Civil War Monument

Civil War Monument. . , This 1961 marker commemorating the first shots of the Civil War does not mention the causes of the conflict. In its 1860 "Declaration of Immediate Causes," South Carolina, the first state to secede, called for secession to protect the institution of slavery. It explains that slave-holding states were being "denied the rights of property," meaning the right to enslave humans:, "Those [non-slaveholding] States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery....", In 1961, Charleston's centennial celebrated the Confederate cause. Although a majority of South Carolina's population had been emancipated by the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation laws persisted 100 years later. When the national Centennial Commission came to Charleston, Madaline Williams, an African American delegate, was barred from staying at the Francis Marion Hotel, causing President Kennedy to move the Commission to the Naval Base. Acknowledging Charleston's past role in the 1961 celebration, the College of Charleston affirms its core values of diversity, equity and inclusion.