It may seem odd to talk about African Americans with Appalachian roots. Many Americans perceive the mountain regions as a “white space,” populated primarily by the Scots-Irish or German immigrants who exterminated or removed most of the Native Americans who had lived there originally. These whites are viewed as farmers with small landholdings who generally did not support slavery or own enslaved persons, in contrast to the British-descended plantation owners along the Atlantic coast enslaving hundreds per plantation. Scholarly research has shown, however, that thousands of African Americans were enslaved in the mountain counties of the Appalachians prior to 1865, working small farms, operating mills and smithies, and generally enhancing the capital of their white owners and those who profited from their labor. After emancipation, most of these newly freed blacks remained near their mountain homes and founded “freedom colonies” like Liberia. They stayed because they knew how to farm the land and they hoped that separated family members might return to the area to find them.

In these communities, African Americans were free from the controlling gaze and restrictive laws of their former masters; they could speak their minds, practice their traditions, educate their children, and worship God in their own way. But we don’t often hear their stories because black descendants lacked the resources to document their family stories and white historians often downplayed, ignored, or remained unaware of the existence of these places and their histories. Liberia’s story is a case in point.

Typically, freedom colonies were separate from white residential areas, situated on land given to formerly enslaved people, traded for their labor, or sold to them outright. By 1865, the area called Liberia, located in the Blue Ridge foothills of upper South Carolina, had a school and a church, Soapstone Baptist. Other than these structures, the “community” of Liberia (like many others in the mountains) consisted of an unincorporated area of family farms scattered across two counties, connected by social interactions between neighbors and friends. Expanding into several hundreds of people during Reconstruction, the community slowly began to fade under Jim Crow restrictions and due to better economic opportunities elsewhere. By the Depression, most black residents had abandoned their farms of cotton and corn for a better life. Today, only a few members of one black extended family live within walking distance of Soapstone Baptist Church; they either are retired or employed in the area’s surrounding cities, just like their rural white neighbors.

Through omission or misrepresentation, local white historians typically have portrayed black enclaves like Liberia either as relatively recent arrivals to traditional white spaces or as collaborators in their own oppression. For example, one local white-authored history described Liberia’s residents as living in “congenial cooperation” with their rural white neighbors. As Liberia’s oral history documents, frequently this has not been true.

For example, according to a family will, on September 4, 1844, Alfred Hester, the owner of an enslaved woman named Chanie, bequeathed her and her child Emerson to Hester’s son, James. Fighting for the Confederacy in the War Between the States, James Hester left his Pickens County farm in the care of his enslaved overseer, Emerson. After freedom, Emerson took the name “Camp” (later Kemp), registered to vote, married, and moved into the Liberia community, along with his mother and hundreds of other freed people.

The founder of Soapstone Baptist Church had been enslaved as well. Joseph McJunkin (his descendants told) was originally from Georgia but was carried to River Falls, a plantation deep in the Blue Ridge coves of present-day Greenville County. While Joseph’s half-brother John killed his enslavers and fled to Ohio, Joseph was sold to a white woman who also may have been his lover. After the Civil War, Joseph took the surname McJunkin, acquired land in upper Greenville County, raised a family and founded several churches. Despite legal challenges to their property boundaries by an expensive gated community, McJunkin’s descendants still own land in the area.

Joseph McJunkin’s granddaughter Lula married a Liberia resident named Chris Owens, and the couple became well-known Liberia residents. The couple were forced to defend their community multiple times. For example, when Liberia’s one-room schoolhouse closed in 1953 due to statewide consolidation of isolated country schools into better-equipped and more substantial (but still segregated) buildings, Lula McJunkin Owens was told by the county school superintendent, who was white, that he had no intention of sending a school bus up to Liberia to transport the few remaining black children to school in the nearby towns of Pickens and Easley. The granddaughter of former slaves was told that the black children needed no further education, and instead she should just put them to work on the farm. Outraged, Owens demanded a bus, threatening to contact state officials if necessary. She prevailed.

In April 1967, on the evening Lula Owens celebrated her 71st birthday, the wooden Soapstone Baptist Church and a neighboring black-owned home burned to the ground. According to local newspapers, the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) suspected arson, and eyewitnesses reported that a message from the Ku Klux Klan had been written in the dust of the parking lot. Still, there is no record of any investigation by SLED; most white neighbors do not remember the incident at all. Almost immediately afterward, Lula Owens led a rebuilding campaign, supported by black and white residents, and the new Soapstone Baptist Church continues to meet.

One of the best-known residents of the Liberia area was the first known matriarch of the Owens family, an enslaved woman named Katie, owned by several local white families before 1865. After her emancipation, “Aunt” Katie moved to the Liberia area and gained regional recognition among her black and white neighbors for being a midwife, cook, and seamstress; she also farmed her own land. Owens became so well-known that local newspapers twice wrote about her, in a profile from 1927 and in her obituary a year later.

But these stories, too, are filtered through a white lens of paternalism and obfuscation due to the Jim Crow era. Owens’s obituary noted that she “made her home with some of the best families before the ’60s,” but the truth was that she “made her home” with these families because she had no choice—she was their property. Soon after the war she married, her obituary continues, “and to her were born three children.” Although Katie Owens was married at the time, the writer obscured the parentage. According to Owens family history, the father/fathers of Katie’s children was/were white, and the relationship/s had not been consensual. “That’s why you see our color,” one lighter-complexioned Owens descendant joked.

Today, while descendants of Liberia’s founders live in widely scattered places, only a few members of the Owens family still live within walking distance of Soapstone Baptist Church. While residents recognize a significant decrease in racial tension between today’s South Carolina and decades past, a few lingering issues remain, as they do in the United States in general. For this reason and others, it is critical to document stories about places like Liberia and to demonstrate the resolve and resiliency of black residents through centuries of enslavement, inequality, segregation, and racism. Today, the matriarch of the Owens family works with white and black community members to preserve Liberia’s history. Her work brings a crucial black perspective to the local white narrative and an important contribution to the history of the state and nation.

The post The Black Freedom Colonies of Appalachia Where Former Slaves ‘Could Speak Their Minds’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This obscure community has always traced its history back to an Ottoman refugee who reputedly served the colonial cause in the Revolutionary War. A brief version of their traditional narrative holds that a “Caucasian of Arab descent,” known as Joseph Benenhaley (or Yusef ben Ali, possibly his Ottoman name), made his way from the Old World to South Carolina, where he served as a scout for General Sumter during the American Revolution. The grateful general then gave Benenhaley some land on his plantation to farm and raise a family, the story went. A few outsiders married in; but most who identified with the ostracized community and their progeny considered themselves people of Turkish descent. Amazingly, they persevered as an enclosed society—numbering several hundred persons in the area by the mid-20th century.

For many years the Turkish people’s origin story was usually considered no more than myth, a fable concocted to sustain an out-group through unpleasant realities of hard history. In 1973, a historian put it this way: “A stranger visiting Sumter County today may come across a baffling breed called ‘Turks’…. So meager are the facts relating to them that the wildest conjectures, based on what must surely be flight of fancy and geographical ignorance, have been advanced to support their origin.” Still, members of the group persisted in claiming Turkish descent, and now we—a political scientist and a Turkish descendant—have confirmed the group’s traditional narrative and beleaguered history, through original research and oral interviews.

