Equalization schools highlighted in Charleston

Having served briefly on the United States Supreme Court, Governor Jimmy Byrnes foresaw in 1951 that a number of low-level federal lawsuits would likely make their way to the nation's highest court within a few years and, given the Court's composition, might result in an order striking down the fifty-year-old "separate but equal" principle in public accommodations.

Byrnes made no secret of his thinking, and he pushed our state legislature toward a Hail Mary strategy: Adopt a massive tax increase to fund the building of hundreds of new schools, to illustrate to the Court that, at least in South Carolina, "separate but equal" was still a viable concept and should be maintained.

He said so in an address to the South Carolina Education Association's annual state conference within a few weeks of his inauguration.

The tax increase passed, the schools were built, but the Court issued its famous ruling in Brown v Board of Education anyway, ordering the integration of public accommodations, including public schools.

Sunday's edition of the Post and Courier of Charleston featured the results of Byrnes's strategy, the so-called equalization schools built in the 1950s, thanks to the work of a graduate student.

Rebekah Dobrasko stumbled upon a piece of relatively unexplored South Carolina history while working on her master’s degree in public history.

She learned the state passed its first general sales tax in 1951 to fund “equalization” schools. This statewide initiative was designed to improve black public schools as a demonstration of its commitment to separate but equal. The state wanted to avoid integrating its racially segregated facilities.

More than 700 new schools were built during the 1950s, but Dobrasko could find little research on these schools or what became of them.

She focused on Charleston County’s equalization schools for her master’s thesis and discovered that some were slated to be demolished.

Dobrasko alerted city officials about the history behind one building slated to be torn down, and her advocacy has led to a first-of-its-kind exhibit being planned for the campus of Charleston Progressive Academy.

School leaders will create the state’s first public display on equalization schools, and the public will have a chance to decide what should be included.

“It’s a chance to tell this story,” Dobrasko said. “It’s a part of our history that’s not the most pleasant, but it’s still something that shaped the education landscape today.”
Building equalization

The state’s equalization schools were built or renovated between 1951 and 1960 as part of the state’s response to the Briggs v. Elliott school desegregation lawsuit. That case originally accused Clarendon County officials of refusing to uphold the law’s requirement that segregated facilities be equal.

Within the first six years of the equalization program, the state nearly doubled the number of accredited black high schools from 80 to 145 in 1957.

South Carolina was one of three states — the other two were Georgia and Mississippi — to give money for school equalization in an attempt to prevent integration. Their efforts would be for naught when the nation’s highest court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that black students must be allowed to sit alongside their white peers.

As part of the equalization school effort, Charleston would receive $6.2 million to renovate, build or equip 46 schools. The majority of the funds went toward black school renovation and construction; black students received new schools first, but the money also funded white-only schools.

Dobrasko became interested in equalization schools during one of her graduate classes at the University of South Carolina. The class took regular trips to Charleston, so she decided to look further at the equalization schools in the county.

She used her Charleston-focused thesis to later create a website on the issue. She heard from residents across the state, and she expanded her work to include schools outside the Lowcountry.

Dobrasko now works for the state Historic Preservation Office, and her job as a supervisor of compliance, tax incentives and surveys has nothing to do with equalization schools.

Still, when she heard about the demolition of Memminger Elementary, an equalization school for white students, she felt compelled to write an email that evolved into a promise of a new public exhibit.
Preserving history

Bill Lewis, the district’s chief operations officer, said the school district can’t restore all the buildings built in that era. Of the equalization schools, the former Courtenay School, now home to Charleston Progressive Academy, has some of the most distinctive architecture, and its close proximity to the Visitor Center and downtown makes it an ideal site for tourists, he said.

Lewis is not sure what the exhibit will look like or include, but he said it likely will be housed in an outdoor courtyard and accessible to the public. It might have maps and plaques as well as photos, but he said that will depend on public input.

The school also might be able to feature some items in its library, but no decisions have been made, he said. The school’s construction budget has about $50,000 set aside for the exhibit.

“If we don’t collect these (artifacts) soon, the memories will be lost,” he said.

Dobrasko said she wants the public — particularly residents who attended or lived in communities near the equalization schools — to share their thoughts on what this exhibit could be. She encouraged residents to bring yearbooks, photos, graduation programs and their stories about whether the schools were important to the area; what the schools were like when they opened; and how they affected the community.

Some of the community’s leading voices on diversity issues — such as the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center and the Charleston NAACP — weren’t aware of the exhibit and said they haven’t been part of the conversation so far. Both groups said they’d like to know more.

Aurora Harris, diversity programs manager for the Preservation Society of Charleston, said she’s been involved in the planning and has helped publicize the upcoming public hearings.

“It’s really telling a part of the story that a lot of people aren’t aware of,” she said.

Bernard Powers, a College of Charleston history professor who’s serving as chief historian on the strategic plan for the International African American Museum, wasn’t aware of the proposed exhibit either but said these schools are an important part of the civil rights movement.

“There is the era of segregation … and the other side is a period of desegregation or integration,” he said. “But in between, there were at least sporadic efforts to forestall desegregation and integration by making separate really equal. And the (equalization) schools are probably the best example of this that you can possibly come up with.”

How SC's Gressette Commission invented vouchers, tuition tax credits

This year, for the fifth or sixth time in a decade, South Carolina lawmakers are trying again to pass a bill that diverts public revenue to private and parochial schools through vouchers or, more subtly, through "tuition tax credits."

It's a ruse that has failed each time it's been tried, thanks to lawmakers straining mightily to drag South Carolina, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. As most civilized nations, and a right smart measure of America, has made it safely into the twenty-first century by now, one would think the task is not quite as arduous as all that. But one has to read his South Carolina history to understand why it remains rusted to its root.

In 1975, Ernest Lander Jr. and Richard J. Calhoun compiled a dense and intelligent little volume titled "Two Decades of Change: The South Since the Supreme Court Desegregation Decison." I highly recommend it and intend to quote from it in a future note.

But in chasing down a loose rabbit from the Lander-Calhoun text, I discovered a much more recent tome and couldn't believe the luck of it. Author J. Russell Hawkins, a doctoral candidate at Rice University, submitted a dissertation in 2009 titled "Religion, Race, and Resistance: White Evangelicals and the Dilemma of Integration in South Carolina 1950-1975." In reading now-Dr. Hawkins's work, I felt like Alice in Wonderland -- peering into a looking-glass at the 1950s and 1960s and seeing 2012 reflected back at me.

Hawkins explains expertly, in great detail and in rich context, the origins of South Carolina conservative lawmakers' lust for vouchers and tuition tax credits. Though it's unfair to simplify a work of such depth, I'm tempted to report that, as many have imagined, the issue is race, was always race, is still race, and will be race for as far as the eye can see from the present vantage point.

Hawkins's work is a full book, nearly 300 pages, but it's only available at present in dissertation form and I'll certainly recommend the product when it's published as a commercial work.

For now, I want to share excerpts that might inform those curious about vouchers, tuition tax credits and South Carolina's strange abundance of private schools named for the heroes of segregation.

In South Carolina, the idea of utilizing private schools as a way to avoid public school desegregation actually predated the 1954 Brown decision as state leaders, reading the writing on the wall, took steps that would allow white students flexibility should the integration mandate come to pass.

In a 1951 speech urging state lawmakers to allocate money for the construction of new schools for African American children, Governor James Byrnes suggested that if the public schools were forced to desegregate, the newly built schools could be handed over to citizens to form their own private segregated schools.

In the post-Brown era, however, favorable talk of encouraging private schools as an alternative to desegregated public schools did not surface among state officials until April 1957 when the Ways and Means Committee of the state's House of Representative considered a bill that would grant tax exemptions for parents whose children attended private schools. State Senator Marion Gressette, who had been appointed five years earlier to head an advisory committee to maintain segregation, reported that the state was sufficiently prepared "to meet any situation that may develop in the present [school desegregation] crisis" and pronounced that there was no need in 1957 to pass additional legislation.

