The slaves met on a Sunday morning, close to the Stono river. Plantation owners tended to go to church on Sundays, and would leave them unattended.

A man named Jemmy had gathered them together. Described in reports as an “Angolan” who could read and write, Jemmy had talked the men through his plan the night before.

There were about 20 men in total. They marched to Hutchenson’s Store, 14 miles west of Charleston, South Carolina, and killed two white men. They then loaded up on pistols and gunpowder, and headed south.

Jemmy was leading them towards the then-Spanish territory of Florida, where he had heard slaves could live as free men.

The men marched from the store to a house belonging to a white man named Godfrey. They burned the house to the ground and killed Godfrey, his wife, and his son and daughter.

When the slaves arrived at the home of a man called Lemy they killed him, his wife, and their child. They did spare a man named Wallace, who owned a tavern. He was considered a kind slave owner. But every other home they passed they torched.

It was 9 September 1739, and Jemmy was leading what became known as the Stono rebellion – one of the largest slave uprisings in what was then the North American colonies.

The men would not make it to Florida. They wouldn’t even come close.

In the 1700s, and on through the 1800s, Charleston was one of the most prominent hubs for the slave trade in North America. At one point 35-40% of slaves entered the US through the city, and it served as a base for trading slaves once they had arrived.

A white man sells black slaves at a sale in Charleston, South Carolina. At one point 35-40% of slaves entered the US through the city. Photograph: Popperfoto/PPP

But walk around Charleston today and the most visible monuments and memorials are not to people like Jemmy and his Stono rebels. The major monuments are to the Confederate leaders who declared their secession from the United States and fought a war over their right to own slaves.



The same is true for cities and states across the country. There are more than 700 monuments to the Confederacy in the US, the majority in the south. Including park and school names, street and bridge names and public holidays, the Southern Poverty Law Center says there are more than 1,500 “symbols of the Confederacy” in public spaces across the country.

There are signs recently that times are changing. Statues of Confederate leaders like Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis have been removed in New Orleans and Baltimore, with other cities exploring how to take down similar structures.

In 2015, after Dylann Roof killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, finally removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds.

But the fight to erect monuments and memorials to those enslaved – or who fought enslavement – has proved just as difficult as the battle to remove those Confederate symbols.



***

As Jemmy and his group made their way south-west, more slaves joined the Stono rebellion. Their number had swelled to about 100 men before they were spotted, by chance, by South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, William Bull.

Bull rounded up a militia, and they confronted the slaves in the middle of a field near the Edisto river, a winding stretch of water that meets the Atlantic Ocean 50 miles north of the South Carolina-Georgia border. A battle ensued.

Accounts from the time say the slaves fought bravely, but they were outnumbered and their opponents were better armed. The majority of the rebels were slaughtered. Some were taken back to plantations and returned to slavery. About 30 escaped, but were later rounded up and killed.

The plantation owners mounted some of the slaves’ heads on sticks along the main road, as a warning to others.

Jemmy and his men had made it just 15 miles.

There were uprisings over the next two years, although historians are divided on how much they were inspired by Stono. None were on the same scale, and none were successful.

Slavery continued in the North American colonies, and continued when the US became an independent country in 1776. It would be 1865 – more than 120 years after the uprising in Stono – before the 13th amendment to the constitution was ratified and slave ownership was finally made illegal.

Slaves of the Confederate general Thomas F Drayton at Magnolia plantation, Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1862, a few miles south-west of where the Stono rebellion was crushed more than a century earlier. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images

Today the only marker of the failed rebellion is a small sign by the side of US Highway 17, just past the Stono river.

It is not easy to spot. Cars and trucks rumble through this part of South Carolina at 60mph, crossing the marshy expanse of the Stono river before reaching the small town of Rantowles.

The sign is on a grass verge, opposite a gas station and underneath an advertisement billboard currently promoting a Chevrolet and Ford car dealership. There is a corrugated metal building behind it which sells arcade games and pinball machines.

There is no layby to pull into, no place to stop. Even with an idea of where the sign was, I flashed past it before I’d seen it. It took a screech of the brakes and a hard right turn to pull into the arcade store car park and take a closer look.

The marker was erected in 2006 by the Sea Island Farmers Cooperative, and looked as if it has been forgotten in the 11 years since then.

The white background was streaked with dirt. The paint of the small black lettering, which gives a pithy summary of the rebellion, was flaking, and the black border was faded and cracked.

It was hard not to think of the contrast with the gleaming Confederate memorials which loom over streets in downtown Charleston.

On a sunny Wednesday at the end of September the grass at the base of the signpost was long and scorched. Wading through it, I could finally read the 50-word tribute to the enslaved men who had made their bid for freedom.

“The Stono Rebellion, the largest slave insurrection in British North America, began nearby on September 9, 1739,” it reads.

“About 20 Africans raided a store near Wallace Creek, a branch of the Stono River. Taking guns and other weapons, they killed two shopkeepers.

“The rebels marched south toward promised freedom in Spanish Florida, waving flags, beating drums, and shouting ‘Liberty!’”