The Turkish people didn’t fit cleanly into the broader black versus white paradigm in that part of South Carolina. They adhered to an ancestral understanding that they were “white people,” but outside the Dalzell area, where most lived, they were shunned. Like their black neighbors, they were subject to insults, intimidation, and systemic oppression. The Turkish people had to go to federal court to be able to send their children to “white schools” during the 1950s, and only in the past few decades have they begun to enjoy the full blessings of American life—things like getting good jobs in mainstream society, accessing health care at local hospitals, shopping at community businesses, or participating in Little League baseball, without being turned away or treated as second-class citizens.

So who, exactly, were these Turkish people? Were they really an Ottoman Turk’s descendants who had endured as a distinct ethnic community, against long odds, in backwoods South Carolina?

Students and their teacher at the Dalzell School for Turks, probably photographed in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Greg Thompson Collection.

The Turkish people have always been extremely skittish about genetic testing, but we obtained DNA sequences for eight direct descendants of the supposed patriarch, Joseph Benenhaley. Though such testing has its problems, it can be useful in combination with other research. In this case, the results for the eight subjects were consistent with ancestry including a Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/North African progenitor, with substantial white European admixture, some evidence of Native American linkages, and no significant sub-Saharan African contribution.

We also compiled a genealogical census of 270 Joseph Benenhaley descendants who lived in the Dalzell area during the 1800s, a number we deemed sufficient to judge the social character of that family settlement in its formative generations. The accounting showed important patterns: People with the Benenhaley last name comprised slightly over half (51 percent) of the individuals in the group, and the six intermarried families accounted for almost all of the names in the confined community. This was consistent with the stories we’d heard about a community that has always revolved around the family, their school, their church, their farms, and whatever jobs they could find in the Dalzell area.

Finally, we surveyed graveyards at the two churches that served as principal places of worship for the Turkish people during the 1900s; and our count of Benenhaleys buried in both was equally impressive. Benenhaleys again comprised a slight majority (51 percent) of interred individuals, and the same six family surnames accounted for virtually all of the individuals resting in peace in those cemeteries. Also, few individuals with Turkish-community names were buried outside the Dalzell area, attesting to the isolation of that group. All these findings, and others, suggest very strongly that the Turkish people did indeed endure as an enclosed ethnic community—originating from Joseph Benenhaley and known as “the Turks”—in rural South Carolina for almost two centuries.

Getting Turkish elders to talk about themselves was a difficult task—bad memories still bothered many of them. As one scholar reported in the 1970s, “The mood of the community strictly opposes any sort of historical investigation. The people will tell any would-be historian that they don’t know anything, don’t think that anyone else does either, don’t see any point in it, and think that he should go talk to some other member of the community.” However, four brave souls—“Boaz,” “Helen,” “Jean,” and “Tonie” (all adopting pseudonyms because feelings still run high in this area)—talked to us about their personal lives and community experience.

Our discussions with the Turkish people about their origins rambled, owing to the fuzzy interplay of ancestry and ethnicity. Still, all four stated that they were white people of Turkish descent; and they related their origins to General Sumter having brought their ancestors to Sumter County. Boaz explained their confidence and pride in the traditional narrative. “I assume I accepted it just like anyone else who would have been from whatever ethnic background they were from,” he said. “That’s who I am…and I hold my head high.”

Regarding their isolation, Boaz speculated that each ethnic group in Sumter County probably just felt more comfortable being with people like themselves: “I don’t want to have anything to do with you just as much as you don’t want to have anything to do with me,” he said. But despite his explanation of mutual disdain, it was clear that Boaz, and the others, viewed white discrimination as the main cause of the extended, lonely history of this community. He noted, with sadness, that, “the Turkish boys and girls were not allowed on teams like the American Legion baseball teams and those types of things. The segregation was almost as bad as the segregation of the blacks. Not as bad, but bad enough.”

Tonie remembered having to stay out of school for a year during the integration movement. “It was awful,” she said. “You never knew what they were going to say to you or what they were going to do to you. Even the teachers were prejudiced. Traumatic. Kids calling you ‘Turk.’ If they were the only ones on a seat, they would put their books on the other side of the bus so that you couldn’t sit there, and dare you to move them.” Helen told a story about a white hair stylist who wouldn’t cut a dark Turkish teenager’s hair. Jean described a traumatic Ku Klux Klan rampage during which somebody burned a cross on her father’s yard. “We were afraid to go outside the house,” she recalled.

When asked about their relations with black people, the Turkish elders had little to say and spoke nothing negative. They would compare the ways whites treated them to the ways whites treated blacks. Apparently, the two minority populations had always harbored resentment against the white establishment, and this served to mute whatever grievances they had against each other.

Today’s Turkish people are not as closed off as in the past—life is better in the 21st century. Most now marry outsiders. Many have moved to other areas, either to start a family or to attend college and begin careers. Those who have stayed say that, generally, they are “treated right” in Sumter County. The strange story of the Turkish people is important, not only for the belated recognition and dignity of that community but also as a compelling addition to our understanding of the American experience. The persistence of Joseph Benenhaley’s descendants—and the experiences of people like Boaz, Helen, Jean, and Tonie—illustrate that for some people, becoming American is a long and difficult ordeal.

The post Why the Enigmatic ‘Turks’ of South Carolina Still Struggle to Belong in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In one sense, the Calhoun Monument is a remarkably honest, and conspicuous, acknowledgment of Charleston’s dedication to slavery, even after its abolition in 1865. Here in the capital of American slavery—the city where nearly half the enslaved persons brought to the United States first stepped foot on our shores, and where Confederate troops fired the opening shots in a war launched to defend slavery—a group of elite white women worked for decades to honor slavery’s great champion with a statue.

Yet the Calhoun Monument tells another, less visible story, too—one of black resistance to those commitments. The lesser-known history of protest against this statue, and against a similar one it replaced, is as integral to its existence as anything Calhoun and his supporters advocated. For over 100 years, critics of these two Calhoun memorials have waged war against statues they see as the ultimate symbols of white supremacy.

The battle over the Calhoun Monuments is just one front in a larger struggle over how slavery should be remembered in Charleston and across the country. As early as 1865, former slaveholders and their descendants began working to construct a whitewashed memory of the antebellum South, downplaying or even ignoring slavery at times, only to cast it as benevolent and civilizing in other moments. In contrast, formerly enslaved persons, their descendants, and some white allies have worked to preserve an honest, unvarnished account of slavery as the cruel and pervasive institution that it was.

Nothing better encapsulates the whitewashed memory of slavery than the Calhoun Monuments, and nothing better encapsulates the unvarnished memory than the long campaign against them.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association actually began its crusade to erect a Calhoun memorial not long after the statesman’s death in 1850. Calhoun’s distinguished political career was certainly a factor in their decision. He had served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, and vice president over his 40 years of public service. But another reason loomed larger. During his tenure in office, Calhoun had been the white South’s most dogged defender.

When northern reformers flooded the nation with antislavery petitions and pamphlets in the mid-1830s, for instance, then-Senator Calhoun led protests in Washington, D.C. Abolitionism, he insisted, “strikes directly and fatally, not only at our prosperity, but our existence, as a people…. It is a question, that admits of neither concession, nor compromise.” Far from a necessary evil, as early American slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had framed the institution, slavery, insisted Calhoun, was a positive good that benefited slaveholders and the enslaved alike. Although Calhoun did not live to see the Civil War, he was the ideological godfather of the Confederate cause.

