Columbia's history being retold with eye on humanity for all

COLUMBIA - Historic Columbia's leadership had a choice to make in 2014.

Do they continue to tell stories of the city's past in the same way, or was a recalibration needed to ensure all sides are presented?

The occasion was a multi-million-dollar upgrade to the Woodrow Wilson Family Home - built in 1871 and a symbol of the complicated racial history not only of the time, but also of the man who would become America's 28th president.

Curators veered from what Historic Columbia Executive Director Robin Waites called a "shrine" to Wilson and turned the house into what is considered one of the country's few museums to Reconstruction.

"It was a big deal," Waites said.

Wilson lived in the home as a teenager during Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, when the federal government controlled the former Confederate states and freed blacks obtained property and voting rights.

So alongside artifacts of Wilson's life - including his birthing bed and a reproduction of his school-age shorthand - is an exploration of his pro-segregationist policies, such as his 1913 order to racially segregate the federal workforce.

Other artifacts include a banner from the 1872 election of Gov. Franklin Israel Moses Jr., who unsuccessfully pushed for integration at the University of South Carolina and created a militia to protect black voters from white paramilitary groups, later called Red Shirts.

There's also a shotgun fired by a member of the Red Shirts, who intimidated and killed black Republicans, including a state senator, to prevent them from voting in the 1876 election of Gov. Wade Hampton. His election signified the end of Reconstruction.

"Being an organization that uses local history as a tool for social justice is a direction that we have been moving," Waites said. "Five years ago, it was shocking to people that we would be willing to do that."

More reflection

A similar approach was taken last year when the preservation group celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Hampton-Preston mansion overlooking Blanding Street.

Wade Hampton I, grandfather of the later governor, purchased the lavish home and accompanying gardens in 1823, and it would blossom into one of Columbia's grandest properties in the century to come.

But none of that prosperity could have been realized had it not been for the enslaved men, women and children who worked silently to till the land, harvest its yields and serve the upper-class patrons inside.

"As you look nationally, there is a trend for interpretation to become more inclusive, telling a more accurate chronicle of the past, and so to come here or any historic site in our care and not talk about the institution of slavery would be disingenuous," said John Sherrer, Historic Columbia's director of cultural resources.

On the mansion's second floor, planners recreated a space to reflect what it would have looked like in the 1950s and '60s, when it was used as a motel. Atop a side table is a replica 1940 edition of "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a directory notifying black families of safe places to stop as they traveled the United States.

Beyond adding context to the homes they manage, the nonprofit is working to give a broader history of monuments on Statehouse grounds, including the statue of Gov. Hampton on horseback as a Civil War commander. That project received an $8,000 grant from S.C. Humanities, which receives money from private donors and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A web-based tour of Statehouse grounds went live over the summer.

Waites said such an overt thematic shift inevitably led to some criticism, but she and her staff felt compelled to present material responsibly and within context.

It's also resonating with visitors, according to data culled from exit surveys.

"The tour did an excellent job of putting into perspective the breadth of the family's wealth and the realities of being enslaved. It contextualized the humanity of enslaved people in a way that I found captivating," a tourist to the Hampton-Preston mansion wrote in October.

The largest font on any of the interpretive panels is a passage from an 1859 letter by Sally Baxter Hampton to her family.

By 1860, roughly 57 percent of the state's 703,700 people were slaves, and 3,330 were in Columbia, representing 40 percent of the capital's population, according to Census numbers.

"You know southern (sic) houses are meant for people & we must occupy all the rooms ourselves," she penned. By "we," she meant white people.

James Quint, director of education for Historic Columbia, said featuring the quote so prominently opens real discussion about race and class.

"It helps reinforce the humanity of people who in many cases had no names," Sherrer said.

Inside the Robert Mills House, curators have put on display a dress that belonged to famed Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut from Camden, the daughter of a former South Carolina governor and U.S. senator and the wife of a U.S. senator who resigned following the election of President Abraham Lincoln. Part of Historic Columbia's permanent 6,500-piece collection for almost 30 years, the dress was only recently restored.

Opportunity to learn

Historic Columbia has also added interpretations on class equality to the Mann-Simons cottage, which focuses on the city's free black society during the Antebellum period leading up to the Civil War.

Once a sprawling neighborhood that included rental properties and a corner grocery store, the footprint shrank dramatically in the late 1960s as city officials needed space for affordable housing, pushing out members of the family who ran the site uninterrupted since 1843.

The Mann-Simons museum opened in 1978 but was rebooted in 2016 following a decades-long archaeological dig, unearthing artifacts that gave historians new insight about life in the Jim Crow South. Many of the items are on display today.

There are also three-dimensional models on either side of the cottage, where buildings once stood.

As Historic Columbia was engaged in these efforts, America found itself grappling with broader concepts of race.

In 2015, South Carolina legislators voted to pull the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds a month after nine black parishioners were killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

As the Hampton-Preston mansion was getting its cultural facelift, emotions flared again nationally over the relevancy and need for public monuments commemorating the Confederacy.

Waites said her organization understood the optics but won't apologize to those who take issue at the change in direction.

Next up is creating a new interpretive frame at the Modjeska Monteith Simkins home. Born in Columbia in 1899, Simkins would become one of the South's leading civil rights figures pushing for public health and social reforms.

She was instrumental in writing the lawsuit challenging segregated schools in Clarendon County. That case, Briggs v. Elliott, was the first such challenge to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court and got rolled into several others as Brown v. Board, resulting in the 1954 landmark ruling that segregated schools are illegal.

Although not open to the public because of ongoing renovations, the site is an important piece of the ongoing dialogue, Waites said.

"This is a property associated with a major civil rights and social justice activist, so it is not unusual to address issues related to the African-American community, but the interpretation will address difficult issues head-on, such as lynching and systemic racism," Waites said.