North Carolina transplant reflects on South Carolina home

Mary Garrison, now a resident of Flat Rock, North Carolina, and a columnist for the Blue Ridge Times-News, published this weekend a reverie of her old home in South Carolina.

"How often have we heard the familiar phrase 'Times have changed'?" Garrison writes. "These past two weeks, I have thought a lot about the timeline of history and change. I just returned from a visit to South Carolina, where I lived in my childhood. In my lifespan, South Carolina has seen some modulations."

Modulations. Fluctuations. Ups and downs. The good times and the bad times.

Well, we are given to euphemisms in our South. Have a predilection for 'em.

Perhaps you have heard this saying: South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. This famous phrase is attributed to S.C. anti-secessionist James L. Petigru in 1861. I can occasionally repeat this, but if someone else pokes fun at South Carolina, I take offense.

The S.C. slogan I prefer is “Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places.”

Oh, it's a great day in South Carolina. Soo-perlative.

But I digress. The object of the trip was some rest and relaxation. In a beautiful city like Charleston, you are bound to rub elbows with the past, for history oozes from every street corner. It was too chilly to be outdoors, so we pursued house tours and museums.

Many Charleston visitors think the Old City Market on Bay Street is where slaves were auctioned. In fact, this happened on Chalmers Street. We discovered the Old Slave Mart Museum when wandering down that cobblestone lane.

I have read slave narratives, written about slavery and seen old photos and newspapers. Somehow, it was more disturbing to stand in a building where people were once bought and sold. Ryan’s Mart, as it was known in the 1800s, was once a complex of four buildings: an auction gallery, a slave jail, a kitchen and a morgue.

The auction house operated from July 1856 to November 1863, in response to a Charleston ordinance prohibiting street auctions. It is the only known extant building in South Carolina that conducted these auctions. Three of the buildings in the complex were destroyed. The auction gallery/museum remains.

It is not a large museum, but there is a lot to learn. There are copies of posters advertising slave sales. It was sobering seeing real people’s names, reading about their skills and the price listings. There are recordings of people who were enslaved, collected by interviewers with the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s.

As one of the Charleston visitor guides (Charleston Gateway-Winter 2012) tells us, a lot of people are aware that there was transatlantic slave trading. Not so many of us know that our Constitution banned the international trade after 1808. This began the rise of domestic sales. More than 2 million enslaved people were sold and relocated in the domestic slave trade between 1789 and 1861.

Wandering down another Charleston street, we found the Heyward-Washington House. Thomas Heyward Jr. was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. President George Washington stayed in his home in 1791.

A well-qualified member of South Carolina's ruling class was the honorable but peculiar young Heyward, who finished his education in England, and who lost a good bit of his fortune in slaves while languishing a while in an English prison in St. Augustine. He narrowly escaped death by drowning; upon his release from prison and during a voyage to Philadelphia, he slipped into the drink and preserved himself by clinging to the ship's rudder until his rescue.

Still he served, as expected, as a judge and congressman, and helped draft the state Constitution of 1790, and left a passel of children by two successive wives, one descendent of which was DuBose Heyward, author of "Porgy," which made a fine opera called "Porgy and Bess" about slaves begging and otherwise enjoying life in Charleston's Cabbage Row, renamed Catfish Row. A handsome segregation academy was opened in Heyward's name in Ridgeland in 1970.

Ironically, our guide informed us that a subsequent owner of the Heyward-Washington House was Judge John Grimke, also a slave owner. His two daughters, Sarah and Angelina, relocated to the North as adults. They were the first female abolitionists who had lived within the institution of slavery in the South. Angelina Grimke also became the first American woman to address a government body.

Alas, it wasn't a government body in South Carolina that Miss Grimke addressed. Deciding that she could not agree with the required pledge to join her father's Episcopalian Church at age 13, she chose instead to become Presbyterian at age 21. But she insisted upon teaching her father's slaves and, at age 24, she dared to ask slaveholding members of her congregation to renounce slavery on the grounds that holding slaves violated Christian law.