Yet the bloody conflict that began in Charleston Harbor in 1861 slowed the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association’s progress on their memorial to Calhoun, and the final months of the war unleashed a wave of vandalism against anything associated with the proslavery statesman. Calhoun’s gravesite was desecrated by multiple parties, and a formerly enslaved person destroyed a bust of Calhoun that she found in the offices of the Charleston Mercury, the city’s leading secessionist newspaper.

Empowered by the occupying Union Army, Charleston’s freedpeople made sure that the unvarnished memory of slavery predominated in their hometown, at least in the short term. In the spring of 1865, they orchestrated a striking parade featuring a mock slave auction and a hearse, carrying a coffin, on which were inscribed the words “Slavery Is Dead.” Annual Emancipation Day and Fourth of July parades celebrating black freedom flourished into the 1870s, when the biracial, progressive Republican Party controlled Reconstruction in South Carolina.

This 1892 photograph of Marion Square shows the first version of the memorial to John C. Calhoun, which was later replaced. The figure at the base of the statue is Justice. Photo by A. Wittemann. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association did not resume their work in earnest until after white conservatives resumed power across the state and brought Reconstruction to a close in 1877. Finally, a decade later, in April 1887, the association unveiled its statue in Marion Square, a park in the heart of Charleston. At the top of a massive pedestal, Calhoun, cast in bronze, appeared to be just rising from his chair to speak, his right index finger pointed outward. The statue was to have been surrounded by four female allegorical figures representing Truth, Justice, History, and the Constitution, though only one—Justice—was actually installed.

The location of the monument was imbued with symbolism. Marion Square was home to the Citadel, the military college that was originally founded as an arsenal to better police the enslaved population of Charleston after a failed 1822 slave insurrection. The ladies hoped that with Calhoun’s stern countenance watching over them, Citadel cadets might learn to “emulate the virtues of the great statesman.” It was also where the Slavery Is Dead parade had begun and ended back in 1865.

The Calhoun statue was one of hundreds of Confederate and other white supremacist monuments that were erected in the same period. Like most of these tributes, the Calhoun Monument didn’t mention slavery. Yet it signaled an attachment to the racial ideology of the Old South in a more direct fashion than other Lost Cause memorials: Calhoun was featured standing up, both literally and figuratively, for his region’s interests, on the Senate floor, so that the monument harkened back to a time when the Civil War’s precipitating cause—slavery—occupied the energies of South Carolina’s politicians. And at the dedication ceremony on April 26, the keynote speaker, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a former Confederate officer from Mississippi, discussed the institution Calhoun had fought so hard to defend. True, Lamar admitted, slavery was dead, but during its time the institution had been beneficial, especially because it had “civilized” the enslaved.

Black Charlestonians also viewed Calhoun and the statue erected in his honor through the lens of slavery, albeit from a different angle. Elijah Green, who claimed that as a young enslaved boy he had helped dig Calhoun’s grave, once said: “I never did like Calhoun ’cause he hated the Negro; no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people.”

Thus, when the monument went up in Marion Square, African Americans like Green may not have been surprised—whites were at that very moment implementing a segregationist regime, after all. But they were outraged. They knew exactly why the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association had never abandoned its project, despite nearly three decades of challenges. Indeed, the long delay in the monument’s construction provided a new use for Calhoun’s ideology in the present.

“Blacks took that statue personally,” remembered Mamie Garvin Fields, born in Charleston in 1888, one year after the Calhoun Monument was installed. “As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place’…he looked like he was telling you there was a place for ‘niggers’ and ‘niggers’ must stay there.” In Fields’s and other black Charlestonians’ eyes, the Calhoun Monument invoked slavery to justify segregation. “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue.”

Black Charlestonians talked back as best they could, given the strictures of Jim Crow. “We used to carry something with us,” Fields explained, “if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose.” Local newspapers are full of stories documenting this campaign of guerrilla vandalism in the late 1880s and 1890s. In one instance, a young black boy shot a tiny pistol at the statue. In another, the face of Justice, the allegorical figure, was painted white under the cover of darkness.

Although the racial identity of the whitewashers was left unmentioned, the press invariably noted that black Charlestonians were responsible for the other major form of attack against the monument: relentless mockery. Justice bore the brunt of African Americans’ verbal volleys. They dubbed the lone, curiously out-of-place figure who sat at Calhoun’s feet ‘he wife,’ or Calhoun’s wife, in the local Gullah dialect.

From the beginning, in other words, Charleston’s black community transformed the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association’s white supremacist shrine into an object of vandalism and ridicule.

By the early 1890s, the association had determined to remove the Calhoun Monument and install a replacement. The women publicly explained that they had always felt the original monument could have been more aesthetically pleasing. Historical evidence suggests, however, that black defacement and mockery played a role in their decision to erect a second statue in 1896, the one that still stands today and that is, significantly, much taller than the first.

The second Calhoun Monument, erected in 1896. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association likely assumed that this new Calhoun, perched on his column over 100 feet in the air, was now out of harm’s way. They were mistaken. Although a fence and lights were installed as defensive measures, the vandalism continued for decades. “Wanton mutilation,” officials complained, kept necessitating repairs into the mid-20th century. Oral history indicates that some of the vandals targeted the new monument specifically because of Calhoun’s outspoken stance on slavery. This was certainly true of the protestors who defaced the Calhoun Monument after the murders at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015. They painted the word “racist” in red near the base of the statue and modified the monument’s engraved testament, which reads “Truth Justice and the Constitution,” by adding the words “and Slavery.”

During segregation, of course, physical and verbal attacks on the Calhoun Monuments were the only real weapons that politically disenfranchised African Americans had at their disposal. In fact, the monuments themselves helped facilitate black repression. It is no coincidence that the major wave of Confederate memorialization dovetailed precisely with the formalization of Jim Crow laws and customs throughout the South. As Confederate veteran Wiley N. Nash observed in the 1908 dedication speech for a Confederate monument in Lexington, Mississippi, “these sacred memorials, tell in silent but potent language, that the white people of the South shall rule and govern the Southern states forever.”

Wiley N. Nash, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Mamie Garvin Fields—white and black citizens alike—understood why these memorials were erected across the Southern landscape. The difference, of course, was their response. Nash, Lamar, and white Southerners cheered the commemorative impulse; Fields and black Southerners denounced it.

Since the Emanuel Massacre in 2015, defenders of controversial Confederate and white supremacist monuments have offered numerous reasons why such memorials should not be taken down. A common refrain is that monument critics are using contemporary standards to unfairly judge the past. Why, they ask, should we remove memorials that honored ideals and individuals not seen as problematic at the time? As the history of the Calhoun Monuments shows, the premise underlying this query is, in fact, ahistorical. These ideals and individuals were never universally sanctioned.

Plenty of Southerners objected to men like Calhoun, what they stood for, and memorialization efforts in their honor. Indeed, in Charleston, which had a black majority in the late 19th century, it is likely that most city residents disliked the Calhoun statues when they went up. The second Calhoun Monument still towers over Charleston today, and it would take an act of South Carolina’s legislature to remove it. There is an effort underway to add a contextualizing plaque to the monument that would make clear both Calhoun’s fidelity to slavery and the white supremacist roots of the statue. But proposals to also include the monument’s many detractors have gone nowhere. The fact that the traces of opposition to the statue and the one that preceded it are difficult to see today, while the second Calhoun Monument and hundreds more like it stand in plain sight, should not diminish this more complicated—and accurate—history.

The post The South Carolina Monument That Symbolizes Clashing Memories of Slavery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“February 18, 1861…. I do not allow myself vain regrets or sad foreboding. This Southern Confederacy must be supported now by calm determination and cool brains. We have risked all, and we must play our best, for the stake is life or death.”

