Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century

By Orville Vernon Burton

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title • A provocative look into civil rights progress in the Palmetto State from activists, statesmen, and historians

Toward the Meeting of the Waters represents a watershed moment in civil rights history—bringing together voices of leading historians alongside recollections from central participants to provide the first comprehensive history of the civil rights movement as experienced by black and white South Carolinians. Edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton, this work originated with a highly publicized landmark conference on civil rights held at the Citadel in Charleston.

The volume opens with an assessment of the transition of South Carolina leaders from defiance to moderate enforcement of federally mandated integration and includes commentary by former governor and U.S. senator Ernest F. Hollings and former governor John C. West. Subsequent chapters recall defining moments of white-on-black violence and aggression to set the context for understanding the efforts of reformers such as Levi G. Byrd and Septima Poinsette Clark and for interpreting key episodes of white resistance. Emerging from these essays is arresting evidence that, although South Carolina did not experience as much violence as many other southern states, the civil rights movement here was more fiercely embattled than previously acknowledged.

The section of retrospectives serves as an oral history of the era as it was experienced by a mixture of locally and nationally recognized participants, including historians such as John Hope Franklin and Tony Badger as well as civil rights activists Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Beatrice Brown Rivers, Charles McDew, Constance Curry, Matthew J. Perry Jr., Harvey B. Gantt, and Cleveland Sellers Jr. The volume concludes with essays by historians Gavin Wright, Dan Carter, and Charles Joyner, who bring this story to the present day and examine the legacy of the civil rights movement in South Carolina from a modern perspective.

Toward the Meeting of the Waters also includes thirty-seven photographs from the period, most of them by Cecil Williams and many published here for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363363

Book preview

TOWARD THE MEETING OF THE WATERS

TOWARD THE MEETING OF THE WATERS

Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century

Edited by

WINFRED Β. MOORE JR.

AND ORVILLE VERNON BURTON

© 2008 University of South Carolina

An ‘Ominous Defiance’: The Lowman Lynchings of 1926 © 2008 Elizabeth Robeson

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2008

Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Toward the meeting of the waters : currents in the civil rights movement of South Carolina during the twentieth century / edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-755-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Civil rights—South Carolina—History—20th century. 2. African Americans—Segregation—South Carolina—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—South Carolina—History—20th century. 4. African American civil rights workers—South Carolina—History—20th century. 5. Racism—South Carolina—History— 20th century. 6. Lynching—South Carolina—History—20th century. 7. South Carolina—Race relations—History—20th century. 8. South Carolina—Politics and government—20th century. I. Moore, Winfred B., 1949– II. Burton, Orville Vernon.

E185.93.S7T69 2008

323.1196’07307570904—dc22 2008018604

ISBN 978-1-57003-971-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-336-3 (ebook)

Front cover photographs: © Getty Images by Anthony Ise (water); Charleston chief of police William Kelly attempting to disperse picketers on King Street, June 1963, UPI photograph, courtesy of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston

In honor of Benjamin E. Mays, Lilly Graham, and Catherine, Brother, Pat, and Skip Williams, of Ninety Six, South Carolina, and Nancy and Ed Haywood of Cowpens, South Carolina, mentors in the full meaning of friendship and civil rights

A few years ago I was in Brazil, a thousand miles inland at a place called Manaus. A few miles northwest of Manaus, two rivers converge at a place they call the meeting of the waters. The Rio Solomos, a clearwater river, flows down out of the mountains and intersects the Rio Negro, a blackwater river like the Waccamaw near my home in South Carolina. At first their waters do not mingle but flow along side by side. I have videotape of myself on a boat going back and forth across that line. But after two or three miles the two rivers flow together, and when they do they become the mightiest river in the world—the Amazon. I see that as a metaphor for the people of our beloved South Carolina.

Charles Joyner

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

John Monk

Preface

Part 1—Governors

From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change

Tony Badger

Comments

Ernest F. Hollings

John C. West

Questions and Answers

Part 2—Aggressors

Lynching in the Outer Coastal Plain Region of South Carolina and the Origins of African American Collective Action, 1901–1910

Terence R. Finnegan

Conflicting Expectations: White and Black Anticipations of Opportunities in World War I–Era South Carolina

Janet G. Hudson

An Ominous Defiance: The Lowman Lynchings of 1926

Elizabeth Robeson

The Civil Right Not to Be Lynched: State Law, Government, and Citizen Response to the Killing of Willie Earle (1947)

William Gravely

This Magic Moment: When the Ku Klux Klan Tried to Kill Rhythm and Blues Music in South Carolina

Frank Beacham

Part 3—Reformers

Mr. NAACP: Levi G. Byrd and the Remaking of the NAACP in State and Nation, 1917–1960

