Authors decry removals of books at Charleston historic sites
But some said they weren’t wholly surprised.
“Here’s that cliche of ‘I was shocked, but not surprised,’ ” said Marjory Wentworth, former South Carolina poet laureate and the author of “Shackles,” which was marked for review by staff at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie.
These orders extended to park gift shops and bookstores. NPS staff flagged 10 titles for a compliance review at Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie and the Charles Pinckney National Historical Site in Mount Pleasant.
“There’s been this whole sort of movement toward erasure of anything in American history that might make White people uncomfortable,” Wentworth said. “I believe really strongly in the opposite.”
“Shackles” is based on the true story of her sons, who dug up a pair of iron shackles while playing on Sullivan’s Island. The discovery prompted a discussion about the island’s place in the slave trade and the Middle Passage, which she turned into a poem, and later a picture book in 2009.
The book was not meant to ruffle feathers, she said, but sought to educate. Still, 15 years after publishing the book, Wentworth is angry and offended that the children’s book is “suddenly controversial.”
“I think there’s a real unhealed wound in our country that stems from this history of how African Americans got here,” Wentworth said. “The only way to kind of heal those wounds and move forward is to really understand the history.”
Former South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Wentworth reads her poem “One River, One Boat” on Jan. 19, 2015, during a joint worship service between Circular Congregational Church and Charity Missionary Baptist Church in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“Smashing Obstacles and Building Legacies,” the story of a Freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, was another title staff recorded at the Charles Pinckney site. The story of the Laing School is a hyper-local piece of Lowcountry history, and the school’s role as an educational institution for Black children in Mount Pleasant is a “great American story,” author Lynette Jackson Love said.
The school was created in 1866 by Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker from New Jersey and nurse for the Union Army during the War. In the years after the war’s conclusion, Hancock came to Mount Pleasant and opened the Laing School for the children of freed enslaved people, an example of the Freedmen’s School movement that cropped up in the Reconstruction period. “One part of it that is so powerful is this collaboration that developed after the Civil War. The nation was in a turmoil, and ordinary Americans came together to figure out what …we need to do to move this country forward,” Love said.
Lynette Jackson Love is the author of “Smashing Obstacles and Building Legacies.”
Provided after she learned her book was slated for possible removal, Love said she sat down and read the Constitution. “I think this is an infringement on free speech and censorship. And free speech is foundational to our democracy, to any democracy,” she said. Love is an alumnus of the Laing School, which she attended when it was an elementary school in the late 1960s, and later went to Moultrie High School. Previous students revere their time at the school, she said. “Growing up, I remember vividly my mother and my aunts and the elders talking about Laing, talking about their experiences,” Love said. “You could really feel the love that they had for that school and I ended up loving my experience at Laing Elementary.” The school still operates in Mount Pleasant as a middle school focused on teaching science and technology
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Love said she’s unsure how her book, a hyper-local piece of Mount Pleasant’s history, could be perceived as disparaging to past or living Americans, which is the criteria for removal laid out in a series of orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
The directive, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” called for the removal of markers, signs and other material in National Park sites that could “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” according to the March 27executive order. A May directive from Burgum to NPS staff outlined a deadline for staff to remove content that fit this description by mid-September.
Alongside Wentworth and Love’s titles, other books flagged included two firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved Africans, Harriet A. Jacobs and Olaudah Equiano. Theirstories detailed their experiences on plantations in North Carolina and in England,respectively, and later as outspoken abolitionists.
A sign posted outside the Fort Sumter Visitor Center onConcord Street asks visitors to submit feedback about thepark.
File/Anna Sharpe/Staff