With that entry, Mary Boykin Chesnut began her diary, chronicling the momentous four years that encompassed the American Civil War. Chesnut’s diary is one of the most significant and intimate sources for understanding the Southern Confederacy. Chesnut and her husband, James Chesnut Jr., moved within the highest circles of the Confederate government and Southern society. Her entries, candid, caustic, and at times, sarcastic, demonstrate how women’s roles evolved and how social class and status remained a defining feature in the Confederate nation, even after the war destroyed their wealth and privilege.

Mary Boykin Miller was born in Statesburg, South Carolina, in late March of 1823. Her mother came from a wealthy South Carolina family, the Boykins, while her father, Samuel Decatur Miller, was of yeoman roots. However, her father rose to prominence in South Carolina politics, serving as governor, U.S. congressman, and senator. Perhaps because of that, Chesnut received a classical education, first in Camden and then in Charleston at the prestigious Madame Talvande’s boarding school. While at Madame Talvande’s, Mary met James Chesnut Jr., who was considerably older. Chesnut’s parents finally relented to the courtship and they were married in April 1840. It was then her adventures in politics on the state, national, and Confederate level began.

In February of 1861, Chesnut recorded her feelings regarding the secession crisis: “My father was a South Carolina Nullifier… so I was of necessity a rebel born.” She went on to note, “I remember feeling a nervous dread & horror of this break with so great a power as U.S.A. but was ready and willing.” Little could she know how the “power” of the Union would shatter her world.

Perhaps the most significant parts of the diary are Chesnut’s musings while she and her husband resided in the Confederate capital at Richmond, from June to December 1861 and from late December 1862 until March 1864. Upon her arrival, Chesnut sought out the head of the Richmond Hospital Association to offer her services as a nurse. This in itself was important, because at the time, nursing in the South was regarded as suitable only for lower-class men. To expose 19th-century Southern women, especially elite women, to sick, wounded, and maimed men was decidedly unusual.

Chesnut toured the various Richmond hospitals in the aftermath of the Battle of First Manassas and was shocked by what she saw: “Then we went to the St. Charles. Horrors upon horrors…. Long rows of them dead, dying. Awful smells, awful sights.” Chesnut began “making arrangements with the nurse…. I do not remember any more for I fainted. Next thing that I knew of, the doctor and Mrs. Randolph were having me, limp rag, put into a carriage….” Throughout the war, Chesnut would do her share of nursing, but she never became accustomed to the “awful smells, [and] awful sights” that she witnessed.

In many ways, the war frustrated Chesnut. Often in her diary, she lashed out against her gender and her inability to serve in the army. In late August of 1861 she wrote, “I think these times make all women feel their humiliation in the affairs of the world. With men it is on to the field—‘glory, honour, praise, &c power.’ Women can only stay at home—& every paper reminds us that women are to be violated—ravished & all manner of humiliation. How are the daughters of Eve punished.” On another occasion, Chesnut wrote that if she were a man, she would have pursued a battlefield commission: “I should have either been killed at once or made a name & done some good for my country. Lord Nelson’s motto would have been mine: Victory—or Westminster Abbey”—a reference to the great London church where many of Britain’s military heroes are entombed.

Chesnut was intelligent, educated, and ambitious, but she chafed at her subordinate status in Southern society. Nonetheless, the war years marked a watershed of sorts for women. Because the men were off fighting, women in the Confederacy were forced to assume roles heretofore unheard of for their gender. They managed farms and plantations, worked in every government bureau, became nurses and labored in Confederate factories. But in all these positions, social class played a prominent role. Only women who were literate could work in a government bureau, for they were required to take tests in grammar, spelling, and basic mathematics. Poor and illiterate women were relegated to dangerous jobs in munitions factories or to sewing uniforms at home or in the Quartermaster Bureau.

Another way in which class distinctions dominated during the war was in accommodations. When James was made an aide to President Jefferson Davis, Mary Chesnut sought out lodgings in Richmond. Accustomed to the grandeur of the Chesnuts’ Mulberry plantation, Chesnut was not happy to live in a boarding house run by “some ‘decayed ladies’, forced by trouble, loss of property, &c to receive boarders.” According to Chesnut, “A dreadful refuge of the distressed it was. The house was comfortable and the table good,” Chesnut admitted. But it rankled her that “you paid the most extravagant price, and you were forced to assume the patient humility of a poor relation.

So fine was the hauteur and utter scorn with which you were treated.” Still, as Chesnut was aware, “We had no right to expect better lodgings, for Richmond was crowded to suffocation—hardly standing room left.”

Indeed, by 1863 Richmond’s population had grown from 38,000 in 1860 to more than 100,000. Most of the new arrivals were refugees fleeing from Union incursions. Ultimately, Chesnut would find a house near the White House of the Confederacy on East Clay Street. But that was unusual: Most newcomers were forced to wander the streets, seeking accommodations, or were compelled to lodge with other families because housing was so scarce.

Equally troubling was the shortage of food in the capital city. Bad weather and government policies such as impressing agricultural goods to feed the armies and forcing farmers to pay a 10 percent tax in kind on produce and livestock discouraged farmers from bringing their goods to market. Too, the Confederate government set prices 50 percent below what the market would bear, which created a disincentive for farmers to bring their goods to Richmond’s markets.

The situation became so desperate that a group of working-class women met April 1, 1863, and resolved to seek aid from Virginia’s governor. On April 2, 1863, these women marched to the Governor’s Mansion. Not getting any satisfaction, the mob, variously estimated to be anywhere from 500 to 5,000, proceeded to loot stores, seizing food, clothing and other goods in the so-called Richmond Bread Riot.

Curiously, though she lived near the business district and could undoubtedly see and hear the commotion, Chesnut did not remark upon the violence in her diary. Instead, she noted that although “Turkeys were thirty dollars apiece,” James’s slave, Laurence, “kept us plentifully supplied.” While others in Richmond realized the Christmas holidays were going to be Spartan, Chesnut recorded that for their dinner, “We had… oyster soup, soup a la reine…. Besides boiled mutton, ham, boned turkey, wild ducks, partridges, plum pudding. Sauterne, burgundy, sherry, and Madeira wine.” Even though many civilians would go hungry and Confederate soldiers were on short rations, Chesunt and her family were happily sated. As a government aide, James could shop at the local commissary, and there are numerous references in the diary to boxes sent from Mulberry plantation that contained all sorts of foods and wines. And given Laurence’s declaration that if they paid him, he would find food, he probably took advantage of the black market.

Portrait of James Chesnut Jr., husband of Mary Boykin Chesnut. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.

James Chesnut frowned upon Mary’s proclivity for dining well and entertaining. Consequently, Chesnut would wait until President Davis sent James on a trip to assess the army in the western theater of the war. When he would arrive home unexpectedly, he would usually find “the party in full blast.” After the guests left, he “laid down the law.” “’No more parties, he said. “The country is in danger. There is too much levity here.’” The war was going badly for the Confederacy and there was real fear of famine in Richmond, but for a member of the Confederate elite, Chesnut never felt want.

All that came to an end when James’s mother passed away and he felt the need to return to South Carolina with his wife. But their journey placed them squarely in the track of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he swung north after his “March to the Sea,” laying waste to everything in his path. James insisted Mary leave Mulberry. For the first time, she became a victim of war, a refugee.

