The Woodrow Wilson Home in Columbia, South Carolina, is reopening after a years-long retoration. The home was once used as a shrine to the late president, but now it will tell a broader history of the area and of the Reconstruction Era. According to an editorial in the Charleston Post and Courier:
not far from Wilson’s birthing bed and childhood writings are displayed an explanation of his 1913 decision to segregate federal workers by race as well as a shotgun owned by a member of the Red Shirts, who violently oppressed African-Americans to dissuade them from voting in the 1876 elections (when Wilson was 5 years old).
It’s just one example of a larger trend at Historic Columbia Foundation’s properties. As executive director Robin Waites told Mr. Benson: “Being an organization that uses local history as a tool for social justice is a direction that we have been moving. Five years ago, it was shocking to people that we would be willing to do that.”
This article from the same paper has more info on the reorientation of the site:
Historic Columbia’s leadership had a choice to make in 2014.
Do they continue to tell stories of the city’s past in the same way, or was a recalibration needed to ensure all sides are presented?
The occasion was a multi-million dollar upgrade to the Woodrow Wilson Family Home — built in 1871 and a symbol of the complicated racial history, not only of the time, but also of the man who would become America’s 28th president.
Curators veered from what Historic Columbia Executive Director Robin Waites called a “shrine” to Wilson and turned the house into what is considered one of the country’s few museums to Reconstruction.
“It was a big deal,” Waites says.
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