The Gressette Committee, in fact, had been instrumental in the passage of several legislative bills two years earlier that provided white South Carolinians firm legal ground to avoid school desegregation if and when that battle was to be fought. These acts included repealing the compulsory school attendance law, which allowed parents to hold their children out of desegregated public schools without legal consequence, and granting more authority to local school boards, which effectively allowed local boards to construct bureaucratic roadblocks to integration. In the summer of 1957, therefore, state leaders saw no need to enact legislation promoting private schools.

In October 1958 a member of the South Carolina legislature representing a low country county with a high African American population again raised the issue of private schools. Sam Harrell, a white representative from Florence County who was irritated by what he perceived as inaction by Gressette Committee, publicly stated that the segregation committee "should do something to set up private schools before the courts act."

Harrell's perspective in the fall of 1958 was no doubt colored by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's deployment of the United States Army to enforce the desegregation of Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Indeed, many white South Carolina citizens looked anxiously at the situation in Arkansas and pledged to support their segregationist neighbors to the west who vowed to continue fighting against school desegregation. The men's club of St. Matthew's Methodist Church in Bishopsville, South Carolina, for instance, passed a resolution of support for Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and his fight "against the unchristian [sic] and evil forces of the Supreme Court and federal government caused by the pressure of politicians, sociologists, psychologist and do-gooders, ignorant of the issues at hand... ."

One Baptist minister from Olanta, South Carolina, urged members of the Citizens' Council in South Carolina to send money to Arkansas to help support private schools there. The issue was so important, Reverend Marion A. Woodson believed, that it was time for South Carolinians to make sacrifices to support the private school effort. "We have reached the point," Woodson declared, "where we must be willing to give up the second car, cancel a vacation trip and buy less clothing in order to provide private schools for our children."

Stunning admission, isn't it? Better to deprive our own children of a high quality of life than to allow other people's children to go to school with ours.

That's us.

The effort to provide private schools for South Carolina white children was soon championed by the state's Farm Bureau and Citizens' Councils. The former group petitioned the state legislature in November 1958 to give "serious consideration" to proposals that would abolish public education in South Carolina altogether. Meanwhile, seven Citizens' Council groups in the Charleston area conducted a survey of the cities' public buildings and churches to investigate the logistical feasibility for private schools should the need arise.

Despite the concerns of white citizens, school desegregation in South Carolina was not an imminent threat in 1958. There would, in fact, be no integration of any kind in South Carolina elementary or high schools until 1963. While South Carolina held out longer than the rest of the South in keeping all levels of educational facilities segregated—-it was not until Harvey Gantt enrolled at Clemson College in January 1963 that South Carolina joined the rest of the Union in admitting black students into one of its public educational institutions-—the fact was, the decade following the Brown decision produced little change in the demographics of the vast majority of southern public schools, particularly in the Deep South.
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So long as desegregation was merely talked about rather than enacted, the need for an alternative for public education remained at bay. Despite occasional calls for private schools throughout the late 1950s and first few years of the 1960s, therefore, it was not until 1963 that the South Carolina legislature gave serious attention to providing a safety valve in the event that desegregation occurred.

In January 1963, just weeks after the state had witnessed Harvey Gantt integrate Clemson College, a bill was presented to the South Carolina House of Representatives to provide tuition grants to public school students who decided to withdraw from public schools and enroll in private institutions. The bill proposed that the state give parents the amount South Carolina spent per pupil—-$225 a year for elementary school students, $250 for high school in 1963-—for use toward tuition costs at private schools.

In order to avoid questions of church/state separation, the bill stipulated that the money could not be used at religiously affiliated schools. The grants were to be available to families regardless of race.

The same proposal, with updated figures attached, has been batted around for the past several years in our state capital, for precisely the same reasons.

Of course, no one says the proposals are being made to keep black children and white children separate -- even Lee Atwater acknowledged in the late 1980s that you have to be more subtle than that. But as soon as the proposals were formulated by the Gressette Commission and Gressette's segregationist cohorts, they were already savvy enough to play it off as something else.

When you reach positions of tremendous stature in public office, and the nation is moving in a direction that you fought, you can't jump up and down, wave your arms and shout, "I'm a racist! I hate people who don't look like me, and I don't want their children to have the same access to education that I provide to mine!"

Instead, you have to use sophisticated code words like "local control" and "accountable to high standards."

Demonstrating that state law makers were aware of the necessity for toning down explicitly racial arguments by 1963, school desegregation was "not mentioned or in any way alluded to" when legislators presented the bill. In talking about the bill in his state of the state address, Governor Donald S. Russell justified the necessity of the legislation, saying that passage of the tuition grants would help keep public schools accountable to high standards. What Russell failed to mention in his talk of public accountability for the state's public schools were three desegregation suits filed against South Carolina schools pending in federal courts at the time the tuition grant bill was proposed.

The tuition grant idea was first hatched by Senator Marion Gressette's segregation committee as a safeguard for segregation in the event that the courts ruled that South Carolina's public schools must integrate; a fact that revealed that the issue of race played a larger role in the drive for tuition grants than advocates publically admitted. As cautious as legislators and the governor had been in not mentioning race or school desegregation when debating the merits of tuition grants, the Gressette Committee itself was less discreet in discussing the need for the legislation. In the report proposing the tuition grant measure, the committee declared "South Carolina at all costs must prevent the development of its grammar and high schools into the lawless 'blackboard jungles' that integration has made" in other parts of the country. It was coded language, to be sure, but undoubtedly communicated volumes to South Carolinians anxious about school desegregation. The idea of "lawless blackboard jungles," in fact, was a theme white South Carolinians sounded time and again in the following decade, albeit without the unseemly racialized undertones.

The tuition grant bill was by no means widely endorsed by South Carolinians.

Probably recognizing the true impetus for the grants, some legislators right away foresaw problems with the bill passing Constitutional muster. The state NAACP threatened immediate court action if the bill was passed. Additionally, state education officials, already financially pressed, were particularly critical of the tuition grant plan because state school funding was directly tied to student enrollment.

Some legislators believed the amount of money the bill allocated for children to attend private schools was not enough to cover the cost of tuition for most families and would therefore only serve as a subsidy for wealthy South Carolinians who already had their children enrolled in private schools.

You see, our evolving aristocratic elite picked up on the money instantly -- it wasn't enough to cover the costs of educating their children in the style to which they'd become accustomed. More would have to be done.

One private citizens' group supported the bill's intent but worried that its exclusion of religious schools was too restrictive and requested that the General Assembly amend the bill to allow tuition grants to be used at church-related schools.

George Cornish, the attorney for the Foundation for Independent Schools, a group seeking the bill's amendment, argued that disallowing the tuition grants for use at religious schools discriminated against parents who wanted their children educated in such institutions. More importantly, Cornish presciently reasoned, even if a private school was not sponsored by a particular church or explicitly religious in its intent, newly established private schools would likely need to make use of church buildings to help defer overhead costs until the time the schools could become financially stable enough to move into their own facilities.

Ah, that was the key to the whole show -- the beginning of the formal relationship between the right wing and churches, rooted in shared desire for exclusivity.

Despite pressure from those who wanted the bill voted down and those who desired an expanded version of the legislation, the General Assembly passed the tuition grants bill in May 1963 with the clause prohibiting their use at religious schools intact.

The bill encountered no serious opposition from lawmakers in either chamber, passing 78-28 in the House and 35-4 in the Senate. In its final version, the legislature allocated $155 per pupil who opted out of public schools to attend accredited non-religious private institutions. It also provided that local districts could decide for themselves if they wanted to participate and could subsidize the grant with additional local money if thought prudent.