Chesnut wound up in Lincolnton, North Carolina, and although she was beholden to a stranger who took her in, she still focused on her superior social status: “The next day came here brokenhearted & in exile. Such a place! No carpet—a horrid feather bed—soiled sheets—and a pine table, &c, &c—for this I pay $30 a day.” On another occasion, she remarked that her new hostess was “N.C. [sic] aristocracy as far as it will go—but does not brush her teeth—the first evidence of civilization—& lives amidst dirt in a way that would shame the poorest overseer’s wife…. A lady she evidently is in manners and taste! & surroundings worthy a barbarian.” Apparently, while Chesnut was in exile, she was forced to work and made strong mention of that reality: “Well this day I have worked! I made my own tea—boiled my own eggs—& washed up my own tea things.”

Yet for all her sense of noblesse oblige, Chesnut was chastened when she and James returned home and found their former world destroyed. “When we crossed the [Wateree] river, coming home, the ferryman at Chesnut’s Ferry asked for his fee. Among us all, we could not muster the small silver coin he demanded. There was poverty for you.” Mulberry plantation was still standing, but the house had been badly damaged by the Union Army and the interior had been ransacked. Even worse, James’s father had invested his entire fortune in worthless Confederate bonds.

Penniless, Chesnut supported James and the other relatives who came to Mulberry to live with them after the war. Once one of the wealthiest women in South Carolina, she was reduced to going into business with Molly, formerly her enslaved servant. With a rescued cow and some chickens, Chesnut sold sell butter and eggs to her neighbors and supported her family on $140 a year.

Chesnut had always battled depression, but the poverty into which the family was plunged deeply affected her. In May of 1865, she wrote, “We are scattered—stunned—the remnant of heart left alive with us, filled with brotherly hate.” Just a year later, she admitted to a dear friend, “[T]here are nights here with the moonlight cold & ghastly & the whippoorwills & screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear out my hair & cry aloud for all that is past and gone.”

Chesnut spent most of the 1880s revising her diaries and taking care of her mother and her husband. She died in 1886 and was buried next to James. But her diaries, edited by a friend and later, by a novelist were substantively rewritten from the original journals. Eminent Southern historian C. Vann Woodward meticulously went through the original journals and published the most accurate edition of Chesnut’s diary in 1981. That edition presents us with an unvarnished and detailed look at the life and death of a planter class that went to war to preserve their privileged way of life based on slavery.

The post The Sarcastic Civil War Diarist Who Chronicled the Confederacy’s Fall appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the cooling evening air, Charleston, South Carolina’s notable citizens filed into Hibernian Hall on Meeting Street for the traditional banquet to close their July 4th festivities. The year was 1860, and the host, as always, was the ’76 Association, a society formed by elite Charlestonians in 1810 to pay homage to the Declaration of Independence.

The guest of honor was one of the city’s most beloved figures, William Porcher Miles, Charleston’s representative in the U.S. Congress in Washington. A former professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston, Miles had won his city’s heart with his heroic efforts as a volunteer nurse to combat an epidemic of yellow fever on the coast of Virginia. He was not a planter, and not even a slaveholder, but he believed in the Constitution and in the slave master’s rights sealed by that compact—and he had come to believe that America was best split into two.

Miles wasn’t happy when, amid the clinking of glasses, a poem approved by the ’76 Association was read out loud in the hall:

The day, when dissevered from Union we be,
In darkness will break, o’er the land and the sea;
The Genius of Liberty, mantled with gloom,
Will despairingly weep o’er America’s doom …

It was just a poem, mere words, sounded with a muted note of elegy. But there was no such thing as “mere words” in the blistering heat of this Charleston summer, with war about to erupt. Words, in 1860, were weapons. And these particular words struck a blow at an equation that secessionists like Miles had labored to forge between their cause and the broader American cause of freedom. This verse presented a quite different idea—the notion, heretical to the secessionist, that the sacred principle of liberty was bound up with Union, with the bonds linking together all of the states, and all of the people of the nation, from Maine to Texas.

So it went for Charleston in this year, beset with a complicated, even excruciating welter of emotions on the question of secession. As determined as so many in Charleston were to defend their way of life, based on slavery, under sharp challenge from the North, still there was room for nostalgic feeling for the Union and for the ideals set forth in the Declaration.

Independence Day in Charleston had begun as customary, with a blast of cannon fire from the Citadel Green at three o’clock in the morning. Roused from their slumber, Charlestonians made ready for a day of parades by militia units in colorful uniform. In the 102-degree heat, the men of the German Artillery, sweltering in their brass-mounted helmets, could only be pitied.

Surely, the town’s secessionists thought, it would be a fine occasion to trumpet their ripening movement. They would celebrate Independence indeed—the coming liberation of the South from the clutches of the nefarious Union. As odd, even bizarre, as this might seem today, Charleston’s secessionists sincerely felt they were acting in a hallowed American tradition. They saw themselves as rebels against tyranny, just like their forefathers who had defeated the British to win America’s freedom some 80 years before. In this instance, the oppressor was the Yankee Abolitionist in league with the devious Washington politician, together plotting to snatch from the South the constitutional right of an American, any American, to hold property in slaves.

By the summer of 1860, these self-styled revolutionaries seemed to be winning their improbable campaign. Back in the spring, at the Democratic National Convention, held in Charleston that year, Charlestonians packed the galleries and cheered wildly when radical Southern Democrats walked out of Institute Hall in protest over the refusal of Northern Democrats to agree to a party plank giving the slaveholder an unimpeded right to operate in western territories like Kansas and Nebraska. The rebel delegates proceeded to establish their own separate “Seceding Convention,” as The Charleston Mercury called this rump group. In its comment hailing the uprising, The Mercury, a daily bugle call for secession, declared that, “The events of yesterday will probably be the most important which have taken place since the Revolution of 1776. The last party, pretending to be a National party, has broken up; and the antagonism of the two sections of the Union has nothing to arrest its fierce collisions.” A Northern reporter strolling the moonlit streets wrote of the occasion that “there was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston last night—a jubilee … In all her history, Charleston had never enjoyed herself so hugely.”

In this electric atmosphere, public expressions in favor of the Union could scarcely, and maybe not safely, be heard. An abolitionist in Charleston risked being tarred and feathered. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, America’s largest paper by circulation and a standard-bearer for abolition, was banned in the city.

It was all the more remarkable, then, that the poem confessing to despair over the Union’s impending collapse was read for all to hear at the banquet at Hibernian Hall on July 4. Rep. Miles could hardly let a handwringing cry for Union stand unchallenged. He held his tongue at the banquet, but five nights later, at a political meeting of town folk held at the Charleston Theatre, up the street from Hibernian Hall, he gave his constituents a tongue lashing. “I am sick at heart of the endless talk and bluster of the South. If we are in earnest, let us act,” he declared. “The question is with you. It is for you to decide—you, the descendants of the men of ’76.”

His words, and many more like them, would win the summer of 1860 for his camp. Charleston’s passion was for rebellion—and the banquet poem turned out to be a last spasm of sentiment for the Union. Repulsed by such feelings, the Charleston merchant Robert Newman Gourdin, a close friend of Miles, organized rich Charlestonians into a Society of Earnest Men for the purpose of promoting and financing the secession cause. When an Atlanta newspaper mocked Charleston’s insurgents as all talk, no action, a member of the group responded in The Mercury that the Earnest Men would “spot the traitors to the South, who may require some hemp ere long.” True to their identification of their undertaking with the American Revolution, the secessionists also formed a new crop of militia units known as Minute Men, after the bands that gathered renown in colonial Massachusetts for taking on the British redcoats. Recruits swore an oath, adapted from the last line of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, to “solemnly pledge, OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES, and our sacred HONOR, to sustain Southern Constitutional equality in the Union, or failing that, to establish our independence out of it.”