Her fellow Presbyterian worshippers didn't agree that slaveholding was a Christian sin, so she left them; they sealed the deal by expelling her formally. She became a Quaker and tried to convert her social peers in Charleston. This was a hard sell, as Quakers were purposefully drab, and Charleston's social elite were purposefully ostentatious. Miss Grimke left for Philadelphia; even there she stood out as an aggressive abolitionist.

In order to find audience for an educated woman's voice, she ultimately had to travel to Massachusetts, where she addressed the subject before the Massachusetts State House in 1837.

An author as well as a public speaker, Miss Grimke published in 1836 a little essay titled "An Appeal to Christian Women of the South," emphasizing the importance of universal public education, including the education of African-Americans. Here in South Carolina, her books were burned. She lived to see slavery abolished, but not long enough to see adoption of her other great crusade, a woman's right to vote.

Thinking again about time and change, I recall attending public schools in Charleston from 1960-64. Per-pupil spending for the 1961-62 school year was $267.11 at white schools and $169.75 at black schools. There were numerous lawsuits that occurred before black parents were allowed to enroll their children in white schools. Some newspapers at that time actually published the names and places of employment of black parents who chose to send their children to white schools, leaving these parents vulnerable in many ways.

Peter Lau's terrific study, "Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Quality since 1865," names the Times and Democrat of Orangeburg as one newspaper that published the names of 57 men and women who signed a petition asking for an end to segregation in 1955. Many lost their jobs, Lau reports; "sharecroppers evicted, credit and charge accounts revoked, and white-owned supply companies refused to deliver goods to black retailers." City leaders even organized a "White Citizens Council," but that's a topic for another extended blog post.

The schools first desegregated in 1963, when I was 11 years old. It was a tough transition. There were schoolyard fights, shunning, bullying and bomb scares at my school. It was an emotional time. Tragically, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated that same year.

Having lived through this, I cannot help but notice the contrasts between the student populations of two elementary schools in our own community that have been featured in the news so much in recent days. Though per-pupil spending is not the issue here, do we want a divergent situation like this in our community? Surely our school leaders and school board members can collectively make a wise decision to remedy this. I have read with interest the comments and concerns of Donnie Parks and letters to the editor from the teachers involved. We don’t want to return to the inequitable ways of yesterday.

Garrison is clearly talking about her new home in North Carolina. Back here in South Carolina, per-pupil spending remains an issue -- we're trying to get back from 1996 levels to at least 1997 levels -- and school funding inequity hasn't yet been addressed. (Paging Chief Justice Toal? Paging Chief Justice Toal.)

The change in climate in Charleston today is noticeable. I lived there when the Civil War Centennial was celebrated. Conflict over desegregation took center stage, and slavery was not talked about and best forgotten.

Celebrated? You mean, like the sesquicentennial celebration that began with a Secession Ball in Charleston in December 2010?

Today, the City of Charleston owns the slave museum, and the tourism industry proudly promotes African-American heritage tours and Gullah festivals at area historic sites. This side of history is being told. The Sesquicentennial Celebration has a different flavor. The contributions and roles of enslaved people are now part of the dialogue.

Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Yes, the contributions and roles of enslaved people have become part of a commercial tourism industry. I don't think I'd jump to conclude they're part of a dialogue quite yet. It's hard to get to reconciliation when we're permanently stuck on the Bourbon Restoration.

Wherever you live, there is much one can learn during Black History Month. In our own community, we had the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a community of freed slaves. If you missed the story in last Sunday’s paper, go back and read it.

In Flat Rock, the summer community of many Charleston people, there in the cemetery amid descendants of the signers of the Declaration of Independence is another section that was once overgrown. Church members restored the plot and made small crosses to mark each grave. A bronze tablet bears this inscription: “Here lie the Members of the Church of St. John in the Wilderness who were Slaves, Freedmen and Their Children.”