Peter F. Lau

The Impact of 1940s Civil Rights Activism on the State’s 1960s Civil Rights Scene: A Hypothesis and Historiographical Discussion

Wim Roefs

Seeds in Unlikely Soil: The Briggs v. Elliott School Segregation Case

Orville Vernon Burton, Beatrice Burton, and Simon Appleford

Five Days in May: Freedom Riding in the Carolinas

Raymond Arsenault

The Developmental Leadership of Septima Clark, 1954–1967

Stephen L. Preskill

Part 4—Resisters

Memories and Forebodings: The Fight to Preserve the White Democratic Primary in South Carolina, 1944–1950

James O. Farmer

Could History Repeat Itself? The Prospects for a Second Reconstruction in Post–World War II South Carolina

Robert R. Korstad

The White Citizens’ Councils of Orangeburg County, South Carolina

John W. White

Integration with [Relative] Dignity: The Desegregation of Clemson College and George McMillan’s Article at Forty

M. Ron Cox Jr.

Memory, History, and the Desegregation of Greenville, South Carolina

Stephen O’Neill

Schooling and White Supremacy: The African American Struggle for Educational Equality and Access in South Carolina, 1945–1970

R. Scott Baker

Part 5—Retrospectives

Briggs v. Elliott a Half Century Later

John Hope Franklin

Joseph A. De Laine Jr.

Beatrice Brown Rivers

Questions and Answers

Voices from the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina

Charles F. McDew

Constance Curry

Matthew J. Perry Jr.

Harvey B. Gantt

The Orangeburg Massacre

Cleveland L. Sellers Jr.

Jordan M. Simmons III

Jack Bass

We’re Not There Yet: Orangeburg, 1968–2003

William C. Hine

Part 6—Crosscurrents at Century’s End

The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution

Gavin Wright

Civil Rights and Politics in South Carolina: The Perspective of One Lifetime, 1940–2003

Dan Carter

How Far We Have Come—How Far We Still Have to Go

Charles Joyner

Appendix: Orangeburg, Let Us Heal Ourselves

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

1. James F. Byrnes, J. Strom Thurmond, and John C. West, 1964

2. Governor Ernest F. Hollings and Senator John F. Kennedy, 1960

3. W. E. B. Du Bois with members of the Charleston NAACP, 1917

4. Editorial cartoon about lynching, 1926

5. The body of Willie Earle

6. Charlie Fitzgerald and the staff of Charlie’s Place

7. Leon Rubber Legs Williams and his dance partner

8. Shag dancers Harry Driver and Cynthia Harrol

9. South Carolina Klan rally, 1950

10. Charlie Fitzgerald after his encounter with the Klan

11. NAACP leaders in Columbia, 1957

12. A blacks-only school in Clarendon County, 1946

13. Plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott, 1949

14. Thurgood Marshall in Charleston, 1951

15. Thomas Gaither

16. Septima Clark

17. Esau Jenkins and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

18. George Elmore

19. Black Charlestonians waiting to vote, 1948

20. Orangeburg White Citizens’ Council newspaper

21. A segregated gas station in Calhoun County, 1959

22. Judge J. Waties Waring, 1954

23. Rev. Joseph A. De Laine and family

24. South Carolina State students in 1960

25. Charleston Movement poster, 1963

26. Picketers on King Street in Charleston, 1963

27. Matthew J. Perry Jr., 1963

28. Harvey Gantt and family, 1960

29. Colored Rest Room sign at Orangeburg County courthouse, 1959

30. South Carolina State and Claflin students marching against segregation, 1960

31. A Ku Klux Klan march in Orangeburg, 1962

32. Shotgun shells fired at South Carolina State students, 1968

33. Samuel Hammond Jr.

34. Delano Middleton

35. Henry Smith

36. Warrenton, North Carolina, boycott flyer, 1963

37. Black share of textile workers, South Carolina, 1918–1981

38. Employment in South Carolina manufacturing, 1940–1980

39. South Carolina personal income, 1929–2004

40. South Carolina population by race, 1860–2000

41. Black elected officials, South Carolina, 1969–2001

42. Median black male income by region, 1953–2001

43. Remembering Harry Briggs

Foreword

On a chilly day in January 2003 in downtown Columbia, I bumped into a friend who asked if I’d heard about the upcoming civil rights history conference being held at the Citadel in Charleston that March. I said no. A smile crossed his face.

There’s not a lot of publicity about it. I’ll send you a copy of the agenda, if you’d like.

A few days later, after scanning a copy of the agenda that had arrived in my mailbox at the newsroom of the State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, I uttered a single, unjournalistic word: Wow.