In November, with the election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party, Charleston went all in for secession. Federal officeholders in the city, including the federal district court judge, resigned their positions, spurring The Mercury to proclaim that “the tea has been thrown overboard—the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”

Charleston’s “patriotic” uprising ended in ruin—ruin for the dream of secession; ruin for the owner of human chattel, with the Constitution amended to abolish slavery; ruin for the city itself, large parts of which were destroyed by federal shells during the Civil War. The triumph, won by blood, was for the idea expressed ever so faintly by the men of ‘76 at Charleston’s July 4th celebration of 1860, and made definitive by the war—the idea that liberty, and American-ness, too, were inextricably and forever tied to union.

The post How Charleston Celebrated Its Last July 4 Before the Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What may well prove to be the most striking of all the many ironies in the life and career of Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Nikki Randahawa, came when, at her mother’s request, she was at least allowed to perform her talent number, a very capable rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Anyone searching for a compelling visual testimony to the brutal absurdity of the American South’s racial obsessions surely need look no further than the photo of little Nikki on the pageant stage, clutching the wrapped package containing the fittingly deflated beach ball that she and her sister received as what she later called their “disqualification” prize. Surely no one in attendance that night, save, one senses in retrospect, perhaps the little girl herself, could imagine that some three decades later, Bamberg would boast four signs welcoming motorists to the “Home of Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina.”

It is tempting to see a story of both personal triumph and regional redemption in the meteoric political ascent of this woman who was born an “other” to blacks and whites in a society where skin color really mattered. Yet contrary to deep-seated liberal presumptions, Nikki Haley has proven to be anything but the empathetic, compassionate champion of minorities and women that her background seemed almost to mandate. Instead, growing up almost astride the color line appears to have quickly shown a savvy young woman like Haley which side of the racial divide offered the better prospects for fulfilling her ambitions. The same was true of the partisan divide as well, for South Carolina was already an established GOP stronghold when she entered the 2004 primary, where she stunned the pundits by knocking off the longest-serving incumbent in the state House of Representatives before sailing unopposed in an overwhelmingly Republican district through the general election to take her seat as the first Indian-American member of the South Carolina legislature.

Six years later, in a campaign marked by persistent rumors of her marital infidelity and a fellow Republican’s reference to her as an “[expletive] raghead,” Haley not only dispatched three better-known primary rivals on the way to become the first female and non-white occupant of the governor’s mansion, but she also won praise from national Republican leaders like Sarah Palin, who called her “the proud daughter of immigrants who worked day and night to achieve the American dream.”

Truth be told, Nikki Haley, an early Tea Party favorite, has hardly proven herself a friend of immigrants, or people of color in general. She has opposed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and, as governor, she championed a new law requiring state-issued photo I.D.s for all voters. Despite her state’s large indigent (disproportionately minority) population, she refused the Affordable Care Act’s offer of increased Medicaid funding, flatly declaring, “We will not expand Medicaid ever.” On the other hand, Haley is just fine with forking over lavish public subsidies to new employers who also have the governor’s personal assurance that “we’d rather die than have unions here.”

Indeed, Haley stands shoulder to shoulder with other Deep South governors in their longstanding and unwavering faith in bringing in new industry at any cost. Forced increasingly to weigh their obligations to preserve segregation against the development imperative as civil rights pressures mounted, the balance began to tip in favor of the latter in the 1960s, when concerns about the potentially harmful effects of racial tensions on business development helped to pave the way for the initial desegregation of public schools and other public facilities and accommodations. A similar consideration has factored heavily in more recent disputes over removing the Confederate battle flag from state property or excising it from the flags of several southern states.

In South Carolina, that flag might still be flying atop the state capitol had a torrent of threatened economic and tourist boycotts and pressure from the state’s business community not forced the legislature 15 years ago to at least move it to the capitol grounds. Though this placement was still far from satisfactory to most black South Carolinians, Governor Haley had shown no public inclination to move against it until the cold-blooded slaughter of nine African- Americans inside their Charleston church by a Rebel-flag-worshipping gunman became both catalyst and premise for a step that southern political leaders had been at once eager but too timid to take. The flag issue has long been the proverbial elephant not simply in the room but squarely astride the shoulders of southern GOP governors and congressmen, not to mention business leaders.

April 6, 2015. The American flag and South Carolina state flag fly above the confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina.

Not only did the flag pose a threat to party unity, but clinging to such a divisive and seemingly hostile and provincial symbol is hardly indicative of a cosmopolitan state or community ready to welcome global companies and their employees. Make no mistake about it, the moves by Nikki Haley and her counterparts in other southern states amounted in no small sense to what a proponent of ditching the Confederate insignia on the Mississippi state flag once called a “strategic business decision.” Without questioning the sincerity of their expressions of horror and grief over the Charleston tragedy in the least, distancing their state and their party from what so many see as an emblem of hatred and persecution seems to have a huge upside for southern Republicans, especially those with national political ambitions like South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham or perhaps even, its governor as well.

Newsweek’s decision in July 2010 to herald Nikki Haley on its cover as “The Face of the New South” may have startled some at the time, but this has become a common trope in recent days. Its aptness, however, rests not in Haley’s skin color or gender but in her politics, which epitomize the GOP’s gradual shift over the last generation or so away from its old blatantly racialized “southern strategy” to a new, ostensibly “colorblind” but hardly race-neutral conservatism anchored in a coldly pragmatic, pro-corporate worldview.

All of that said, albeit 150 years too late, the move by Haley and other southern leaders to finally furl the Confederate flag is a welcome one nonetheless. History, after all, offers too few examples of right things done for precisely the right reasons to afford us the luxury of being picky.

The post Why Governor Haley Took Down the Confederate Flag appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We had our Jim Crow moments, though. In the final photograph of the 1967 Panorama, a slim gold-and-black collection of public school photographs, stand two black janitors, with four black lunchroom women between them. You won’t see their names. Instead, you will find the following dismissive words: “These fill a vital role at L.H.S.”

In the world of Jim Crow rules, a white man did not shake hands with a black man, because it implied social equality. With rare exceptions, blacks and whites didn’t eat together (although I had many a meal in the 1960s with my black friends down on the farm), and if they did eat together, whites were to eat first. If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat. Another rule: White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections. Good God. Surely that was a formula for disaster!

It’s damn hard for me to believe all this. But it was real. Even black music was taboo. It used to be called “race music.” If the term sounds unfamiliar, that’s because Jerry Wexler of Billboard coined “rhythm and blues” to replace “race music” in 1948. (Although blacks referred to their music as race music, Wexler, who was Jewish and sensitive to the unintended impact of words, had found the original term derogatory.) But one group of kids did cross racial lines to listen to R&B: those were the “shaggers,” the original bad boys.

The shag is a slow, smooth couples dance that evolved out of the jitterbug and earlier dances. You can only dance the shag to beach music, which has roughly 120 beats a minute. Think of The Four Tops and The Platters. It’s hard to shag without a strong sense of seduction and romance. Few people beyond the shag world consider the first wave of shaggers to have been Civil Rights trailblazers. Well, they were. They had three confederates old timers will recall with affection: the jukebox, 45 RPMs, and that fabled music we know as the blues.

