Last year this beautiful bridge had to be closed for time because structural issues and fears abut icing. The authorities told motorists trying to leave and drive into Mt. Pleasant to use Interstate 526.
I wonder whether Black citizens avoid this bridge even when it is not icy in South Carolina?
The Bridge is named for a South Carolina politician and racist, Arthur Ravene, Jr. Mr. Ravenel’s fellow lawmakers voted to name the bridge the Arthur Ravenel, Jr. Bridge. Some felt that the bridge should not be named after Ravenel after he worked to get it funded in the State Senate because he was only one supporter.
“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.
There is another reason Black folks might not feel good on this slippery bridge. Ravenel is 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 state. How many Jews there know their city even has had a monument to the Nazis? Charleston had a POW camp for Nazi soldiers. Allthat 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 Carolian 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,”
Now it has been torn down, apparently to the distress of my South Carolinian brother in Law, Bill Quick, “Bill Quick (FACEBOOK) the chimney is finally gone — seehttp://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.”