It was not just that there were more than twenty panels featuring more than seventy civil rights scholars from across the nation and the world. Or that their subjects were such largely forgotten topics as lynching, desegregating South Carolina’s universities, the role of the NAACP in South Carolina, the Clarendon County Briggs v. Elliott lawsuit (the real linchpin of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision), and the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. Presentations would also include scholarly looks at the late, great civil rights activist Septima Clark and the trailblazing U.S. judge Waties Waring of Charleston, also deceased.

What also caught my eye was that some of the aging actors of those dramatic days would be present and speak about their roles—former governor and current U.S. senator Ernest Hollings, a former staunch segregationist who became an equal rights advocate; the brave Harvey Gantt, who as a young black in 1963 risked ostracism and, some felt, death, to desegregate Clemson University; the aristocratic black legal revolutionary and now U.S. judge Matthew Perry; John West, a beloved icon whose 1970 election as governor marked a bright line between the state’s old hardline racial ways and the new, more open and inclusive South Carolina; and Cleveland Sellers, a black activist who was shot by highway patrol troopers at a college civil rights demonstration in Orangeburg and who served time in prison for inciting a riot. These days, Sellers has a pardon and teaches African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Leading off the three-day panel was John Hope Franklin, eighty-eight, the legendary Duke historian who as a young NAACP researcher had played a vital role the plaintiff’s case in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown decision.

In short, there would be not just scholarship; there would be witnessing. It would be an opening of minds, of hearts, of eyes—the closest thing South Carolina had ever had, and maybe ever would have, to a reconciliation meeting, those psychologically cleansing sessions where they who have done wrong acknowledge their deeds, apologize, and are forgiven. Here, the purpose was not to apologize or explain but simply to reflect that long-ago reality, to tell the truth of about the grip of state-sanctioned racism upon South Carolina, and relate stories of the heroes, black and white, who freed us all.

The conference had its ironies. It was being held at the Citadel,¹ a state-run military college established before the Civil War to insure domestic tranquility—in other words, prevent slave uprisings. In 1861 Citadel cadets fired the first shots of that war. A century later its cadets and alumni fought hard (and lost again!) to keep blacks and women from becoming students. The Citadel is in Charleston, where the 1860 secession convention split the Union. It is a city in which for many residents the past is likely to be symbolized by historic homes or the Confederate submarine, the H. L. Hunley, pulled from a watery grave off Charleston in 2000. Public inquiries into slavery and civil rights—the issues that have defined South Carolina politically, economically, and socially for hundreds of years—have never ranked high among the Holy City’s, or South Carolina’s, for that matter, priorities.

I took the conference agenda to the State’s top editor, Mark Lett. He saw its significance immediately. In fact, he one-upped me. Where I had envisioned sending a reporter (me) or two to the conference—which would have been far more coverage than we give most scholarly events—Lett’s idea was to use the conference as a springboard to produce our own stories on the South Carolina civil rights era. In the days leading up to the conference we would explore, in a series of feature articles, various topics based on those to be presented at the Citadel. Writing these preconference stories would liberate us from solely stenographic coverage of just reporting on the Citadel’s sessions. As for the conference itself, we would flood it with reporters, having four or five there each day, with photographers, as well a technology-trained reporter to capture some panels on digital camera for our Internet site.

To us the conference was far more than a news event; it was a chance to educate our readers and ourselves about a story as dramatic as it was untold. For South Carolina’s civil rights era, a period roughly between 1940 and 1970, was a time of great battles and their warriors, with no less than the American promise—justice and equal rights versus oppression—hanging in the balance.

We wrote dozens of stories. Supplementing our core team of myself, Claudia Smith Brinson, Carolyn Click, and Roddie Burriss—all veteran reporters—were more than ten other reporters, photographers, editors, and graphics designers. Our technical people shot digital video of some conference sessions and put them on our Internet site. Two months later we produced a twenty-six-page special section, with most of our stories.

We at the State felt this was a special project. We were revealing a submerged past and showing how far we had come. Reader reaction was intense and widespread. Most was favorable, but as might be expected, a few complaints surfaced from those who felt the newspaper was just stirring up trouble.

Three years later, I’m still getting calls from people, asking for copies of stories we did back then.

The Citadel conference was about history. But it also made history. To understand that statement it is necessary to know this: for much of the twentieth century most South Carolina newspapers and professors at the state’s universities failed to speak out fully, forcefully, and truthfully about the state’s racial dilemmas.

This was tragedy of a high order. Journalists and professors are the people who, by their education and choice of profession, might have been expected to be most vocal in providing moral leadership in articulating civil rights matters. The silence of most South Carolina journalists and professors in those times most likely not only prolonged that sad era, it in some ways allowed the state’s history to be hijacked by those who would deny history—how else to explain that in 2000, during the debate over whether to fly the Confederate flag atop the statehouse, a group of more than one hundred South Carolina historians felt it necessary to hold a press conference to document that slavery—and not states’ rights, as claimed by flag defenders—was the major cause of the American Civil War!