We're not there yet. But if you should find the grave of a slave who served in the Confederate army, we'll still mount a shiny black plaque on it. It won't be a grand granite marker at a courthouse next to any Confederate monuments or on any other public lands, of course -- let's not be foolish -- but a dignified little plaque that will show the slave served his Confederate nation adequately.

As they say, times have changed. Let’s make sure we cultivate and maintain a positive atmosphere of that change in our own community and in our schools.

Agreed.

Horry students win prizes for historical essays

Congratulations to the students of Horry County who participated in the essay contest co-sponsored by the Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School Museum and Education Center in Myrtle Beach and Horry County Schools Adult Education. An awards program was held last week at the Center.

Students were to write a poem or short essay on the theme “One Person Can Make a Difference,” which was to honor unsung African-American heroes. Their subjects could be famous people from past or present, or someone from their everyday life.

All three winners in the elementary school division were from Pee Dee Elementary School: first place, Ivy Tucker; second place, Taina Diaz; third place, Ayeshia Bostic; and their teacher, Denise Armour.

For middle school, the winners were: first place, De’Ericka Jackson, Myrtle Beach Middle School, Cindy Garcia; second place, Isabel Galeono, Forestbrook Middle School, Stephanie Necessary; third place, Madison Belissary, Myrtle Beach Middle, Annette Nerone.

For high school, first place, Holly Edwards, Loris High School, Danny McPherson; second place, Alexis Halyard, Socastee High School, Bobby Chandler; third place, Madeline Cook, Conway High School, Kelly Wilson.

The first-place winners from each category read their essays at the event. They received book-store gift cards, as well as monetary awards donated by Jewel John in memory of her late husband, Walter John.

Second- and third-place winners received their essays commemorated on a plaque along with gift bags.

Didn't know anything about the Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School Museum and Education Center? It too has a fascinating story to share.

The original four-room, wood-framed Myrtle Beach Colored School opened in 1932 as a product of segregated times. Previously, African-American students were educated in local churches, since they could not attend the official “white” schools. Having a school to call their own was a great advancement and source of pride, and the Myrtle Beach Colored School fulfilled a vital role in the African-American community during that period of transition and growth.

The need for the Myrtle Beach Colored School was eliminated in 1953 with the opening of Carver Training School. No longer in use, the old schoolhouse served as a warehouse for a while, but eventually languished in the heart of the neighborhoods that it once served and fostered. Yet former students never forgot their class time there, even when the building itself, untended and unpainted for two decades, had become an eyesore. They wanted to preserve this tangible piece of Myrtle Beach’s past and, with crystal vision, could see beyond the building’s now-shabby outward appearance to its essential role and function as a cornerstone of the community.

As early as 1978, a group of former students tried to save the school, but the task of buying property and raising restoration funds was too great. In 2001, when the building’s days truly were numbered by an imminent road-widening project, the City of Myrtle Beach answered their call for help. City Council appointed former students, community representatives and other interested parties to a newly created committee charged with the task of saving the school. Council also provided $10,000 in “seed money” to help the committee with fund-raising.

Unfortunately, as everyone discovered when the old school was surveyed, the building itself could not be saved. Time and weather had taken their toll, and the wooden structure had deteriorated beyond salvage. Even if the committee could find the money to restore the original, it was in no condition to be moved from the site. With this option gone, the City of Myrtle Beach contributed $27,000 and the South Carolina Department of Transportation added $10,000 to deconstruct the building and store the pieces in a donated warehouse until funds for a new building could be raised.

With the site of the old school about to be halved by the new road, Burroughs & Chapin Company, Inc., offered to donate a site nearby, less than two blocks away, where a new “old” school could be rebuilt. This land donation, valued at $93,000, along with City Council’s pledge of up to $350,000 in construction money, gave the former students hope that their dream might be realized. Toward that end, the group renamed itself the Historic Myrtle Beach Colored School Museum and Education Center Committee, as proof of its intentions.