Hawkins found one -- at least one -- senator who told the truth about the bill and its motives:

One state senator who was in the minority opposing the bill took to the floor just before the vote in an attempt to lay bare the bill's true intent. Despite the fact that lawmakers had consciously made no mention of desegregation in debating the bill, state senator Roger Scott declared bluntly, "we might as well say it, it's about white people and Negroes."

Gressette and his disciples spent their careers trying to figure out ways around that one, simple, plain fact, but there it was.

And here it still is.

For South Carolinians worried about school desegregation, the tuition grants bill passed at a particularly fortuitous moment. Just months after the tuition grants bill became law, a United States District Court judge in Columbia, South Carolina, heard arguments on whether twelve African American students would be allowed to enroll in white high schools in Charleston for the 1963 school year. In arguing their case for the necessity of maintaining segregation, the Charleston school district called a professor emeritus of biology from the University of South Carolina to testify that "Negroes have 'an innate lack of capacity' for matching the performance capabilities of whites," which justified educating them separately from whites. The expert witness based his analysis of the intellectual abilities of the races on the weight and perceived characteristics of the brains of whites and African Americans.

In his decision, Judge Robert Martin rejected the school district's pseudo scientific defense and ruled that the black plaintiffs were to be allowed to attend one of the four white high schools in Charleston. Additionally, Judge Martin ruled that all the heretofore exclusively white Charleston schools would have to implement some amount of desegregation by the start of the 1964-1965 school year.

The era of complete segregation in South Carolina's primary and secondary schools had at last come to an end. In closing one sordid chapter of the state's racial history, however, Martin's 1963 ruling also marked the beginning of another in South Carolina: the rise of private schools to avoid racial desegregation. And as it had done all throughout the era of massive resistance, religion played an important role in sustaining the private schools.

As the 1963 school year began with four of their city's schools experiencing desegregation for the first time, white groups in Charleston immediately began meeting to discuss opening private schools to take advantage of the newly enacted tuition grant program. Five separate groups in Charleston alone made plans for private schools, including the First Presbyterian Church of Charleston, which carefully wrote the school charter so it was unassociated with the church itself and thereby qualified for the tuition grants.

The scene in Charleston was one that was replicated across the state starting in the mid 1960s as court decisions and federal funding programs led to desegregated schools in communities throughout South Carolina. Complying with court rulings and the Department of Housing Education and Welfare (HEW) guidelines that mandated desegregation in exchange for federal money, South Carolina school districts between 1964 and 1967 produced freedom-of-choice plans for school integration that produced little more than "token" desegregation. These plans invariably resulted in no white students choosing to attend black schools, while only a miniscule number of African American students "integrated" formerly all-white schools.

For all intents and purposes, the practical result of these plans was the continuation of segregated education in the state. During the 1965-1966 school year, for instance, despite 80 percent of the state's school districts being in compliance with HEW guidelines for acceptable desegregation plans, only 1.5 percent of African American students in South Carolina attended school with white students.

During this same period, thirty-two new private schools—-all racially segregated—-opened their doors. As federal courts' rulings forced southern schools to move beyond token desegregation and demonstrate substantial integration percentages, private schools in South Carolina flourished. The rate at which private schools were created was directly proportional to the amount of desegregation occurring in state schools. In 1970, the year the Supreme Court's ruling in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education mandated immediate and massive desegregation take place throughout the South, 93 percent of South Carolina's African American students attended desegregated schools. The previous year, only 29 percent had done so.

Not coincidentally 1970 also marked by the advent of thirty-six new segregated private schools in South Carolina, the most in a single year.

Gressette and his commission failed to keep federal law out of South Carolina completely, but he succeeded in bringing together the political right and the evangelical community, and in giving them cover long enough to get their operations up and running. By the time the Gressette Commission was dissolved in the late 1960s, the segregation academy movement had sufficient momentum.

Integration would be thwarted after all, and those who wished never to integrate -- to view individuals of other races as equal human beings, and treat them accordingly -- would have plenty of options available to them.

Between 1964 and 1972, when the majority of school desegregation in their state took place, white South Carolinians formed 111 new private schools. In 1973 these recently established private schools enrolled 25,000 white students.

And South Carolina found a way to lead its region again!

South Carolina had a higher percentage of students enrolled in private schools than any other southern state by the mid 1970s. But the same pattern of public school desegregation followed by a rash of private school openings that occurred in South Carolina was repeated to varying degrees in all the states of the South. The same factors at play in desegregating South Carolina schools-—court rulings and access to federal money—-insured that the integration of public schools in the former Confederacy quicken its snail-like speed. The microscopic number of African American students attending formerly all-white schools throughout the South rose to 46 percent of the total southern black school-age population by 1973.
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In October 1969 an estimated 300,000 students throughout the South were enrolled in private schools upholding racial segregation. Following a November mandate that same year from the Supreme Court ordering school districts to integrate "at once," the estimated enrollment numbers jumped an astonishing 33 percent. By 1971 the number of pupils attending segregated private schools topped a half million. Twenty years after the Supreme Court handed down its Brown decision, it was estimated that between three and four thousand private schools had been established in southern states whose roots could be found in the desegregation of public schools. Attendance at these "segregationist academies" accounted for an estimated three-quarters of a million white schoolchildren whose parents believed strongly enough in segregation to pull their children out of the free public school system and pay to enroll them in these newly established institutions.

Most state money that may have originally been devoted to help parents pay for these private schools was frozen by court challenges by 1967. In South Carolina, for instance, tuition grant payments were halted almost as soon as they were dispersed.

Opponents of the payments were granted an injunction against the state-sponsored tuition grants, and the courts ultimately ruled them unconstitutional in 1968. Despite this, however, the growth of private schools in South Carolina remained unabated after school desegregation began in 1963. The same scenario held for white families across the South: as the 1960s progressed and school boards at last put desegregation into practice, many white parents throughout the region demonstrated that they were willing to bear the financial burden of private school tuition to keep their children out of racially integrated public schools.

Faced with the requirement to send their children to desegregated public schools, parents instead chose to simply create their own schools. Independent of public funding, these schools sheltered white children from mixing with members of different races.

In South Carolina some felt that the new wave of private schools operating in the state by the mid 1960s necessitated the creation of an organization to help further private education in the state. Accordingly, in 1965 T. Elliot Wannamaker, the headmaster of the Wade Hampton Academy, invited representatives from seven of the other newly formed private schools to Orangeburg in order to discuss the creation of an independent school association. As a result of that meeting, the South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) requested and received a corporate charter from the state.

The executive secretary of the SCISA in the first two years of its existence was a young lawyer from Barnwell County, South Carolina, named Tom Turnipseed. As one of the founders of the Jefferson Davis Academy in Blackville, South Carolina, Turnipseed was committed to the idea of private education, and as the executive secretary of the SCISA, Turnipseed was instrumental in establishing private schools throughout the state. The majority of these schools were located in the South Carolina low country, where the African American population density was highest.

In addition to insuring that the quickly forming new schools were able to obtain tax-exempt status, Turnipseed's other chief responsibility was to spread information about the SCISA. As the public relations manager for the SCISA, Turnipseed's primary message was that the newly formed association was not a segregationist organization but instead was a group of prominent citizens concerned about quality education in the state. In later years, however, after he had undergone a transformation in his racial attitudes, Turnipseed admitted that race played much more of a motivating factor in the establishment of the independent schools in South Carolina than the association let on at the time.

Publically, the SCISA never mentioned race, reflecting the significant change taking place in southern society at that time. In reality, however, the independent school movement of the mid 1960s "had everything to do with race." The SCISA even brought in a scientific expert in the mid-1960s to explain to association board members and headmasters that the frontal lobes of African Americans' brains lacked the deep folds found in the brains of whites, supposedly inhibiting the formers' capacity for critical thinking.

