build a neat display case to show the nylon flag that once flew on the Statehouse grounds. There’s no need to spend millions. The war is over.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!