As I write this in mid-2006, there is still a powerful strain in South Carolina that would quash examinations of the past that might taint the ideal of a Confederacy that symbolized anything less than freedom or delve too deeply into the wellsprings of injustice that propped up segregation in South Carolina during much of the twentieth century. Only this spring I asked two of South Carolina’s most prominent historians, both of whom work for public universities, to comment on historical significance, or lack thereof, of the H. L. Hunley submarine. Both historians declined to make public their honestly held opinions for fear of offending powerful neo-Confederates in the state legislature. A third historian reluctantly agreed to comment. Such reticence today on the part of even our finest historians underscores the fact that large patches of South Carolina’s historical landscape—from slavery to Reconstruction to lynching—still have Keep Out signs posted.

We journalists like to call our stories the first rough draft of history. When it came to state-supported apartheid in South Carolina, members of my profession in this state wrote a very rough draft indeed. While it is true that events with a racial dimension were covered—lynchings, colored gatherings, protests in the twentieth century—these events were often written in a kind of one-dimensional code, written by white journalists for white readers. Nearly all whites—writers and audience alike—believed in the legitimacy of a white-dominated, racially segregated world.

In the 1950s and 1960s the editorial writers at my paper, the State, had upheld segregation and criticized anyone, including the federal government, who would pass laws affirming equal rights for black people. In so doing they comforted themselves and their readers with the fiction that their stands were enlightened and part of a southern cultural tradition with sound intellectual underpinnings. They took pride in the nods they made to African Americans as people. Former State editor Sam Latimer noted in his 1970 history of the State newspaper that it not only had editorialized in favor of compulsory black public education up through the twelfth grade but also (before World War I) was the second newspaper in the South to capitalize the N in Negro.²

William Workman, one of South Carolina’s most prominent journalists in the mid–twentieth century and editor of the State from 1966 to 1972, likened integration in his 1960 book, The Case for the South, to that most hated of ideologies: communism. What Communism has been to the rest of the nation, so integration is to the South—something so undesirable, so foreign to the domestic way of life, so fraught with danger to present and future generations that it is fought on every front, including the educational.³

From the 1920s to the early 1960s the State’s editorial pages regularly carried a cartoon featuring Hambone, a shuffling, dialect-speaking black man, the kind of harmless black who dispensed amiable wit but who would never upset folks by asking to vote or sit at a lunch counter. (As the 1960s went on, the State’s news coverage improved and its editorial stances moderated. In the crucial 1970 gubernatorial elections, it endorsed the moderate John West, not the race-baiting Albert Watson.)

But segregationist views dominated almost every South Carolina newspaper, sometimes to an extreme. In the 1950s, as he closed out a long career as a noted editor and first dean of the University of South Carolina journalism program, for example, William Watts Ball at the Charleston News and Courier wrote amusing stories about black lynchings.⁴ Many editorial writers adopted a rhetorical technique of segregationist politicians: they would compare the NAACP—which was trying to end legally segregation’s injustices—with the Ku Klux Klan, which preached a virulent, sometimes violent brand of racism. Thus, in a few words, journalists of that era routinely smeared the NAACP while decrying Klan excesses.

There were a few exceptions. The Charlotte Observer—widely circulated in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s—was noted for its liberal news and editorial stances (that is, advocacy of simple justice and equal rights for blacks). Just over the North Carolina/South Carolina border, newsman Horace Carter of Tabor City exposed Klan violence in South Carolina, especially in Horry and Marion counties. For this work he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953. (It is telling that no South Carolina newspaper has ever won a Pulitzer for exposing racial injustice, despite ample opportunity for generations!) In the mid-1950s John O’Dowd, a Citadel graduate and editor of the Florence Morning News, wrote editorials after the Brown decision in which he said things such as, like it or not, the U.S. Supreme Court is the law of the land. Because of his moderate racial stands, O’Dowd attracted a wide range of enemies and critics, from the Ku Klux Klan to the News and Courier. Eventually community pressure forced O’Dowd to leave, a one-man exodus noted by Time magazine, which reported that O’Dowd was moving to Chicago and quoted him as saying, "I’m certain the News will no longer buck racial feeling."⁵

In the state’s universities a parallel universe of self-censorship and lack of freedom of speech also existed. Professors who spoke up for equal rights for black people, or who might dare to defend the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court, were ostracized and in extreme cases forced to leave. The most infamous incident involved University of South Carolina’s Chester Travelstead, dean of the School of Education. In 1955 Travelstead wrote a letter to segregationist governor George Bell Timmerman, telling Timmerman he was wrong to try to undermine decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Timmerman responded by seeking, and eventually getting, Travelstead’s dismissal. Fear covers South Carolina like the frost. Men are afraid to speak, wrote Camden Episcopal minister Stiles B. Lines.⁶