Ideas such as these were the basis on which the Charleston school district had petitioned the U.S. district court to uphold segregation in the city's public schools. The school district appealed the ruling rejecting these supposedly scientific findings all the way to the Supreme Court in 1964. Even though the highest court in land rejected the notion of the innate inferiority of the black race without comment, such ideas were still being promulgated among the supporters of the private schools in South Carolina.

Tom Turnipseed was only with the SCISA for two years before leaving South Carolina to help organize George Wallace's presidential campaign in 1968. During his brief stint with the SCISA, Turnipseed helped organize more than thirty schools while broadcasting the message that the newly formed schools had nothing to do with race.

Despite the mantra of quality education, the leaders of the SCISA were unquestionably driven to support private education at least in part because of racial prejudice. SCISA president, Elliott Wannamaker, for instance, had written two years before founding the private school association that the "separation of the races in education, in recreation, in living quarters, and in churches is in the best interest of both races and is essential to the preservation of racial integrity."

As executive secretary, Tom Turnipseed shared Wannamaker's racial views and even withdrew from the Methodist denomination to join the Southern Methodists who remained firmly committed to segregation of the races. It was not too difficult to see the racist motives underneath the thin veneer of "quality education" the SCISA espoused to justify its schools' existence.

Religion figured prominently in the creation of private schools in both South Carolina and the region as a whole. In South Carolina, white churches were essential in forming many of the member schools in the South Carolina Independent School Association. As leader of the SCISA, in fact, Elliott Wannamaker encouraged groups interested in starting private schools to work in conjunction with local churches, which had ample Sunday School classroom space to house the schools during the week.

Wannamaker's own school, Wade Hampton Academy, spent the first year of its existence housed in the Northside Baptist Church in Orangeburg. In time the school was able to raise enough capital to move out of the church building and construct its own facilities, but for Wade Hampton Academy, the church was instrumental in getting the school off the ground.

Many churches in South Carolina, however, did more than just house newly formed private schools. While some churches like Northside Baptist granted private schools use of their facilities while having no formal association with the schools, a good number of churches took an active role in creating and running racially segregated schools that operated under the authority of the churches themselves.

According to one study, of the 111 segregation academies in South Carolina by 1973, more than one-third were church sponsored and operated. That churches established schools for the sake of avoiding racial integration is strong evidence that religion played an instrumental part in the fight against desegregation into the 1970s. The schools that met across the South in church basements, Sunday School classrooms, and fellowship halls in the wake of desegregation did so with God's implied sanction. The inescapable message of a racially segregated school created under the aegis of a church was divine favor for such a school.

The statement these church-affiliated schools made, tacit or otherwise, was that God supported racial segregation—-exactly the religious argument conservative white Christians had preached for decades in explicit segregationist folk theology and in more recent years in covert appeals to racial orthodoxy as demonstrated by the arguments during the Methodist merger.

Even the secular private academies established in the South, however, were not without religious underpinnings that helped buttress the righteousness of the segregationist cause. "Religion is an integral part of the Independent School movement because it's an integral part of the South," Donald Roberts, a principal of one of the newly formed private schools, professed in a 1972 interview. "Our people-—supporters of the Independent Schools—-are convinced that God is behind us. That I am sure of, we are doing God's work," Roberts continued. "This is something somebody outside the South can't understand. If you don't include that [the religious] aspect you're missing a good part of the motivation behind this movement. People believe full heartedly that God doesn't want us to mix."

Religion, therefore, was not limited in its importance to the private schools directly associated with local churches. Even schools that claimed no religious affiliation relied heavily on Christian reputations to justify their existence.

Many of these secular private schools also emphasized Christian principles in their classrooms. One study examining the philosophy of the southern private school movement found that even the non-sectarian schools "open classes with prayer... [which is] expanded into a considerable devotional exercise, with readings from the Bible." In throwing his considerable political weight behind the SCISA, Senator Strom Thurmond reiterated the idea that independent schools, although often unassociated with any church, nonetheless maintained a palpable religious identity. As Thurmond told his constituents in South Carolina, the newly created independent schools "are unabashedly Christian in outlook and daily practice," despite the fact that they were not church-related.

The Southern Council Academy provides a useful example of how schools not affiliated with local churches still imbued their students with Christian teachings.

Established in Durham, North Carolina, in September 1971, the Southern Council Academy was one of 396 institutions in a network of schools overseen by the national organization of the Citizens' Councils of America that year alone.45 "Although Southern Council Academy is not affiliated with any church group," the school's handbook informed potential applicants, "it is a 'Christian' school. A basic premise for our school is 'The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge.'" In addition to the quote from the book of Proverbs, the handbook assured parents that "every home room teacher daily conducts devotions during the home room period." The headmaster of the school "is also a Christian minister, [and] teaches a Bible class daily...." The school also required chapel once a week for the high school and elementary students who attended.

Conspicuously missing from the Southern Council Academy's informational handbook was any mention of race. At the time school officials wrote the handbook in the early 1970s, however, explicit mention of racial segregation as a purpose of these private schools was usually absent. In addition to the fact that an openly discriminatory policy was outside the bounds of social acceptability by the 1970s, the omission of race from private school handbooks was in large part also the result of changes in IRS tax codes, which required private schools to strike any mention of racial discrimination from their institutional charter in order to maintain tax exempt status.

"As middle class whites in the South have become more conscious of their image in racial matters," one study suggested in 1976, "they have begun to say (and to believe) that they have many reasons for patronizing the schools that have little to do with race." This sentiment was certainly true. Parents began citing behavioral problems and lower academic standards that they saw growing in desegregated public schools as justification for sending their children to receive religious-based teachings in all-white private schools whose very existence was owed to racial integration in public schools. Even a headmaster of one of the schools in the South Carolina Independent School Association conceded that "there can be no doubt that one of the major factors affecting the growth of those (independent) schools and the establishment of a great number of private schools in 1964 and the following years in South Carolina was the beginning of mass integration of black students into the public schools."
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As racist attitudes were mitigated throughout the state in the 1970s, many South Carolinians sounded seemingly sincere appeals for private education. Some parents saw private education as good and necessary regardless of its ties to segregation, past or present. "Parents are prohibited from giving their children the school environment they would like," one South Carolina father wrote to William Workman. "When pupils are bused away from their communities to achieve the kind of integration our courts seem to desire, it not only hurts the child, but it hurts the community socially.... It is not so much the integration but rather the environment in the public schools to which I object."

One South Carolina mother who wrote to Workman spoke for many who were growing tired of the constant association between private schools and racism: "it is a little exasperating that 'private school' has become a dirty word, synonymous with racism and sin." For many South Carolina parents by 1975, private schools were not likely regarded as intentionally segregationist havens, despite the institutions' history. Instead, they were viewed as something necessary to make sure the sons and daughters of South Carolina received the best education available.

Yet southern private academies of the mid 1970s simply cannot be divorced from their segregationist origins. In a 1972 interview, one of the founders of Clarendon Hall, a private school in Summerton, South Carolina, claimed that the school-—which operated in the county that Briggs v. Elliot originated-—"was started not so much because of integration as [it was] the Supreme Court decisions on prayer and teaching the Bible in school."

Although this kind of justification for private schools were becoming popular in the 1970s, they were difficult words to believe coming from S. Emory Rogers, the lawyer who had argued for segregated schools before the Supreme Court in 1954; who went on to serve as the president of the South Carolina Association of Citizens' Councils; and who published a pamphlet on the compatibility of Christian love and segregation that circulated across the South in the 1960s.

