The 125-year-old historical statue of statesman and former U.S. Vice President John Caldwell Calhoun that was displaced during the height of 2020’s civil unrest is now the subject of a lawsuit involving an upcoming Los Angeles art exhibit and the city of Charleston, S.C.
“My petitioners are the descendants of the ladies who put the money together for the trust as well as the statue of John Calhoun,” said Bill Connor, a South Carolina attorney who filed the complaint on Dec. 14. “Amid all the mayhem last year, the statue and its incredible base that is 90 to 100 feet tall was torn down and warehoused.”
Mark Calhoun, Arthur Francis Doty III, and F. Preston Wilson sued the city of Charleston and the Attorney General of South Carolina Alan Wilson seeking a declaratory judgment as to whether the statue of Calhoun is held in trust by the city of Charleston and if it is, what are the limitations of the trust.
“Shipping John Calhoun's statue outside the state in this way and not even really seeming to want to make an effort to place it where it can be on private land to be honored is, we believe, a violation of the charitable trust,” Connor told the Southern California Record.
The Post and Courier reported that the Charleston Commission on History voted 7-4 on Dec. 15 to recommend that Charleston officials lend the statute to a Los Angeles art exhibit.
“The city of Charleston unilaterally decided to remove the monument from its current position and now transfer possession to a Los Angeles museum exhibit seeking to denigrate and demean figures such as John C. Calhoun it associates with what it calls the lost cause,” Connor wrote in the lawsuit.
LAXART Director Hamza Walker is organizing the art show, tentatively titled "Monuments," along with artist Kara Walker, which is scheduled to open in 2023 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, according to media reports. It documents the decommissioning of Confederate statutes.
“What’s at stake is what we do with the statue,” Connor said. “Is the city able to just send it off to whatever they want? Is the next group going to be an Antifa group that wants to throw tomatoes at it? After what happened last year, there are concerns by a lot of people.”
Although Calhoun was a slaveholder, Connor contends that he did not serve in the Confederate Army against the Union.
“John Calhoun was one of South Carolina’s most accomplished politicians and he died 10 years before the Confederacy,” Connor said. “So, you really can't put him in that direct boat but he's being put in the ‘lost cause’ boat by this art exhibit.”
Neither Walker nor the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art responded to requests for comment. AG Wilson previously issued an opinion in which he stated that the authority of monuments under the state’s control doesn’t apply to the Calhoun statue.
“We all agree that slavery is wrong and that there is the controversial part of John Calhoun who defended slavery but there is a lot more to his life story being vice president, being secretary of war, being a member of Congress, and writing on all kinds of various different things,” said Connor, who was awarded South Carolina's Order of the Palmetto by GOP Gov. Henry McMaster.