Inaction based on fear also paralyzed much of the black community. In 1956, under pressure from Governor Timmerman, black officials at all-black South Carolina State College (now University) in Orangeburg halted rallies and expelled students.⁷ In his autobiography, The River of No Return, South Carolina activist Cleveland Sellers tells how as a young teenager he had been so excited at the spreading sit-ins in the early 1960s that he helped organize protests and rallies in his home town of Denmark until his father ordered him to stop. I’ve been working all my life to build something for you, Sellers’s father told him. If you keep on, you’re going to destroy everything.⁸

These days it is fashionable for many whites to say, in excusing the conduct of segregationist whites back then, But everyone did it. That was the custom.

But the examples of men such as Travelstead and O’Dowd show us that not everyone did it. Injustice is injustice, and there are moral choices to be made to speak out in every generation. It was part of the tragedy of South Carolina’s civil rights era that so many journalists and professors, people who supposedly dedicate their lives to finding truth and speaking about it, chose silence.

So it was that the Citadel’s 2003 gathering of scholars and the State’s saturation coverage each had its own historical significance. No one in their wildest imagination fifty years earlier would have ever imagined a South Carolina where scholars would gather to talk publicly about civil rights, or where a newspaper would give those scholars such prominence.

Such an event was, as they say, a long time coming.

In addition to the unspoken moral imperatives to have such a conference in South Carolina, along with wide press coverage, another reason was, simply, that these were stories that needed to be told to a new generation.

By 1971, when moderate white John West took office as governor, the great racial battles of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were over. Libraries, public universities, voting booths, many public schools, restaurants, parks, beaches—all mostly closed a few years earlier—were now open to African Americans.

From 1971 on, the legacy of the past’s injustices became harder to discern. Racial issues morphed into less definable areas such as single-member city council districts, segregation academies, partisan battles over school board seats, and school vouchers. In time generations of South Carolinians, white and black, forgot the struggle that had shaped today’s life.

Moreover few accessible books have been written about South Carolina’s racial battles. Although this state had seminal figures and issues (Briggs v. Elliott, for example, and Waties Waring), South Carolina had lacked the attention-getting people or events that might have caught the media’s attention, such as a Selma or Mississippi civil rights kidnappings. There was no activist of the stature of a Martin Luther King Jr. Without such events and figures, a myth had been created in some quarters that South Carolina had been a kinder, gentler state, a place where all the white folks somehow, one day, had an epiphany and, without much prompting, decided to give the black folks equal rights. (At the Citadel’s conference scholar Tony Badger of Cambridge University demolished this myth, saying South Carolina in no way deserves a reputation as a moderate state on civil rights issues. Far from dousing the fire of popular racist sentiment, the leaders of South Carolina sought to fan the flames, Badger said. Only when pushed to the brink by federal authorities and forced to choose between rebellion or compliance did South Carolina’s white officials begin to grant rights to blacks, he said.)

Prompted by the attendance of so many historical figures (including pioneer protesters at South Carolina State in the 1950s and blacks who as children integrated Charleston public schools) and the State’s landmark coverage, the conference drew hundreds, students and adults, blacks and whites. Even the attorney general of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, dropped down for a morning, and later said he wished he could have stayed longer.⁹ The Charleston Post and Courier gave the conference front-page coverage. Local television stations aired reports on the nightly news. The Associated Press ran stories about the conference, putting them on the wire. In this way this scholarly conference reached an audience of South Carolinians potentially numbering in the millions.

The conference had many dramatic moments, from former governor West choking back tears when relating how former governor Hollings had shocked the General Assembly when he said the South Carolina was going to obey the law and allow Harvey Gantt to enter Clemson, to Gantt himself describing his first night on the Clemson campus, filled with hostile whites.

As good as the Citadel conference was, however, it represented only a beginning. There is much in South Carolina’s past yet to be examined. Entire conferences, for example, could be held on such matters as the Ben Tillman–inspired 1895 Constitutional Convention, in which rights were taken away from South Carolina blacks, or the actions of the South Carolina news media during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Conferences could be held around missing documents (should they ever be found) from the civil rights era: for example, the State Law Enforcement Division conducted extensive police surveillance of civil rights organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, and its undercover agents, who infiltrated NAACP meetings and, presumably, KKK meetings, wrote reports, a few of which I have in my possession, having stumbled across them in the archives at the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University. But most of these papers are missing, as are the complete records of the Gressette Committee.

But make no mistake: the Citadel conference was a tour de force. It demonstrated that in South Carolina, when it comes to history, there should be no Keep Out signs posted anywhere. At the Citadel, for a few shining days, there was only one sign, and it said, Enter.