Even if Rogers was sincere in his claim that Bible reading and prayer were the primary cause for Clarendon Hall's founding, the enrollment history suggests a different reason for the school's continued success. When Clarendon Hall opened in conjunction with a Baptist church in 1968, 127 students attended; the following year enrollment stood at 124. In 1970, however, the first year Clarendon County saw significant school integration, Clarendon Hall's student body swelled to 434 pupils. By 1972 enrollment topped 500 and the school was no longer associated with the Baptist church. The fact that enrollment at Clarendon Hall exploded after desegregation and continued to grow even when the school was no longer operated by the Baptist church cast doubts on the idea that religious concerns were the sole motivation behind the county's largest private academy.

By the early 1970s the South teemed with schools like Clarendon Hall that were created in the years between 1954 and 1970 as the threat of desegregation spread through the region. As a character candidly admits in a Walker Percy novel written in the heyday of the private school movement, these institutions were founded "on religious and patriotic principles and to keep Negroes out."

Percy perhaps used one conjunction too many in his description of the South's private schools. Schools "founded on religious and patriotic principles to keep Negroes out" would have been a more accurate description of the segregationist academy movement that took hold in the South by the mid 1960s. When the Supreme Court ordered schools desegregated in 1954, the Deep South held out valiantly. Many who participated in the massive resistance against integration did so with the unassailable belief that God was against racial integration. It was a belief white southerners found supported as they viewed nature, read their Bibles, and listened to their ministers.

Some historians have suggested that segregationists gave up their fight relatively easily compared to their pro-slavery forebears in large part because religion was not a motivating force for twentieth century southerners as it was for their Confederate ancestors. But this view perhaps underestimates the rise of private academies in the South and conservative religion's importance to the new schools.

Massive resistance morphed into segregationist academies; white evangelical religion justified both.

History, friends. Facts in chronological context.

If you're ever in Columbia and have a few minutes to spare, you should stop by the State House complex and marvel at the statues and the names on the buildings. There are only a few statues and buildings, so who they represent and celebrate reflect the state's deepest-held values.

Among the statues, you'll find the murderous governor Pitchfork Ben Tillman facing the Confederate flag, the war hero and Confederate redeemer Wade Hampton on his steed, and the loveable statesman Strom Thurmond walking tall. In a leafy front corner of the complex, as if hiding or hidden purposefully, you'll find Governor James Byrnes, seated and solemn, who served as assistant president and Secretary of State to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Then, among the buildings behind the State House, there's the John C. Calhoun Building, the Edgar Brown Building, the Rembert Dennis Building, the Solomon Blatt Building that houses the House offices, and the Marion Gressette Building, which houses the Senate offices.

While we breathe, we hope.

Sun-News: South Carolina is not a national model

It's odd that a columnist for the Myrtle Beach Sun-News would be picked up by the Kansas City Star of Kansas City, Missouri, but that's exactly what happened in yesterday's edition. Odder still is the content of the Sun-News column: It's shocking that one of our state's mainstream newspapers allowed a column of such bold dissent to be published. Watch for future by-lines by the columnist, Issac J. Bailey. They may become quite rare.

The broad concepts the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination will tout on the stage at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center Monday night have been preached for almost a quarter of a century in South Carolina.

Taxes are low. Labor unions have been defanged. Politicians of all stripes take pains to cozy up to business, even providing incentives as way Horry County Council recently did without knowing what the company would or realistically could produce.

Private education sprouted decades ago after desegregation, and charter schools began flourishing under former Gov. Mark Sanford while public education funding has remained below recommended levels.

Indeed so -- and finding data related to Sen. Marion Gressette's sixteen-year leadership of the legislature's "Segregation Committee" like finding millionaires teaching public school in South Carolina. Throughout the civil rights era, Gressette's name came to be associated, even synonymous, with desegregation, institutionalized racism and delay of implementation of Brown v Board of Education. Most contemporary records of that era have been scrubbed clean of the "Gressette Commission" and its work, though its legacy -- the 1960s blossoming of private schools and segregation academies -- is obvious.

The state’s low tax rate has led to underfunded schools, underfunded and inadequate roads and a fifth of its citizens having no real health insurance. We’ve been begging the federal government for the past couple of decades to help us build Interstate 73 and have only been able to pay for local infrastructure upgrades along the Grand Strand because we decided to tax citizens a little more at the cash register.

The state still struggles to claw out of the bottom of the national educational barrel.

The free market principles the candidates espouse devastated small towns throughout the state when textile and manufacturing companies either closed shops or shipped jobs overseas. AVX Corp., which until recently had its corporate headquarters in Myrtle Beach, built its largest plant in China, roughly the size of two Walmarts.

The candidates who will be at the convention center have even been talking up Boeing’s move to North Charleston, claiming the federal government, through a lawsuit filed by the National Labor Relations Board against the company,- was punishing South Carolina because it is a so-called right-to-work state. They ignored the $1 billion incentives package the state’s taxpayers were forced to cough up for that plant – similar to the billions of dollars in government subsidies being financed by the country’s taxpayers to pad the bottom lines of the largest corporations, a redistribution of wealth up that is unlikely to end because of an unrealistic tax philosophy espoused by candidates who will share the debate stage.

And speaking of Walmart, that corporation has been able to take over the grocery and retail market in the state by lowering prices for everyone – yeah! – by suppressing wages and using tax and other government incentives to force out mom-and-pop retail establishment that once were the hallmark of the state.

The wages it pays barely keep many of its workers out of poverty and a need for food stamps Republican candidates keep talking about.

The days the typical South Carolinian could put in long, hard hours and be paid a living wage, enough to support a family with enough left over to stash away for a rainy day or retirement, are long gone in part because of the market principles that will be reiterated Monday night. Those principles have led to an increase in income inequality and most of the spoils over the past three decades have gone to the top, bypassing the middle class and poor who make up the bulk of this state’s residents.

When the candidates lecture us about the need to unleash the private market, they won’t tell you that part. They won’t tell you what a few retired corporate executives have been telling me the past several weeks, that corporations are not designed to create jobs or be fair or level the playing field; they are created to earn money. If adding jobs are necessary to boost the bottom line, that’s what they’ll do. And if jobs must be cut for the same reason, well, that’s just capitalism at work. Ask Mitt Romney.

It matters little that that philosophy has been on display in South Carolina for a quarter of a century and all the state has to show for it is one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation and pockets of severe poverty well-off residents believe only exist in third-world countries.

I imagine that the candidates and national media personalities will come our way telling us about the importance of the economy to the state’s Jan. 21 Republican primary.

I don’t buy it. If it was really about making the economy better, candidates on that stage Monday night would take an honest look at South Carolina’s economic history and reassess what they are trying to sell voters.

South Carolina has been practicing for decades what the candidates on stage will be preaching Monday night.

Pardon me for being less than impressed.

Judge J. Waties Waring re-directed South Carolina history

Martin Luther King Jr in 1967, channeling the sentiment of Theodore Parker's writing of 1853, told the 11th annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, "...the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

If judges, whose main interest is justice, affect the course of that arc, few of South Carolina's judges had greater impact on it -- or on state history -- than Judge J. Waties Waring. In a series of decisions issued in the 1940s and 1950s from his bench in Charleston, it might be said that Waring took the arc in both hands and bent it with all judicial force. In so doing, Waring earned himself an important place in South Carolina's history.

But he also earned the permanent enmity of the state's ruling elite, whose responses to Waring continue to punish South Carolina's children today.

TIME magazine took notice of Waring in 1948, publishing this item under the title, "The Man They Love to Hate":

Aug. 23, 1948

For the first time in history, South Carolina Negroes voted freely last week in the Democratic primary; by evening of election day nearly 35,000 had cast their ballots. To old families in the mansions along Charleston's historic Battery, as to most South Carolinians across the state, this was sacrilege. But proud Charleston spent its bitterness on the cause, rather than the effect of this enormous social change. It charged it all up to cold-eyed, 68-year-old Federal Judge J. Waties Waring.

