July 18, 1863 was the date of the attack on Fort Wagner by Union troops, led by the famous 54th Massachusetts. It's also the date the KKK has planned for a pro-Confederate flag rally at the SC statehouse.
Back in 1863, Fort Wagner straddled a key sand island at the southern side of the entrance to Charleston harbor. If the fort could be captured, the defensive works guarding the harbor could possibly be unhinged, and Charleston itself captured.
This was the topic of the 1989 film Glory, which contains a number historical errors, IMHO because it minimized the service of other colored (as they were called then) regiments, such as the 1st South Carolina Volunteers and made their commanders look like a bunch of fanatics and/or corrupt.
Although the attack failed, and its better known leaders, Colonel Shaw and General Strong, were either killed in the attack (Shaw) or died later of wounds (Strong), the deed itself is memorialized in the great bronze relief by St. Gaudens, placed in Boston on the very street down which the regiment marched off to war.
Some grudging Unionists refused to acknowledge the worthiness of blacks as soldiers. Abraham Lincoln shut them up:
You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you ...
So, yeah, I'd say, July 18, bring it, KKK. You have the haters and the fools. We had the heroes then and
we still have them now. So long as there are people like Bree Newsome among us, we can ask, as she did:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”