JOHN MONK

Notes

1. Charles R. Wilson and William Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 277.

2. S. L. Latimer Jr., The Story of The State, 1891–1969, and the Gonzales Brothers (Columbia, S.C.: State Printing, 1970), 221.

3. William D. Workman Jr., The Case for the South (New York: Devon-Adair, 1960), 245.

4. Tinsley E. Yarbrough, A Passion for Justice: J. Waties Waring and Civil Rights (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1987), 190–91.

5. Time, July 30, 1956, 50.

6. Henry H. Lesesne, A History of the University of South Carolina: 1940–2000 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 124, 125, 127.

7. William C. Hine, Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protest, 1955–1968, South Carolina Historical Magazine 97 (October 1996): 310–31.

8. Cleveland Sellers, with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: Morrow, 1973), 29.

9. Henry McMaster, telephone interview with author, July 5, 2006.

Preface

What … strikes me now is how much of the painful past we have yet to confront, even when we love one another and think that we know one another. So much of what agonizes and divides us remains unacknowledged. Even more of it simply fades into oblivion…. We are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.

Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

South Carolina has often been at the center of the American racial drama. As an English colony it was the primary point of entry for African slaves shipped into British North America. Of the original thirteen United States it had the highest percentage of slaves and slave owners. Amid rising national controversy over slavery it led the southern march toward secession and civil war. Of the defeated Confederate states, none underwent a longer or more hotly contested Reconstruction. And almost as soon as that brief experiment in interracial democracy was overthrown South Carolina blazed a trail into the Jim Crow era of racial disfranchisement and segregation. These chapters in the state’s history have been extensively examined and are generally well known.

Far less well known is what happened in South Carolina during the long civil rights struggle that followed. In general accounts of the era important people and events in South Carolina are often either invisible or glossed over in favor of more widely publicized happenings in Alabama, Mississippi, and other states. Most of those accounts, for example, remind readers that Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to obstruct racial integration. But few point out that South Carolina’s chief executives were more successful in the same effort. Almost every scholarly treatment of the civil rights movement assigns significance to the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the regular Mississippi delegation at the national Democratic Convention of 1964. But few mention that black South Carolinians and their Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) had set that precedent at both the 1944 and 1948 national conventions. Most Americans learn that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark in the fight for equal rights. But hardly any are taught that the case that first raised the issue came not from Kansas but rather from South Carolina, as Briggs v. Elliott. Fewer still have heard of Harry Briggs, or John McCray, or Joe De Laine, or Esau Jenkins, or Septima Clark, or the price that they and black South Carolinians like them paid to expand the boundaries of American freedom.

Like their fellow Americans, citizens of the Palmetto State continue, regularly, to grapple with issues that inflame racial passions. Stormy exchanges over the flying of Confederate flags, the funding of rural school districts, and the observance of a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. are but a few of the best-known recent examples. All are deeply rooted in the state’s troubled racial history—a history that many South Carolinians do not know and many others prefer to forget. Public discourse is diminished accordingly. So is the prospect for bringing her people closer together.

A conference on The Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina was held at the Citadel in Charleston from March 5–8, 2003. The meeting brought together historians, civil rights leaders, former governors, and members of the community. The scholars presented research papers on a large number of topics within twentieth-century race relations. Those who helped to shape the events of the era shared their memories and perspectives on what happened. Discussions followed among all who were present. Nearly one hundred people were on the program. Approximately two thousand attended at least one of the twenty-two sessions.¹

This volume is a product of that meeting. It is divided by topic into six sections, all of which, in their separate ways, argue that the struggle within South Carolina was much fiercer and of far greater national significance than is generally recognized. It is our hope that this work will promote a better understanding of the civil rights movement and a more informed and productive discussion of racial issues in the Palmetto State.

The gathering that gave birth to this book would not have been possible without a major grant from the South Carolina Humanities Council, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Indispensable financial assistance was also provided by the Citadel Foundation and the Citadel Alumni Association, the latter of which generously donated the use of its Holliday Alumni Center for the conference. The Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture hosted one of the plenary sessions and a reception afterward. Sonya Fordham, Committee of Descendants Fund of the Community Foundation, awarded a grant to defray costs of transporting participants to campus and for a plenary luncheon session. The Self Family Foundation provided funds to transcribe oral remarks made at several of the plenary sessions and to secure rights to republish photographs.

Additional contributions were made by the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies, Coastal Carolina University; the South Carolina Historical Society; the University of South Carolina Institute of Southern Studies; the University of South Carolina Press; the University of Georgia Press; the College of Charleston Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World; the College of Charleston School of Humanities and Social Sciences; and the Citadel College of Graduate and Professional Studies.

