Trial lawyers have a saying: When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. And when neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.
Few in recent memory have brought those words to life quite like Charleston’s-own American Heritage Association (AHA), the rather grandly dubbed gaggle of Lowcountry Lost Causers who filed yet another frivolous, table-pounding lawsuit last week against the Charleston County School District for removing a Robert E. Lee Memorial Highway marker from one of its campuses in 2021.
This latest legal misadventure — the group’s third in as many years — will almost certainly end with the same quick withdrawal or dismissal that we’ve seen in the group’s previous cases. But in the meantime, they’ll milk headlines, play politics and raise more money to wreak more havoc. Because when you’re in the Lost Cause business, those are the real neo-Confederate goals. They really don’t care about winning any lawsuits.
So the questions these cases raise for the rest of us aren’t really legal — they’re historical and, yes, moral. How do we tell our city’s story appropriately? What lessons do we draw from its intricate weave of triumph and tragedy, freedom and folly? And which parts do we choose not just to commemorate, but to celebrate as guideposts to a better, brighter future for all our citizens?
Two years ago, former Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg offered the beginnings of an answer to those questions in his State of the City address as he talked about what it was like to come to work every day in Charleston’s historic City Hall. And crucially, he focused on the Just Cause of the American Revolution, not the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
We should take notice of the difference, particularly in an era when some want to dismantle our founding framework.
“[T]he first time you walk up the old marble steps and through these doors, you almost can’t help but be bowled over by the enormity of it all‒the great people, the great moments, the great debates,” Tecklenburg said. “But the more time you spend here, the more the essential truth of this people’s house and all its long history settles in your bones: We are, in every generation, the keepers of what President Kennedy once called ‘that first revolution.’
“And we continue to hold its truths to be self-evident — that we are all created equal, and that our rights come not from the kindness of kings but from the hand of our creator. Because it is here, in this small, centuries-old pine chamber, that we Charlestonians still come together every other Tuesday night to renew our commitment to the always-revolutionary act of democratic self-rule — trusting our fate, as we always have, to the grace of a loving God and the common sense and collective wisdom of our fellow citizens.”
Almost 250 years ago on the soft white sands of Sullivan’s Island, Charlestonians from every walk of life stood against the world’s mightiest empire in one of the earliest battles of “that first revolution” — and in so doing, won a victory for freedom that changed the course of human history.
That’s when our best and truest Charleston story began. It’s where the Just Cause of liberty and justice for all in our city was born. And it’s why the AHA’s Lost Cause of resentment and recrimination will ultimately lose in the most important court of all — the court of public opinion.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
