Can you believe it? He wants to require city and county governments in South Carolina that do not recognize Confederate Memorial Day as a paid holiday to do so. And not one of the white legislators in state government has thought to do this before now?
While South Carolina is definitely a deep southern state, it has a legacy of being the more liberal (or rather, less conservative) on race than its counterparts. The reason is that the socio-economics of plantation slavery pre-WBTS in South Carolina was far more plutocratic than the rest of the South. For some reason, the owners of such economic factors, i.e. the cash crop plantations, did not have very much tangible experience with their slaves and (after the WBTS) sharecroppers, so they did not have the same kind of experience that their counterparts in Alabama and Mississippi had. South Carolina was more generous in granting the franchise to blacks than their neighbors, because the plutocrats thought that their sharecroppers would all vote in a bloc for the interests of their boss.
This might be why South Carolina’s black body politic might be slightly less hostile to Southern Heritage symbols and monuments than their analogues in neighboring states.
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