The Meriwether Monument and the Hamburg Massacre
Near Augusta, South Carolina
This tall obelisk honors one man, Thomas McKie Meriwether, but the story it leaves out is the one that matters. On July eighth, eighteen seventy-six, in the nearby town of Hamburg, a white mob of nearly two hundred men besieged a company of Black state militia. When the shooting was over Meriwether lay dead, and so did seven Black men, four of them executed after they had already surrendered.
The killings were part of a campaign of terror meant to drive Black citizens from the polls and end Reconstruction in South Carolina, and it worked. Forty years later, during the Jim Crow era, this twenty one foot monument was raised to Meriwether alone. The names of the seven Black men appear nowhere on it.
They are remembered instead about a mile away, on a separate headstone, names long left out of the story this stone was built to tell.
