The-Ave.US

The bridge has been criticized for being slippery on the rare occasion when it gets cold in Charleston.   I wonder whether Black citizens avoid this bridge even when it is not icy in South Carolina? 

So, now the racist flag no longer lies over South Carolina’s capital.  Sadly, the damned flag still flies proudly 116 miles to the south in Charleston where my sister and her husband live.

Then there is a bridge. 

Removing that damned flag took the deaths of nine good people  during a prayer service.  The oh so liberal folks on Charleston were proud of this (that is the taking down of the flag), despite living in a city where the flag is still displayed proudly.  They were even undisturbed when not a single high level state  official, not the Republican governor, the Republican Lt Governor or either  Republican Senator  had the guts to show up for the lowering  of the racist flag.

Then there is the bridge, a damned bridge named after a racist, South Carolina politician and racist, Arthur Ravene, Jr.

“Certainly, Arthur Ravenel is a fine, decent person, but that bridge is bigger than any one individual and it should reflect all the qualities of the state and not some state senator who happens to be in the Legislature the time the structure is being built.”  member of bridge commission.

Like so many other white citizens in this city,  Ravenel did not see his pride in the Confederacy as a problem.  Ravenel  was a member of Moultrie Camp, Sons of Confederate Veterans.  He was also a strident  supporter of the Confederate flag being flown at the South Carolina statehouse.

Ravenel provoked controversy at a rally for the flag in 2000 when he referred to the NAACP as the “National Association for Retarded People”. Ravenel  apologized to mentally handicapped people for comparing them to the NAACP. Many called for the Charleston bridge to be renamed.

Ravenel once said that his fellow white congressional committee members operated on “black time”, which he characterized as meaning “fashionably late”.

Of course the Ravenel bridge is not the only offensive monument in this ethnically afflicted city.  How many Jews in Charleston knew their city had, until recently, a monument to the Nazis?  Charleston had a POW camp for Nazi soldiers.  All that was left was a chimney from what looked like a barbecue.   Of course there was plaque memorializing the POWs.

Despite the offensive nature of this relic of the Nazi era, locals in South Carolina tried to prevent the owners of the lot from tearing the Nazi relic down.  But its owners, member of a local Jewish family,   repeatedly sought to remove it but, given the nature of South Carolina, there was little of no support from their fellow citizens to tear it down.

Mary Ann Pearlstine Aberman, a co-owner of the property, told The New York Times last year that she wanted it gone, partly because she did not want it to become “a shrine to Nazis. Every time I see the structure, it makes me think about the ovens,”

Bill’s home.

Now the Nazi Chimney has been torn down, apparently to the distress of my South Carolinian brother in Law, Bill Quick,

Bill and my sister Steph chose to move to South Carolina, as they then said for the climate and the low taxes.  They strike me as having the notmla attitude ytowad other races, certainly not bigoted . The sad thing is that he sees none of the pain this bridge must cause for any African American.  Imagine havong to drive across the Adolph Hitler Bridge?

Bill Quick (FACEBOOK)  the chimney is finally gone — see http://www.postandcourier.com/…/last-remnant-of-west…  This toad should crawl back into his swamp and stop annoying the world with his misinformation and bigotry.”