Heartfelt thanks are also gratefully extended to our colleagues in the history departments at Clemson University, Coastal Carolina University, the College of Charleston, Francis Marion University, Furman University, South Carolina State University, and the University of South Carolina—all of whom, at a time of fiscal contraction, shared their scarce resources with us to make this a statewide initiative of the South Carolina higher education network.

Beyond financial contributions, numerous people provided important assistance to this undertaking. Sherry Moon transcribed, from videotaped recordings, the oral remarks made at several of the plenary sessions. Elizabeth Brooks handled the secretarial work of the conference. Rachel Carr skillfully performed the secretarial, and no small amount of the editorial, work for this volume. Randy Akers, Chaz Joyner, Jack Bass, Marvin Dulaney, Bernie Powers, Sherman Pyatt, and Tom Kuehn provided much appreciated encouragement and support throughout the process. Harry Carter, the provost of the Citadel, generously helped, on more than one occasion, to solve unexpected problems. So, too, did Kyle Sinisi and Marc Cox of the Citadel’s Department of History. Simon Appleford provided invaluable research assistance. All the while, Alex Moore, our editor at the University of South Carolina Press, has been a model of patience and good humor when we deserved neither.

Finally we offer special thanks to the State and to the Charleston Post and Courier, South Carolina’s most widely read newspapers. The State devoted eight consecutive days of front-page coverage, along with a companion Web site and a special supplement, to the meeting.² The Post and Courier contributed four days of extensive reporting. This rare, if not unprecedented, level of attention to an academic gathering made the history of the civil rights movement a topic of conversation throughout much of the state and encouraged a broad cross-section of South Carolinians to turn, for a few days at least, and face the hounds. These and the large number of other folks who helped to make the conference a success deserve most of the credit for this volume. Its shortcomings are ours alone.

Notes

1. Nearly one hundred separate presentations were made. The plenary sessions were videotaped. An outline of the entire conference, and its related activities, is available online at http://www.citadel.edu/civilrights/.

2. The State’s coverage began on Sunday, March 2, 2003, with background pieces on the civil rights movement and the upcoming conference. It ended the following Monday with an editorial on the current state of race relations in South Carolina. Much of the coverage may be found at http://www.thestateonline.com/civilrights/. The Post and Courier published a couple of brief pieces in the weeks prior to the conference and provided continuous coverage of the events from March 6 through March 9.

Part 1 Governors

The interpretive framework of the volume is set forth in part 1. In its principal essay, From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change, Tony Badger places the state’s response to the civil rights movement into a regional context. He challenges the conventional wisdom that the Palmetto State’s elected leaders did not share the ingrained racism of the state’s white voters, that they exercised commendable restraint on racial matters, and that they were powerless to prevent massive resistance to reform. Rather, he argues, from J. Strom Thurmond and James F. Byrnes to George B. Timmerman and Ernest F. Hollings, they led an impassioned, aggressive, and effective defiance of racial change right up to the brink of disaster in 1963.

By then, in the aftermath of widespread and well-reported incidents of white violence against blacks throughout the Deep South, the political climate of the nation had changed. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that South Carolina would either have to change with it or suffer the same level of national condemnation that was then being directed toward Mississippi and Alabama. At that point, responding finally to ever-rising pressure from black Carolinians and from a belatedly committed federal government, South Carolina’s governors halted their march and charted—in comparison to their counterparts in other states of the Deep South—a more balanced course. But even it, Badger laments, all too often was marred by white actions to minimize additional gains in civil rights.

Two of the governors discussed in Badger’s essay, Ernest F. Hollings and John C. West, were present when he read it at the civil rights conference. Afterward, they commented on his analysis of their gubernatorial leadership. They also fielded questions from the audience about the state’s celebration of the Civil War centennial, the integration of Clemson University, the Orangeburg Massacre, and current racial issues. Transcripts of those comments and discussions complete the first section and are offered to provide insights into the ways that race relations in South Carolina have, and have not, changed during the intervening years.

From Defiance to Moderation

South Carolina Governors and Racial Change

TONY BADGER

It is a great privilege to share the platform tonight with two of the men, Senator Hollings and Governor West, who did most among South Carolina’s white leadership to guide the state into an acceptance of the end of segregation and the embrace of dynamic and diversified economic growth, to lead the state’s move from defiance to moderation. It is also a daunting task, as I am not a historian of South Carolina, although I have done some work on the state’s congressmen and the Southern Manifesto. I am not attempting tonight to add freshly researched material to the wonderfully nuanced studies of South Carolina’s response to racial change by Marcia Synnott and John G. Sproat, the comprehensive dissertation on 1963 by Ron Cox, the overview by Walter Edgar in his remarkable South Carolina: A History, or the fine study by Gordon Harvey of New South governors and education that features John West.¹ What I believe the organizers want me to do, instead, is to put the established narrative of white South Carolina’s response to racial change into a regional context, to see what was distinctive and what was not about the state’s reaction.