Antique Grandeur.
Judge Waring was one of Charleston's own. He was born of an old and honored family; he married a Charleston girl. He was appointed to the bench January 1942 on the recommendation of the late Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith. Until he was 65, he abided by the insular mores of Charleston's first families and devoted himself to the dusty grandeur of Charleston's traditions.

Three years ago, after 32 years of marriage, he and his wife got a Florida divorce (South Carolina has no divorce laws). The judge married a Connecticut woman. He was instantly ostracized. He did not take it well. Charleston lawyers complained that he grew more vituperative and irascible month by month. But as time wore on, he also grew more liberal in his opinions. His onetime friends did not consider the possibility that an elderly man might gain a new and deeper understanding of justice and the law. They whispered that he was "out to get his revenge."

Last July they were sure of it. Judge Waring ordered the Democratic Party to open its enrollment books to Negroes and permit them "full participation in party affairs." He went even further. When a white man, Senatorial Candidate Alan Johnstone, rose to protest, the judge had him forcibly ejected. He told the crowd of Negroes who jammed his courtroom: "It is a disgrace when you have to come . . . and ask a judge to tell you how to be an American."

He was jeered and denounced. When lightning struck a house next to his summer cottage on Sullivan's Island beach, its owner nailed up a neatly lettered sign: "Dear God, He Lives Next Door." Every man entered in South Carolina's senatorial race vilified him during the campaign. Congressman L. Mendel Rivers sought to institute impeachment proceedings against him, cried: "Unless he is removed . . . there will be bloodshed. He is now in the process of extracting a pound of flesh from the white people of South Carolina because, through his own actions, he has been ostracized from their society."

New Dignity.
Last week there was no bloodshed. South Carolina's Negroes voted quietly. Their votes did not change the result—all the favorites, including blue-blooded, well-heeled U.S. Senator Burnet R. Maybank of Charleston, won handily. Whatever South Carolina thought last week, history might remember crusty, umbrageous Judge J. Waties Waring as a man of cool courage.

Indeed, arch-conservatives in the South Carolina House drafted a resolution to impeach Waring, though it was not adopted.

That 1948 ruling on voting rights and open primaries was controversial enough. But it is Waring's dissent in a 1951 case that earns him attention in an academic law review this summer. Authored by U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel and Hofstra law professor Leon Friedman, the article sees Waring as an exemplar of the independent judiciary.

On June 23, 1951, a little more than 60 years ago, a three-judge federal court panel sitting in Charleston, S.C., issued a majority opinion, upholding the state's rigidly maintained practice of segregating school children on the basis of race. The decision in Briggs v. Elliott, which relied upon the U.S. Supreme Court 1896 precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, concluded that school segregation was a local matter outside the purview of the federal courts and the American Constitution. What was then little noticed was a passionate dissent by U.S. District Judge J. Waites Waring, an eighth-generation Charlestonian and son of a Confederate veteran. The Waring dissent represented the first instance in the 55 years since Plessy that a federal judge concluded that racial segregation was incompatible with the American Constitution, even if an effort had been made to equalize the segregated facilities. The Briggs lawsuit would eventually wind itself onto the Supreme Court's docket and be consolidated with four other cases under the name Brown v. Board of Education. As they say, the rest is history.

Briggs v. Elliott was the first case filed, tried and appealed to the Supreme Court challenging segregation in public schools. At the time of the trial, in late May 1951, 18 states, including South Carolina, required the operation of racially segregated schools. These laws were a patchwork of state statutes and local ordinances from across the country that enforced a form of racial apartheid then popularly known as "Jim Crow" laws.

The Briggs case was brought by 20 mostly poor African-Americans from the rural community of Summerton in Clarendon County, S.C. The plaintiffs sought an adequate education for their children as a path away from their crushing poverty. As a price for placing their names onto the federal court complaint, many of the plaintiffs had suffered severe retaliation such as loss of their jobs or inability to secure credit. They were, however, undaunted.

On the morning of the federal court trial, a large group of the plaintiffs and their supporters traveled by caravan from Summerton to Charleston to witness what would be one of the most important legal proceedings in American history. Hundreds lined up in the courthouse, on the stairs leading to the courtroom and onto the street for a chance to see and hear the legal attack on their second-class status. They were not disappointed. They observed the testimony of witnesses describing the profound disparities in the educational facilities and resources provided the black and white children of their community. They heard what would become the historic expert testimony of psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark as he described his "doll studies" and opined that segregation stigmatized and injured their children. But what thrilled the plaintiffs the most was the searing cross-examination by their lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, as he questioned the defendants' star witness, ultimately forcing him to admit that, at least in part, his testimony was based on a lifelong belief in racial segregation.

But this was South Carolina, the year was 1951 and the doctrine of Plessy was deeply ingrained in the region's culture. Several weeks after the completion of the Briggs trial, in June 1951, the three-judge panel issued a predictable decision, holding that racial segregation of the schools was a matter of state legislative policy in which the federal courts were "powerless to interfere." What was not predictable was the stirring 20-page dissent by Waring, who concluded that "segregation in education can never produce equality.…Segregation is per se inequality." Waring described segregation as an "evil" that "must go and go now."

Waring's improbable journey on race began after his appointment to the federal bench in 1942. Civil rights cases on his docket slowly opened him to a view of his native city and state that he had never considered as a prosperous attorney and member of elite social societies in Charleston. He started modestly, ending segregation in his courtroom. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Waring issued a series of opinions equalizing the pay of black teachers and requiring the state to admit black students to the University of South Carolina School of Law or to open an equal law school for African-Americans. Waring crossed the racial Rubicon in 1948, when he ordered the state Democratic Party to end its "white primary" and to allow black South Carolinians to vote in the only election that then mattered in the state. Waring soon found himself a social pariah in his native state. Politicians called for his impeachment, death threats were constant and crosses were burned in his yard.

Shortly after issuing his historic dissent in Briggs, Waring turned 70 and became eligible for judicial retirement. He quietly submitted his notice of retirement to the president, and he and his wife moved to New York City. There, he watched as Briggs and other school-segregation cases wound their way onto the Supreme Court's docket. In all of these cases, from Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and South Carolina, only Waring concluded that segregation in public education, even if equalized, was incompatible with the 14th Amendment. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, echoing the words and reasoning of Waring's dissent, concluded in Brown that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." On the night of the Brown decision, Walter White, the president of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders journeyed to Waring's small Upper East Side apartment to thank him personally for the courage and vision of his dissent.

Several years after the Brown decision, Waring and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who authored the Supreme Court's unanimous order, had a chance encounter. Waring told the chief justice, "I was greatly relieved when you decided that Clarendon school case. I'd been very lonely up to that time." Warren responded to the retired Southern jurist, essentially living in exile, "Well, you had to do it the hard way."

It is fitting now — 60 years after the Briggs trial and Waring's remarkable dissent — to note the vital role an independent judiciary played in bringing about an end to government-mandated racial segregation in America. It is also important to remember the ability of one man, willing to sacrifice his good name and comfort for a higher principle, to help to change the course of American history. We should, on this important anniversary, tip our collective hat to Judge J. Waites Waring for his courageous and historic dissent.

South Carolinians generally, and educators in particular -- who know a thing or two about bending the arc of the moral universe, one generation at a time -- have plenty of reason to celebrate and honor the courage of Judge Waring.

George Carlin pegged the problem in 2005

A clip from the late George Carlin's 2005 HBO performance of "Life Is Worth Losing" has been making the internet rounds in recent weeks, as more information comes to light about corporate interests' influence over America's (and South Carolina's) political systems, and everything else.

Carlin was Carlin, which means the video clip includes a share of salty language. But his underlying points are rooted in bedrock and resonate today as loudly as seven years ago.