The former students were adamant about two things. First, they believed the school should retain its original name. To them, it had always been the Myrtle Beach Colored School, and they were unconcerned with whether that name might be uncomfortable or politically incorrect. Segregation was wrong, but it happened, and changing the name now was an unthinkable act of revisionist history. Second, they strongly believed that the school should continue to serve in an educational capacity. It wasn’t enough to create a museum to the past; the new building also should provide a service to the community.

Clyburn: South Carolina still exhibits "strain of resistance"

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn is living history, having been present through some significant tribulations of the 1960s in South Carolina. In addition, he's a great guy, an encyclopedic resource and, as House Majority and Minority Whip, he's one of the most powerful men ever to serve in the U.S. House from South Carolina.

So when he speak in his district, or across the state, it's a good idea to pay attention. This week, he was at South Carolina State University for a two-day conference on the civil rights movement, co-sponsored by Richland School District 2. As part of his intended topic for discussion, relationship-building, he delivered a lesson in South Carolina history.

Clyburn served as the featured speaker during a Friday morning session in the auditorium of the university’s Fine Arts Center. Clyburn said the conference was important and highlighted a “strain of resistance” that still exists in the state.

“I think it’s still there,” said Clyburn, who referenced the early beginnings of the university as a land-grant institution, one whose development was resisted by the state.

S.C. State’s beginning was based on the passage of the First Morrill Act of 1862, which permitted states to receive federal support in the form of land to establish colleges or universities. As prescribed by the Act, land-grant institutions were mandated to teach agriculture, military tactics and mechanical arts. In 1890, Congress passed the Second Morrill Act. This provision inspired the creation of the nation’s 17 historically black land-grant colleges, also known as 1890 institutions. The Act required that states in the then-segregated South establish institutions of higher education for blacks.

“South Carolina State is an 1890 school. When these land grant institutions were first established, South Carolina was resistant to establishing the school. The reason the school is here is because the Methodist Church gave the property. That’s how the school got next to Claflin,” Clyburn said.

“It’s a strain of resistance to all things federal in this state. That’s what you get when you see people who say they don’t want to accept federal dollars. It is all about anti-federal government. That still exists in significant numbers of people and, I think, too many people.”

Clyburn's absolutely right, and a full series of lectures could be made on that singular point: South Carolina resists all things federal.

Funny thing is, it wasn't always so. South Carolina's delegates to the Constitution Convention supported -- LOVED -- the idea of a nation united under a federal system, so long as they believed they could control or influence it. That sentiment remained until the Tariff Act of 1828, when they realized that not everyone honored their sense of superiority. Suddenly, South Carolina's ruling elite felt they were being penalized as a minority by a Congressional majority sympathetic to northern manufacturing interests.

Isn't that a hoot? Cotton planters -- plantation owners, our aristocracy -- loved the federal government until they felt like a minority whose interests weren't being protected, and then they turned on the government. As early as that year -- 1828, when the Constitution was only 41 years old-- South Carolinians began talking about secession. If they could not control the nation, they'd rather not participate in it.

Want to hear another odd fact? Not all whites agreed with this sentiment. South Carolina voters in 1852 -- which meant white men who had money and land -- voted not to secede from the nation if seceding meant South Carolina would be alone. And to put the cherry on top of this point: Eight years later, when secessionist fervor had struck its height after the election of Abraham Lincoln, no new referendum was held to check voters' present views on secession. Why not? Because if voters once again opted against secession, secessionists among South Carolina's ruling elite class wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.

Lesson: Better to deprive the proletariat of their voice than to have them speak and embarrass you. Ah, sweet South Carolina.

With his love of history, Clyburn makes a great story himself.

Clyburn, who was elected president of his youth NAACP chapter at age 12, recalled his early days in the struggle for civil rights. In 1960, he was among the student leaders who, in concert with others in North Carolina, led sit-ins that resulted their arrests and the eventual integration of higher education across the South.