***

Some say it rolled off the Mississippi like a mist that mesmerized all who breathed it. Others say it shot up from the river’s alluvial plain, the Mississippi Delta. Something mystical, something melancholy came out of the delta all right—the blues, that sadly beautiful, beautifully sad music. And the blues, that mighty tributary of melody that grew out of work songs, spirituals, shouts, and chants, would forever change lives.

To understand how people fell in love with the blues, you have to understand the times that led to it. It was a time of taboos, a time when danger accompanied things we take for granted today. It was a time when parents didn’t approve of race music or the dancing and its settings. It was a time that called for doing the unacceptable.

Jim Crow governed music too. In a bit of reverse discrimination, whites could not enter black clubs and watch black performers. Nor could black entertainers perform in white establishments. Thus it was that unknown-but-stardom-bound blacks performed on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a string of clubs throughout the South where they could do their thing in a safe, acceptable venue.

Charlie’s Place was a club on the Chitlin’ Circuit near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, perched on a stretch of Carver Street called Whispering Pines. The pines began whispering, as Frank Beacham wrote in Charlie’s Place, Shaggin’ the Night Away, the night Billie Holliday sang there.

During World War II, the only people who heard rhythm and blues were a few bold fellows who made it a habit to jump the Jim Crow rope. “Black music influenced us from the start, and the only good place to hear it was on the Hill,” said South Carolinian shag legend the late Billy Jeffers. Another such fellow was a North Carolinian, Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks. Hicks grew up around blacks, and it wasn’t a big deal to watch blacks jitterbugging at a Durham armory.

Hicks served in the U.S. Coast Guard and washed up in a club-happy place, Carolina Beach, in 1943. Back then, he said, “It was like a state fair, 24 hours a day. There were places that had no doors, ’cause they were always open.”

Hicks was such a fervent appreciator of this music that he became a pioneer. Jim Hanna, a former merchant marine, first placed African-American jump blues on his piccolo, or jukebox, at his Tijuana Inn in Carolina Beach at the behest of Hicks. Hanna called the amusement company in Wilmington that stocked his jukebox and had them bring over some music they regularly took to the black joints down the road. Soon the box that sat just to the right of the entrance to the long and narrow club was blaring tunes unheard of in postwar white America.

Hicks had an affinity for black music and white liquor. On his moonshine-purchasing trips to the African-American community of Seabreeze, Hicks heard popular songs by black artists such as Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers, Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five, Lionel Hampton, and Wynonie Harris, forebears of the budding jump-blues style music emerging out of the swing and big band traditions.

Hicks liked to show off the new steps he picked up from Seabreeze. When he hit the dance floor, people gathered around for the show. “I’m gonna tell you the truth, I didn’t call it anything,” he said in 1996. “I couldn’t stand it, how they all called it the jitterbug. All I said was, ‘Come on, let’s go jump awhile.’”

Hicks was more than an exceptional dancer. He changed the music whites listened to. He helped bring blacks’ “bop” sound to whites, and that, in part, would give rise to the “beach music” sound, and the shag to go with it. “I got chummy with the jukebox changers. I’d say, ‘Bring that record and that record.’ I got rid of Glenn Miller in Carolina Beach jukeboxes.”

The music proved infectious, and people adored its source. As the nation was coming out of the Great Depression, the jukebox secured a reverent place in Americana and shagdom. Harry Driver, considered the “Father of the Shag” by some, lived in Dunn, North Carolina. He recalled listening to “race” and Hit Parade music in 1945 at White Lake’s Crystal Club. There they danced to “suggestive” music banned in the segregated Carolinas. They paid scant attention to the bans. Said Driver, “We had integration 25 years before Martin Luther King Jr. came on the scene. We were totally integrated because the blacks and whites had nothing in our minds that made us think we were different. We loved music, we loved dancing, and that was the common bond between us.”

As the big-band era died, rhythm and blues came on strong, and racial barriers softened. The color line began to wash out, bleached by black musicians’ crossover to white audiences, thanks to guys like Hicks who got their records into white jukeboxes. Vinyl from artists such as Bull Moose Jackson and LaVern Baker could now be heard. More and more whites turned to black music at the beach pavilions, although to do so was perilous. Sometimes the KKK showed up, showering bullets, slurs, and mayhem.

Said one veteran shagger, “You could only hear that stuff when you were at the beach and away from your parents. The whites loved what they heard, and no sheriff was going to hold them back.”

That was many, many years ago.

***

There’s an old dictum. “The more things change the more they remain the same.” Mostly whites dance the shag today. Young blacks consider it a dance performed to “white music.” Black musicians, including Maurice Williams of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, say their own kids refuse to listen to it. “The beginning of beach music was predominantly rhythm and blues,” Williams said. “But today if you say to a young black man, ‘come on, let’s go and listen to a beach music show,’ he’ll say, ‘I ain’t going to that white music.’ The average black kid in his 20s or 30s doesn’t know what this is all about.”

Beach music has its roots in rhythm and blues, but so much has transpired since those early days that the music’s history is lost on the very descendants of those who created it.

The post Defying Jim Crow To Shag appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But in the midst of all of this traveling I’ve made one very dear friend. His name is Pedro, and he lives just south of the North Carolina border in Dillon, South Carolina. He has a thick moustache that I just wish he’d shave, but he’ll never listen to me. Standing 97 feet tall and donning an over-sized sombrero, Pedro isn’t really a friend so much as a landmark–the tallest free-standing sign east of the Mississippi in fact. And in spite of his steel frame and inability to breathe, Pedro manages to spark an undeniably warm feeling in my heart.

Because I find myself moving so often, the places I pass by are often as significant to me as the places I end up. South of the Border–the curious roadside attraction Pedro advertises–is one of those places. From 150 miles south, hundreds of billboards tell me that the distance between us is waning. The signs’ punch lines are completely outlandish, from “Too Much Tequila” written upside-down, to a 20-foot-long frank proclaiming, “You Never Sausage a Place (You’re Always a Weiner at Pedro’s!).” Pedro and I share an undeniably corny sense of humor.

Pedro was there when a car full of hangers and mini-appliances sent me off to college, as I drove from my hometown of Boca Raton, Florida up to North Carolina for the first time. We were mere strangers then, the 800 miles of highway an unfamiliar journey. With eight trips under my belt, I now find Pedro’s tricolor poncho as heartening as my dog’s slobbery kisses, and I can recite the billboard slogans like I can the Pledge of Allegiance. Featured on every South of the Border sign, Pedro appears mile after mile to tell me I’m headed home. Sometimes that means Boca Raton, and other times Durham; in either instance, I’m delighted to see him.

Three years later, Pedro has watched me escape to the beach, return from abroad, head home for the holidays, and go to Washington for an internship. He’s seen me at my worst, napping against the passenger window with my mouth hanging open, and at my best, dolled up for my first day back on campus. But as many times as I’ve driven past South of the Border, I’ve stopped off the exit to pay my dear friend a visit just once. It was around 10:30 at night, and it was only to use the bathroom. In what was surely the quickest visit in SOB history, we were back on the road in minutes.

To those who stop by South of the Border for a longer stay, the venue serves as a rest stop, a theme park, a gift shop, a fireworks stand, a shooting range, and, for some, a chapel-500 couples have tied the knot under Pedro’s monumental sombrero. I don’t think I’ll be one of them, even though I will always count Pedro, and the road he presides over, among my rites of passage.