So, two options: If you want to watch the edited/bleeped clip of Carlin's monologue on the problems of education in America, by all means click on the video. Otherwise, the transcript of the clip is reprinted below.

Consumption: it's the new national pastime. ...[i]t's consumption.

The only true lasting American value that's left: buyin' things! Buying things.

People spending money they don't have on things they don't need - MONEY THEY DON'T HAVE ON THINGS THEY DON'T NEED - so they can max out their credit cards and spend the rest of their lives paying 18% interest on something that cost 12.50! And they didn't like it when they got it home anyway.

Not too bright folks, not too... bright. But if you talk to one of them about this, if you isolate one of 'em, you sit them down rationally, and talk to them about the low IQs and the dumb behaviour and the bad decisions - right away they start talking about education.

That's the big answer to everything. Education! They say 'We need more money for education. We need more books, more teachers, more classrooms, more schools. We need more testing for the kids!' You say to 'em, "Well, you know, we've tried all of that and the kids still can't pass the tests!" "Ah, don't you worry about that, we're gonna lower the passing grades!"

And that's what they do in a lot of these schools now, they lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody's happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points, and pretty soon all you'll need to get into college is a... pencil! "Got a pencil? Get... in there, it's physics!"

Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do. "EDUCATION". Politicians know that word - they USE it on you. Politicians have traditionally hidden behind three things: the flag, the Bible, and children! 'No child left behind'"no child left behind".. Oh really? Well, it wasn't long ago you were talking about giving kids a head start! Head start...left behind? Someone's losing... ground here!

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the b****.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.

That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting f**** by a system that threw them overboard 30... years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly s*** jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this... place! Its a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, its the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich c*** who don’t give a f*** about you….they don’t give a f*** about you… they don’t give a F*** about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue... thats being jammed up their a*** everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

Its called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Herbert: For school success, bring children out of poverty

Bob Herbert of the New York Times published a column today (another one that I didn't see reprinted in today's Spartanburg Herald-Journal) titled "Separate and Unequal." With a title like that, I instantly assumed that he was talking about South Carolina, and I wasn't much disappointed.

"Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty," Herbert writes. "The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled."

If you live in South Carolina and still haven't seen "Corridor of Shame," Bud Ferillo's award-winning documentary film about the "corridor of shame" along our state's section of Interstate 95, I'm sure you can still buy a copy. I fully expected Herbert's column to refer abundantly to the film, but maybe he hasn't seen it yet.

Still, he rang many of the film's themes in his text:

Breaking up these toxic concentrations of poverty would seem to be a logical and worthy goal. Long years of evidence show that poor kids of all ethnic backgrounds do better academically when they go to school with their more affluent -- that is, middle class -- peers. But when the poor kids are black or Hispanic, that means racial and ethnic integration in the schools. Despite all the babble about a postracial America, that has been off the table for a long time.

More than a half-century after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling, we are still trying as a country to validate and justify the discredited concept of separate but equal schools -- the very idea supposedly overturned by Brown v. Board when it declared, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

"Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school," said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who specializes in education issues.

Read that again: Kahlenburg says, "Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school." What part of that sentence doesn't make perfect sense? It's all common sense. But it's part and parcel of our culture here.

Herbert then declares, "If you really want to improve the education of poor children, you have to get them away from learning environments that are smothered by poverty."

I've been re-reading some South Carolina history recently -- I highly recommend it to our elected leaders and, more importantly, their qualified electors. The major themes of our entire past -- from the settlement of Barbadian English at Charles Towne in 1670 to the present day -- have included maintaining separateness among our peoples: Charlestonians withholding power from Upstaters for generations, one race holding another bound and gagged, and "economic royalists" keeping the mass of our families in economic bondage from sharecropping through mill villages to the present-day "right-to-work-for-less." The notion of keeping ourselves stratified and separate is so ingrained in our culture that our leaders convulse at the thought of taking children out of poverty and guaranteeing them opportunities to thrive. One such convulsion taught us the phrase "minimally-adequate education." Is there anywhere else in America that "minimally-adequate education" is used to describe a state's goal?

Studies have shown that it is not the race of the students that is significant, but rather the improved all-around environment of schools with better teachers, fewer classroom disruptions, pupils who are more engaged academically, parents who are more involved, and so on. The poorer students benefit from the more affluent environment. "It's a much more effective way of closing the achievement gap," said Mr. Kahlenberg.

About 80 school districts across the country are taking steps to reduce the concentrations of poverty in their schools. But there is no getting away from the fact that if you try to bring about economic integration, you're also talking about racial and ethnic integration, and that provokes bitter resistance. The election of Barack Obama has not made true integration any more palatable to millions of Americans.

...
It's difficult, but there are ways to sidestep the politics. What I think is a shame is that we have to do all of this humiliating dancing around the perennially uncomfortable issue of race. We pretend that no one's a racist anymore, but it's easier to talk about pornography in polite company than racial integration. Everybody's in favor of helping poor black kids do better in school, but the consensus is that those efforts are best confined to the kids' own poor black neighborhoods.

Separate but equal. The Supreme Court understood in 1954 that it would never work. But our perpetual bad faith on matters of race keeps us trying.

On this date: Gov. James F. Byrnes speaks to The SCEA, 1951

There was a time in South Carolina when public education was such a priority to statesmen, and educators were such a potent and valued human resource, that governors came to address teachers at their annual gatherings. But there was a time, too, when South Carolina's leaders were statesmen.

Such was the case sixty years ago today when one of South Carolina's true statesmen, Governor James F. Byrnes, addressed the representative assembly of The South Carolina Education Association. It was the first of two such addresses to this body, this one in the first year of his term -- less than two months after his inauguration, in fact -- and the second coming in the last year of his term.

For those unfamiliar with Byrnes, it is no exaggeration to call him one of the greatest of South Carolina's products in the twentieth century and, indeed, he played an active role in shaping that century. His election to the governor's office was merely the cherry atop a long and storied life in public service.

As a young Congressman, Byrnes became a close and trusted ally to President Woodrow Wilson. Though Byrnes was associated with Sen. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, it was Byrnes who often influenced the older Tillman -- and for the better -- rather than the other way round. As a U.S. Senator, he supported Franklin Roosevelt's bid for the presidency and Roosevelt rewarded him with a seat on the United State Supreme Court -- making him only the third South Carolinian to serve on that body, and the only South Carolinian on the Supreme Court in the twentieth century.

But life on the court was too restrictive, and he resigned the seat before his second anniversary in it, first leading Roosevelt's Economic Stabilization Office, then the Office of War Mobilization. His influence was so great -- and his relationship with Roosevelt so close -- that he was nicknamed "Assistant President." Byrnes was believed to be Roosevelt's choice for vice president on the 1944 ticket, until Roosevelt chose Sen. Harry Truman of Missouri instead. Still, it was Byrnes who came with Roosevelt to the "Big Three" Conference at Yalta in 1945, and Byrnes served as Truman's Secretary of State until 1947.

To place Byrnes in more particular context, consider this: Upon his resignation as Secretary of State, he was succeeded by George Marshall, author of the "Marshall Plan" that rebuilt postwar Europe. Byrnes's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court is now held by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

So it was this statesman and confidante to three presidents who held South Carolina's chief executive office in 1951 -- taking over from former Governor Strom Thurmond, no less -- and who spoke to South Carolina's educators in Columbia sixty years ago today. As governor, the quality and easy access of the state's public schools to its children were paramount concern. As a former associate justice of the Supreme Court, he understood the gathering storm around public education as a civil right. As a native South Carolinian and politician, he understood the volatility of integration as a political issue, and he positioned himself as one earnestly seeking to equalize the quality of schools for black and white children, under a segregated system.

