More complete history given to the Hamburg Massacre, Meriwether monument (2024)

On July 8, 1876, Thomas McKie Meriwether and nearly 200 other members of a white mob besieged a Black militia, Company A of the South Carolina National Guard's Ninth Regiment.

Meriwether and seven Black men died during the incident; four of the Black men who died were executed after having been captured by the mob.

But the white obelisk that’s stood in Calhoun Park for 108 years memorializes only Meriwether and its words speak of white supremacy: Meriwether, the inscription reads, “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.”

Now, that monument and its inscription have a rebuttal.

Three educational panels were unveiled at Calhoun Park on May 17 and tell in triptych the complete story: the founding of Hamburg during Reconstruction. The Hamburg Massacre, which influenced that year’s presidential election. And the Meriwether monument, with a defiance of the words inscribed on it, words that “do not represent the attitudes of the people of North Augusta today.”

“These panels are telling the story the right way – the correct story, the real story – and they’re giving the historical perspective that, quite frankly, has been pushed aside since 1916 when that monument was built,” Mayor Briton Williams said.

At Calhoun Park for the unveiling was Clara W. Lamback, who was born in North Augusta’s now historic Hamburg-Carrsville neighborhood. Her family’s house is still there on Barton Road. She was a student in the old Society Building.

“It brings tears. But you have to move on; you can’t live in the past,” she said. “Teach the history. It will enlighten a lot of people who didn’t know.”

The Hamburg Massacre was “a tragic, yet historic, event right here within our present-day city limits,” former Mayor Bob Pettit said. “An atrocity, which can be tied directly to the beginning of the Jim Crow era.”

It was under Pettit, in 2019, that the Meriwether Monument Committee was formed of citizens “unfazed by the potential for controversy” and tasked with finding a solution that could better portray what happened on that July day in 1876 as the town celebrated the nation’s Centennial.

Expanding on history, instead of doing away with it – elucidating it, acknowledging it and completing it – was the answer the committee found. “We decided it would be best to educate the public about history rather than erase it,” said Milledge Murray, a local historian who served on that committee.

The seven Black men who died in the Massacre – First Lt. Allen Attaway, Cpl. Nelder Parker, James Cook, Albert Myniart, Moses Parks, David Phillips and Hampton Stephens – are now memorialized in Calhoun Park, their names written as a part of history.

“If we wait, whatever is undone will get done. That’s how God operates,” the Rev. Dr. Alexander Pope said. Pope is now retired after 38 years as pastor of First Providence Baptist Church, the Carrsville church that is also North Augusta’s oldest.

“This is not the ending, I’m here to tell you, it is the beginning,” he said. “This is the beginning of other great things that’s going to happen in this city.”

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