Ashley Alman is an undergraduate student at Duke University and an intern at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of rvaphotodude.

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Irmo, South Carolina, sits 10 miles northwest of Columbia, the state capital. Running north to south, a busy rail line cuts through the town. Trains rumble, rush, and wreak havoc with traffic all day and night. That would please dearly departed railroaders C.J. Iredell and H.C. Moseley. They founded the town in 1890, graciously christening their whistle-stop with the first syllable of each of their last names.

Leeza Gibbons, the talk show host, grew up here. A few miles away, what was once the world’s largest earthen dam straddles the Saluda River. That dam, along with the construction of nearby I-26 in the late 1950s, turned the farms, fields, and woodlands around Irmo into a crazy quilt of old and new. Irmo is in Republican Lexington County. Nearby Richland County leans Democratic.

The town proper has no square, no mall–just shopping strips, fast-food joints, restaurants, and stores. It’s home to a watering hole, Catch 22, a cozy seafood and rawbar. On any given night, you’ll find alluring women, bums, businessmen, lounge lizards, professors, attorneys, a CEO now and then, nurses, scalawags, and blue-collar blokes at the oval bar. It’s a mini-congress of ordinary souls. State and federal workers, retirees, loners, couples, the bored, and the divorced join the mix. Ages run from the 20s to the late 60s. Maybe older.

Democrats, Republicans, Independents–they’re here. Everyone just wants to forget life for a while and drink, laugh, and gossip, but the bar TVs’ talking heads don’t always let them.

Just beyond the parking lot, cars creep and crawl to a stop on Lake Murray Boulevard. There’s nothing quite like a ninety-three-car train rolling through on a Wednesday afternoon to encourage exasperated drivers to ease into Catch 22’s parking lot.

Regulars file in brushing away workday dust. “Little Pink Houses” plays on Music Choice. Glasses clink, and kitchen clatter spills over the rawbar and into the bar itself.

At 6 p.m., the barmaid turns Music Choice down as a 60-ish, pudgy Northerner fires up a karaoke-like music machine. He strums an acoustic guitar and croons velvety love songs with a reverb Andy “Moon River” Williams would die for.

The worries of the world seem far away, but that nettlesome portal to politics, the TV, is on.

8 o’clock. After a good many rounds, chatter flows as thick as the cigarette smoke.

“The summer was too damn hot.”

“Those ugly new fluorescent light bulbs are a DC conspiracy with big business!”

“Screw the Post Office. It’s a goner.”

“Those phony-baloney diversity commercials aren’t worth a plugged nickel. Nobody lives like that.”

“The SEC has won five straight national championships. Tell your Buckeye friend to put that in his pipe and smoke it!”

Then the TV news comes on and what do we see? Politicians. Sneers erupt.

Although the TV is muted, it takes habitués but a second to shout, “Change the damn channel!” People smirk, snide remarks fly across the bar, and the night becomes a smoky evening of venting. There’s a new devil in town, and his name is Politician.

“Where oh where, Mommy, did all the statesmen go?”

“Sweetie, they died in the ’50s.”

Alcohol is truth serum. Someone makes the mistake of asking a woman what she thinks about profiling Middle Eastern passengers boarding airlines. A man wearing a Texas Longhorns baseball cap jumps into the conversation. “It slaps the hell out of falling from the sky,” he says.

“It’s discrimination,” replies a blond with gray showing at her temples.

“Well, hell, girl, welcome to the Goddamned United States of the Offended!” yells Lynn, 60, a retired state worker nursing a spot of Ecco Domani pinot grigio. She deplores what she considers a politically correct cancer that destroys common sense and open dialogue. She loathes career politicians who are more concerned with keeping their job than what’s good for this country’s legal citizens, putting emphasis on the word, “lee-gal.”

John, a one-time bodybuilder and full-time cynic, cuts loose. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to piss on a goddam politician if he were on fire,” he says.

Mike, late 50s, writes columns for a Columbia newspaper. He’s restrained. “Most of our political woes are caused by our own inability to get off our asses and seek the truth,” he says.

Lake Murray resident Malinda, 60, works as a guest services manager for a major hospital. One of her forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence and another signed the Constitution. “We have erred into the gray area of socialism with the expectation that our federal government will maintain all,” she says. “We are on the road to ruin and the same track as the Roman Empire. Let’s get back to the basics: honestly, integrity, with no special interest groups driving our political decisions.”

General sentiment is always a hard thing to pin down, but some things weigh heavy with veracity. People here in Irmo hate their elected officials. They hate them for being out of touch.

People feel Washington should run the country like ordinary folks run their homes. Logic seems upside down in DC. The straightest path to a solution is a zigzagged up-and-down, in-and-out quivering line of the moribund same-old same-old. Black is white and white is black.

Washington, take notice. The people in Irmo, South Carolina, are much like people elsewhere except for one little detail. They’ll fight you. South Carolinians fired the first shot of the Civil War, and few know it, but they fired the first shot of the Revolutionary War, a skirmish in a forgotten ghost town called Mt. Carmel.

If what folks in the heart of South Carolina feel and believe holds true for much of the electorate, politicians are in deep trouble. The necessary evil that they are can’t be changed, but individual politicians can be changed out like a bad bulb.

I dabbled in photography for a while. One of my assignments was to photograph Senator Strom Thurmond at his Columbia home. A meet-and-greet kind of thing. The good senator’s staff wanted photos of the people shaking his hand.

In stifling heat, people lined up for four blocks to meet the legend. My chief memory of that day is seeing women hug and kiss him. Men shook his hand. Men and women stuffed money into his pockets. By the end of the day his suit bulged with greenbacks.

The people adored Strom. He was one of them, a commoner risen to the heights. He served them well. If a widow’s husband’s military pension disappeared in a snarl of red tape, one phone call from Strom cut it free. That was my last photography assignment, such as it was. The year was 1978.

I believe that were Strom alive today, he’d be booted out of office, sullied by the smell of career politician. Patrons at Catch 22 have started to joke: if at first you don’t secede, try, try, try again. South Carolina’s bellicose nature wasn’t lost on Rick Perry. No wonder Perry thought he could get mileage out of saying, “South Carolina, you’re in a state of war with the federal government.”

Most nights around 3 a.m., the lonely wail of a train’s airhorn sounds to the west. Another train advances toward the grade crossing three miles away in Irmo. Its airy weeping slips through the pines into my sleep. It skims over the Catch 22 foyer and empty barstools where nighthawks perched just hours before.

The train’s cry trails away and the clack clack clack of steel wheels on creosoted ties provides rhythm for lovers. And then it’s quiet except for barking dogs. Night dogs are always barking around Irmo. They bay when the moon is dark. They bay when the moon is full. They bay when no one cares to listen. “Here we are,” they say. “We have dreams. It’s 3 a.m. and we are looking out for you.”

Dogs would not make career politicians. No, dogs would be statesmen. Dogs give unconditional allegiance to the people who choose them, and they don’t bite the hand that feeds them. Politicians should pay attention to dogs and learn something about loyalty and service.

In this era of crafted sound bites and Teleprompters when no one says anything original, honest, or daring, maybe ballots should tell us which candidates own a dog and which don’t. Maybe then we can make intelligent choices and get ourselves out of this diabolical disaster called politics. The people here, like people elsewhere, are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. At least that’s what they say.

Tom Poland is a Southern writer and author in Columbia, SC. His work can be found at tompoland.net.

*Photo by T. Poland.

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