He was chosen as the star witness in an Orangeburg civil disobedience case defended by the late Matthew Perry, South Carolina’s first African-American federal district judge and a S.C. State alumnus. That case developed from the arrests of 388 college students. Clyburn was later jailed during the march on the state capitol that resulted in the landmark breach of the peace case, Edwards v. South Carolina.

“This conference is a good thing because I think that so many of the problems that we have in our relationships with each other is that we have not learned to really get to know each other, to understand each other and the background experiences that I think are important to what made this country what it is today,” Clyburn said.

“The extent to which we learn to appreciate each other’s contributions to the overall order of things will determine how successful we’ll be as a nation,” he said.

Clyburn said the divisiveness in Washington across party lines is no different than the divisiveness exemplified in earlier history, including with the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Strom, whose ancestors and heirs, legacies and legends are woven indelibly into the tapestry of our state. Striving for some element by which to inscribe his name into national history, he chose race hatred -- knowing that if his biracial daughter's existence were to become known, there would never have been a local school superintendent, governor or senator by his name.

“There is no more divisiveness in Washington than it has been historically in this country. ... There are certain things we don’t like to talk about in this country” including race, he said. He said he never thought he’d see an African-American president in his lifetime, noting that race still matters because some issues involving Barack Obama “have a significant race element to it, and we know it.”

Clyburn said the creation of a “more perfect union” in the United States will be an ongoing process.

“That’s in our Preamble to the Constitution and what we’re working on every day,” he said.

Dr. Larry Watson, an associate professor of history at S.C. State, said the conference was important because there is an overall “lack of understanding” of the Civil Rights Movement.

“As teachers of history, we’ve come to understand and recognize that a lot of the history of the Civil Rights Movement is not being taught to today’s students,” Watson said. “They have a lack of understanding of it. The Civil Rights Movement is a very complex movement, and a lot of our teachers are not adequately prepared to teach it.”

He added, “We view this conference as a means to reach out to teachers to learn more about the movement, gain more resources and take advantage of the immense amount of primary sources that are still available in terms of pictures, music and living testimonials.”

Thank you, Dr. Watson and Representative Clyburn.

Gonzales recalled on 109th anniversary of his murder

A note for the state's history teachers and buffs among us: Brad Warthen exhumed the memory of Narciso G. Gonzales, co-founder of The State, on his blog today. Warthen has a modern-day anecdote to share, but the example of Gonzales is a powerful one about political power in its own right. After all, how many lieutenant governors of South Carolina have pre-meditatedly murdered an editor of The State newspaper, had their trials moved from Richland to Lexington in order to find more sympathetic juries, and been completely acquitted?

Only one, and the murderous lieutenant governor's name was James Tillman. If the name rings familiar, it should. Tillman was the nephew of "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, former governor and sitting U.S. Senator at the time of his nephew's rampage on Gonzales.

Here's Warthen's take:

N.G. and his brother founded The State in 1891 for a specific purpose: to oppose the Ben Tillman machine. N.G. wrote the editorials, which lambasted the Tillmanites with a vehemence that would shock most newspaper readers in my lifetime, but which was par for the course in those days.

One of the targets of editorial vitriol was James H. Tillman, Ben’s nephew. James was the lieutenant governor, and aspired to be governor. N.G. wasn’t having it, and criticized him heavily during the 1902 campaign. Tillman lost. Not long after that, on January 15, 1903, N.G. was walking home for lunch. The newspaper office then was on Main St., and Gonzales had to turn the corner of Main and Gervais to get home. As he approached the corner, Tillman headed his way, coming from the Senate side of the State House with a couple of senators.

Tillman went straight up to Gonzales, drew a gun, and shot him in cold blood. He did this in the presence of many witnesses, including a policeman.

As N.G. fell, he cried, “Shoot again, you coward!” As one who inherited his mission of writing editorials for The State, I’ve always been proud of him for that.

He died four days later.

Cold blood.

