Robert Smalls

More than 100 years after his death, Robert Smalls — a Civil War hero, educator and South Carolina politician — will be honored with a statue on the Statehouse grounds.

A bipartisan panel of South Carolina lawmakers chose a visible area close to the Statehouse visitor's entrance for the location of the future monument to Robert Smalls.

South Carolina is preparing to put up its first individual statue for an African American on its Statehouse lawn, honoring a man who put on Confederate clothes in order to steal a slaveholder's ship and sail his family and a dozen others to freedom during the Civil War.