"A Slap in the Face"
Photos and words by Sean Rayford for Soda Citizen
The final casualty of the Hamburg Massacre in 1876 was suffered when Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman led the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a white supremacist paramilitary terrorist faction of the infamous Red Shirts, in the execution style murder of Black state legislator Simon Coker. The Red Shirts had also previously murdered Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens, and Albert Myniart on the edge of the Savannah River— as a strategic pillar of their political goals: ensuring white supremacy in elected offices, in response to emancipation and reconstruction. Also killed in the massacre in an earlier incident were two black servicemen of the National Guard and Thomas Meriwether, the lone white casualty.
Que McQueen, right, demonstrates for racial equality at John C. Calhoun park in North Augusta, SC on Saturday, June 20, 2020.
On Saturday, nearly 150 years following the terrorist attack on the North Augusta black community, protestors marched to the monument that honors Meriwether, located in John C. Calhoun Park.
“This monument right here is a rallying point because it’s a slap in the face to the Black residents of North Augusta,” says 25 year-old Que McQueen, who currently lives across the river in Augusta proper. “And it's glorying the murder of our people and we have so much left that we have to do to get equality. You're gonna be a second class citizen until objects glorifying your murder are gone.”
The inscription on the base of the obelisk reads:
“In memory of Thomas McKie Meriwether, who on 8th, of July 1876 gave life that the civilization built by his fathers might be preserved for their childrens children unimpaired.
In youths glad morning the unfinished years of manhood stretching before him, with clear knowledge and courageous willingness, he accepted death and found forever the grateful remembrance of all who know high and generous service in the maintaining of those civic and social institutions which the men and women of his race had struggled through the centuries to establish in South Carolina. What more can a man do than to lay down his life.
In life he exemplified the ideal of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By his death he assured to the children of his beloved land the supremacy of that ideal. ‘As his flame of life was quenched it lit the blaze of victory.’
This memorial is erected to the young hero of the Hamburg riot, by the state under an act of the general assembly, with aid of admiring friends.”
“I'm a black man and I've got black family and seeing the dudes and these deaths over and over again, we can't sit back and do nothing. We have too much blood in these streets, we have too many people in our ancestry that have fought and worked to get us where we're at. It's our duty tio finish the job. We got to keep pushing,” says McQueen.
“Today we came out here, we showed that we can be peaceful and that we have a voice and that we are ready for actionable change. Those are the two biggest words I can tell you, actionable change. We can't just keep continuing with reactionary laws, and not voting, and not participating in our community. We need to take things by the reigns and actually change things.”
For the 29 year-old Ben Tillman, his participation in the 1876 massacre would launch him to a long political career, as South Carolina governor and in Congress where he bragged about his violent white supremacist acts of terrorism on the Senate floor. A statue memorializes Tillman at the South Carolina Statehouse.
“Martin Luther King Jr., always said our protests are just to get to the negotiation stage and I think we've got enough voices out here. We've got enough people working for the change that we can start taking our ideas, our opinions, to mayors, to our city council, to our elected officials — and start getting that change and holding them accountable,” says McQueen, “I’ve got nothing but hope.”