And this happened at a time when "Gonzales" didn't necessarily carry the ethnic baggage that our immigrant-averse conservative society abhors today. Narciso's father had been a Cuban revolutionary against Spain -- which made him a military hero in America even before he attained the rank of Colonel in the Confederate army, protecting South Carolina.

And on his mother's side, Gonzales was bona fide South Carolina aristocracy: his mother Harriet was an Elliott, descended from Rutledges. (Note: The state department of education is found today in a structure called the Rutledge Building.) Long story short: Narciso Gonzales was somebody.

Warthen continues the tale:

Tillman was arrested and charged with the murder, of course, but the defense obtained a change of venue to the friendlier Lexington County. A strategy of self-defense was attempted, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Then, the defense entered N.G.’s editorials into evidence.

The jury acquitted Tillman. The ostensible reason was self-defense, but since there was nothing to support that — Gonzales was unarmed and not threatening Tillman in any way — it has always been assumed that the jury let him off because the son-of-a-bitch editor had it comin’.

There are some more salient bits to that trial: The change of venue came thanks to the intervention of Senator "Pitchfork" Ben himself, who then attended one day of the trial, just to hold the farmers on the jury in awe -- and likely in fear. Tillman was still one of the most powerful men in government, and wasn't particularly attentive to scruples or to consistency of judgment. Pitchfork's somewhat sympathetic biographer, Francis Butler Simkins, quotes him saying, "Jim Tillman was my nephew, and blood is thicker than water." John Hammond Moore, in his book "Carnival of Blood," adds that Tillman's "jail quarters were soon outfitted with new furniture, books and other comforts..."

Simkins continues,

He tried to influence the verdict by attempting to create the belief that acquittal was inevitable and by unsuccessfully attempting to insert in a newspaper a fictitious interview by what he called a "suppositious citizen." He assisted in paying the expenses of the case and at the trial sat among the defense lawyers...

That's not all. Pitchfork's intercession was successful at getting a hand-picked judge to hear the case: Frank Gary, nephew of revered Confederate General Martin Gary, whose fame stems from declaring at Appomattox, "South Carolina does not surrender."

And how did South Carolinians, we who love virtue and despise injustice, react to Pitchfork's outrageous intervention and display?

We re-elected him, of course -- twice more -- to represent us in the U.S. Senate.

Want one more twist that isn't likely taught in our history books?

Tillman's prosecutor in the Gonzales murder trial was Solicitor John William Thurmond, new father of an infant named Strom, less than a year old.

And one more? John Hammond Moore explains,

Thurmond, it might be noted, had sought out Jim Tillman to defend him when he was charged with the murder of Willie Harris, a drug salesman, in March 1897. Now their roles were dramatically reversed. As solicitor, Thurmond was trying to convict the man who, only six years before, had saved him from prison and possibly even a trip to the gallows.

What a tangled web is our state's history.

More than just being somebody, Gonzales was beloved by Columbia. Moore writes that upon hearing of the editor's death,

Forty-eight hours later, businesses closed throughout the city and hundreds stood in the rain outside a packed Trinity Episcopal Church to pay tribute to Narciso Gonzales.

Another source adds,

Gonzales’ funeral that year was the largest ever, second only to the recent burial of Wade Hampton the year prior, and the outpouring of his colleagues and friends resulted in the monument to his memory in 1905. In granite, the words are etched, “A great editor, an eminent citizen, an honest man….the measure of success is not what we get out of life but what we leave after it.” It has been rumored that the monument, which stands at Senate and Sumter Streets, stands not at the site where Gonzales was murdered, but was placed in the path James H. Tillman normally took on his walk home from the State House, so that he would have to see Gonzales’ monument as a constant reminder of his misdeeds. Tillman died eight years later in Asheville, N.C. in 1911, it seems much diminished socially, politically, and personally after this affair.

You'll notice that the state did not erect a monument to this newspaper editor, this victim of political power on steroids, this martyr to free speech; his friends had to do it.

As for Pitchfork Ben, we have only to visit the State House grounds to see our state's reverie for him.