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Meriwether Monument

North Augusta, United States of America

Meriwether Monument

The Meriwether Monument is a 21 feet (6.4 m) tall obelisk erected in 1916 at John C. Calhoun Park in North Augusta, South Carolina, to commemorate Thomas McKie Meriwether (December 4, 1852 – July 8, 1876), the only white man killed in the Hamburg massacre when white supremacist militias attacked Afr

ican Americans in coordinated political violence, seeking to restore the Democratic Party to power and disenfranchise African American voters. The massacre occurred in 1876 and was part of a violent political campaign at the end of the Reconstruction era. The monument was erected 40 years later during the Jim Crow era. An inscription on the marker states: In life he exemplified the highest ideal of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By his death he assured to the children of his beloved land the supremacy of that ideal. Protests at the monument were organized in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd as part of Black Lives Matter activism. Alterations to the park including interpretive panels have been proposed. In 2020, one of Meriwether's descendants, Brittany Meriwether Williamson, called for the monument to be taken down. Former North Augusta mayor, Bob Pettit, asserted the monument was protected...

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