"It has been three-fourths of century since South Carolina faced a problem more serious than the one we face today," he began. "After the War for Southern Independence, reconstruction was a tremendous task. Second only to that is the task now confronting us to provide adequate educational facilities for the children of our State."

For those children we must provide new school buildings, more teachers, and better transportation. And we must try to preserve the Public School System. Every child in the State, white or colored, should have the opportunity for a full public school education. It must be our goal to see that each of them accepts that opportunity.

South Carolina must go forward. It cannot go forward without a new educational program. You cannot lift the State economically without raising the educational level of the people. Statistics will show that in the states where there is the greatest illiteracy there is the smallest per capita income.

I am sure you and all other South Carolinians were humiliated recently to read that during a three-months period last fall the rejection rate of draftees for military service, due to mental causes, was higher in South Carolina than in any other State in the Union. More than 60 percent of the men in this State were rejected. The rejection rate was 35 percent for the rest of the South.

I am convinced this humiliating rejection rate was due not so much to lack of intelligence as to lack of education.

Byrnes cited a litany of numbers: children going without education, never enrolling in schools; lamenting the poor shape of existing schools, and the "shifts" required of its instructors to serve all of their pupils; the fact that South Carolina was home to more school-age children than any other Southern state; and the fact that some classrooms were packed with 40 children.

So Byrnes described his proposed campaign for school construction and other educational improvements. He concluded that greater tax revenues were necessary to fund this program, so he advocated for the issuance of $75 million in bonds, and the implementation of a new sales tax, to finance it -- regardless of the political fallout.

But he recognized there were be vehement opposition to raising tax revenues to do what was inherently right, and he addressed it:

Naturally there is opposition to the Sales Tax. There is opposition to every tax, but I have failed to find any man who is really in favor of improving our educational facilities who will suggest a substitute tax plan.

I can understand the position of the man who thinks it is a waste of money to educate the children of people he calls "common people." He is willing that we should continue to have more illiteracy than any state in the Union. I disagree with him but I understand him.

I cannot understand the position of the man who says he is in favor of increasing teachers' salaries, improving the transportation system, constructing new school buildings, and yet opposes the sales tax and offers no substitute. He wants to help the children -- provided it does not cost him anything.

That cannot be done. It will cost money. But the education of our children is the primary duty of our State just as National Defense is the primary duty of the Federal Government.

When we properly discharge our duty, we make more difficult the task of those who would have the Federal Government control our schools.

Other Southern states have had to meet this problem. Practically every state in the South now has a sales tax. It is argued by some that it will be a greater burden to the poor. The benefits will be greater to the poor. It is among them that we find large families and their children cannot be sent to private schools.

Schools in our cities, as a rule, are well equipped. The schools in our small towns and rural areas are not. The one teacher schools in rural areas, having not more than 15 or 20 pupils cannot secure good teachers. Our people must realize that these schools should be consolidated. I want the boys and girls of small towns and rural areas to have opportunities in life equal to the boys and girls of cities.

Men and women who receive little or no education participate in the election of those who govern this State. Government will only be as intelligent as the electorate. Moreover, the cities of South Carolina cannot prosper economically unless the peoples of the rural areas are educated and can increase their incomes. The improvement of conditions in rural sections is of vital concern to every city.

Just as pressing was the issue of equal schools for children of both races, and Byrnes -- who might have voted on these matters himself if he'd remained on the Court -- spelled out his expectations:

Last spring there were pending in the United States Supreme Court two cases brought by Negroes, one against the University of Texas and one against the University of Oklahoma. These cases were based on the charge that facilities furnished Negroes of the Negro colleges of the two states were not equal to the facilities furnished in colleges for whites. The United States Government was not involved in the suit. However, the attorney general filed an argument. He did not ask for equal facilities. On behalf of the United States Government he asked that the Court abolish segregation in State supported colleges. The Court did not decide this issue. It held it was no necessary to the disposition of the cases in which the petitioners asked only for equal facilities.

Last fall, after the election of this Legislature, some Negroes who had brought a suit against Clarendon County, asking for equal facilities, abandoned that suit. But they instituted a new suit, asking that the provisions of our constitution and statutes requiring separate schools for the races, be held unconstitutional.

...
That case will be tried before a three-Judge Court in Charleston the last week of May. I do not see how a Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals and two District Judges can reverse a decision of the Supreme Court which has been the law of the land for more than a half century. They may express their desire to do so but only the Supreme Court can reverse a decision of the Supreme Court.

No matter what may be the decision of the Court in Charleston, the case will go to the Supreme Court of the United States. My hope is that the record to be considered by that Court will show that regardless of how we may have failed in the past to provide substantially equal facilities, that a courageous and forward looking Legislature has enacted a law providing an educational program that will improve facilities for Negro children as well as for white children. I hope, too, it can show that the Governor of this State has said he will use what influence he has to accomplish that end.

Then, adopting the same strident tone that Sen. Thurmond would adopt in his failed bid for the presidency in 1948, Byrnes declared that South Carolina "will not now nor for some years to come, mix white and colored children in our schools. In the Reconstruction Days, a carpetbag government tried to do it and failed. A Democratic administration cannot now do what a Republican administration could not then do."

His next words were a strange admonition of things to come, far and long beyond the fight for civil rights and even into the century he wouldn't live to see: "If the Court changes what is now the law of the land, we will, if it is possible, live within the law, preserve the public school system, and at the same time maintain segregation. If that is not possible, reluctantly we will abandon the public school system."

He predicted that under such circumstances, school buildings "could be sold or leased" by the state, perhaps to parochial school interests. He imagined that the state might return the amount of tax revenues then being spent on public schools to parents, and "permit them to pay for the education of their children."

He acknowledged, "The difficulty, of course, is that many of those who most need education would not be sent to school. Now we find it difficult to get many children to attend free schools."

He told educators that he did not want these speculations to come to fruition, but he understood South Carolina's people and their predilections. In his conclusion, he turned to the state's educators for aid, and delivered sentiments that sound absolutely foreign to modern educators' ears:

No matter how serious may be the problems ahead of us, I know that the State can rely upon the loyal and intelligent assistance of the teachers of our schools.

I have an exalted idea of the importance of your profession. I resent the charge that this Association has no purpose other than to make efforts to increase your salaries. You fashion the thinking of the children of our State. You influence their lives. I believe you have at heart the future of your pupils, as well as your own future. I believe from your group meetings here you have benefitted and will be better able to help your schools.

The life of a teacher must be a life of sacrifice. To teach you must spend four years at college, and, in addition, you must continue to study as long as you teach. The college graduate who enters your profession cannot hope to receive the compensation of the doctor, the lawyer, the bricklayer, and the plumber. You may receive compensation equal to that of a preacher. You are entitled to compensation that will enable you to maintain a standard of living demanded by your profession. But, you do have a compensation greater than your financial reward. You see your pupils go out into the world. When one makes good in life, it must bring to you a satisfaction second only to the satisfaction of the parents of that pupil.

I ask God to bless you. I ask it with earnestness because upon you depends in great measure the character of the men and women who will guide this State in the days ahead of us.

Among Jimmy Byrnes's great gifts was prescience, as his predictions largely came to pass: The Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education changed the expectations of South Carolina's system of public education, to the anger and resentment of many citizens. The several years it took to integrate the schools gave segregationists time to establish "segregation academies," many of which still exist. Byrnes's premonition that the state would abandon its public school system is still playing out today, despite a few progressive spasms -- Governor Richard Riley's statesmanly efforts spring to mind -- in the intervening years. And his speculation that lawmakers would attempt to divert public funds to private schools has come to life in the form of vouchers, "opportunity scholarships" and "tuition tax credits."

It was a powerful presentation, delivered by a gifted and skillful state leader, to those he considered to stand among the state's most important citizens -- for their impact on the state's most precious element, its children.

That, it seems, is history.