The Denmark Vesey monument in Hampton Park in Charleston, South Carolina. Vesey attempted to lead a slave rebellion. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

The largest rebellion of the time may have been doomed, but over the next 100 years more men sought their own version of liberty. Eighty-three years after Jemmy and his men attempted their revolt, Denmark Vesey, a former slave himself, was planning his own large-scale Charleston rebellion.

Around 1800, when he was in his early 30s, Vesey had won $1,500 in a cash lottery. He used some of the money to buy his freedom from his owner, and hoped to use the rest to secure his wife’s freedom, but her owner refused to sell her.

Over the next 20 years Vesey, who had been born into slavery in the then-Danish colony of St Thomas, built up a carpentry business and became a prominent figure in the emerging African Methodist Episcopal church – the church Dylann Roof would target two centuries later.

Vesey maintained friendships with enslaved men, and became increasingly determined to change the state of affairs in South Carolina.

“He’s a man who by that time period was in his 50s, mid-50s. He’s an old man,” said Curtis Franks, museum curator at the Avery Research Center for African American history and culture in Charleston.

“It was this heightened sense of urgency because of where he was in his life to do what he could do to bring about an end to the institution of slavery.”

In 1821 Vesey and other churchgoers began to plan a revolt. By some accounts thousands of men were prepared to join the cause, both in the city and out into the countryside – even as far as the Stono river where their predecessors had assembled nearly a century earlier.

The men planned to attack an arsenal facility in downtown Charleston on 14 July 1822, seize weapons, then commandeer ships and sail to Haiti, where slaves had overthrown French colonialists two decades earlier. Had they made it, Vesey and his companions would have been able to live freely on the island, a thousand miles south-east.

They didn’t make it.

The plot was exposed days before they were due to strike. After a brief trial Vesey and 34 others were hanged, 38 more were deported.

Franks was part of a group of people who wanted to erect a statue of Vesey in Charleston. He saw it as an important counterpoint to the existing monuments that glorify Confederate politicians and leaders.

The group got the backing of some members of the Charleston city council, which at the time was evenly split between black and white people, and of the city’s mayor.

Nevertheless, it took almost 15 years for Franks and the others to get their memorial to Vesey and his would-be rebellion.

They faced opposition in the press, Franks said, and on talk radio. Opponents vilified Vesey as a terrorist – ignoring the hypocrisy of the memorials to people who initiated a civil war – and one proposed site was blocked after residents protested.

The monument to John C Calhoun in Marion Square in Charleston. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The group had wanted the Vesey statue in the downtown area, where tributes to the former US vice-president John C Calhoun, a hardline defender of slavery who referred to it as a “positive good” in an 1837 speech, are unavoidable.



The main street running east to west through downtown is named after Calhoun. That street borders the south of Marion Square, where a giant Calhoun statue glares down at passersby.

“In a sense it could offer a counter to the Calhoun piece,” Franks said. This more visible representation of the darker parts of Charleston’s past would not just honour the history of black Americans, Franks said, but also offer something to the people who travel to the city each year.



“There are black folk throughout the country who are visiting Charleston. And they’ve done their work, they’ve done their reading. And they understand the importance of this physical space to this country, and to the world.

“So they’re coming with great expectations, and they get here and that reading, that preparation doesn’t meet or match what they find when they get here,” Franks said.

“You look around and you see all this other stuff that is Confederate.”

The plan to place the Vesey statue there did not pan out. The city of Charleston does not own the park – it leases it from the Washington light infantry, a military organisation that fought on the Confederate side in the civil war.

It was years before a site was agreed on. Franks’s group did not get their downtown location, but were granted a site in Hampton Park, a couple of miles north.

Franks drove me out to see the statue in September. The monument has Vesey standing on top of a plinth, a Bible in one hand and a bag of carpenter’s tools in the other. He has his back to the open green space of the park, facing instead a paved semi-circle with two benches designed for contemplation.

The tale of the Vesey statue shows how divisive the legacy of slavery remains today.

***

This battle to accurately represent both side of Charleston’s history is not lost on locals. I took a cab from the Vesey statue to downtown, and the driver, Jamal Middleton, was aware of the struggles Franks and others from the Avery center had faced.

“It’s the largest monument to anything that has to do with ending slavery or evolution or freeing slaves,” Middleton said of the Vesey memorial.

“And it’s placed in an area where it would be almost difficult to find unless you know where it is.”

Middleton, who once ran a non-profit called the Greater Charleston Empowerment Corporation,

drove me along Calhoun Street to point out some of the memorials.

“I mean look at this thing,” he said as we passed the Calhoun statue. I asked how it felt to drive past a tribute to someone who was so keen to keep black people enslaved.

“It’s almost reminiscent of how I would envision a slave would have felt if they were walking down the street and someone’s spit on them. Yeah. Literally that’s how I feel. It is disgusting,” Middleton said.

In Charleston and elsewhere the attempt to properly remember the horrors of slavery is about more than just honoring the past. It is about how people feel in the present, and how people will treat each other in the future.

The way Middleton felt driving past that Calhoun statue, the struggle Franks faced to erect his Vesey monument, and the almost anonymous memorial to the Stono rebels all illustrate the disparity black people still face in the US.

It is almost 300 years since Jemmy and his rebels briefly broke free, and almost 200 years since Denmark Vesey was executed for trying to help others do the same. But the fight for liberty in this country has still not been won.