1

It may be a measure of British provincialism, but South Carolina unfortunately does not feature in the news in Britain very often. Even the hundredth birthday of Senator Thurmond might not have broken that pattern of neglect. But the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Nick Bryant, was a Cambridge historian who went to Oxford to write a rather good Ph.D. dissertation on the Kennedy administration and civil rights. He was also a great admirer of Dan Carter’s biography of George Wallace. So, well before the furor over Trent Lott’s comments, British viewers and listeners had the benefit of listening to Professor Carter give his views at some length on the then senior senator. At the same time the Economist reminded its British readers of Olin Johnston’s comment, handed on by Harry Ashmore, when listening to one of Senator Thurmond’s diatribes on the subject of civil rights: Listen to ol’ Strom. He really believes all that shit.²

Johnston’s implication that South Carolinian politicians, unlike Thurmond, did not believe their segregationist rhetoric has been widely accepted. Johnston himself warned a young Dick Riley that segregation was on its way out—and should be. William Jennings Bryan Dorn later claimed, We did not really believe what we said back then. For that matter, Thurmond himself always denied that the Dixiecrat movement was about race. Leading political figures told John Sproat, off the record in the early 1980s, that they had known from the start that segregation was doomed. The argument was that the forces of popular mass white racism were so powerful that no politician could challenge them and be reelected. Harriet Keyserling, from a later generation of reformers, accepted that argument in her memoirs. The linked argument was that precipitate desegregation would unleash a tidal force of white violence and pave the way for racial demagoguery of the Tillman and Cole Blease variety. Rembert Dennis argued that the Gressette School Committee, the legal fountain spring of South Carolina’s massive resistance legislation, was more of a delaying procedure, a maneuver because of the finance involved than it was any real effort to forever thwart it [desegregation]. Everybody recognized it couldn’t be done. It was just a delaying proposition, until the state could take on the full responsibility, principally in education, of full integration.³

These views are not merely the comfortable efforts of veteran politicians to reassure themselves. They link closely to two important strands in current historiography. The first is Michael Klarman’s argument that the Brown decision temporarily destroyed racial moderation in the South and it halted the incipient amelioration of Jim Crow practices that had been occurring in much of the South in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It propelled southern politics towards racial fanaticism because it decreed that racial change take place first in an area of life, grade school education, where white southerners were certain to be most resistant. Numan Bartley similarly argues that the civil rights movement was wrong to target education: it should have targeted voting rights, where resistance would have been less. Bartley also blames national liberals and the Truman administration, in the same terms as Olin Johnston, for substituting a moralistic concern for symbolic opportunity and the elimination of de jure segregation for the substance of a drive to tackle the economic problems of lower-income blacks and whites.⁴

These views constitute what I would call the self-exculpatory model of massive resistance in South Carolina, in which the responsibility for massive resistance lies with everybody except the white political leaders of the state. The blame is instead placed on racist white workers in the state, the NAACP, the Supreme Court, and northern liberals. In the face of the obstacles placed on them by these irresponsible forces, the leadership of the state acted with as much restraint as it could.

If the model of South Carolina in the 1950s is self-exculpatory, the model of the state in the 1960s is self-congratulatory. From the peaceful integration of Clemson in 1963, anticipated and orchestrated by Governor Hollings, to the collapse of freedom of choice schemes and the acceptance of substantial school integration under the watchful eye of Governors McNair and West, South Carolina surprised observers by the peaceful nature of racial change in the state, in stark contrast to the violent confrontations that wracked Alabama and Mississippi. The state’s responsible leadership received high praise from the Kennedy administration, its governors attracted national media attention and commendation, and historians have concurred. The titles themselves convey the essence: Firm Flexibility, Integration with Dignity, Pragmatic Conservatism, Calm and Exemplary.

What had happened? Gordon Harvey saw John West as one in a long line of moderate governors who have steered [South Carolina] to safety through the swirling waters of Civil Rights without major violence. According to Walter Edgar, following an argument originally made by Numan Bartley, the new, growth-oriented metropolitan elites had triumphed over the old, traditional county elites. They did so by championing ‘moderation and social stability’ and thus used an old and venerated South Carolina tradition. These elites and the governors of the 1960s had realized that order and harmony were crucial to economic growth, and that was more important than preserving the racial status quo.⁵

There is some force to the self-exculpatory model of defiance and the self-congratulatory model of moderation. But let me try to tease them out a little and ask some questions about the context to make explicit the implicit comparisons that often underpin them.

2

The self-exculpatory account of the years of defiance up to 1963 plays down the coherence and proactive quality of the massive resistance strategy that existed in South Carolina and underestimates just how pioneering and successful the strategy was in a regional context.

Fritz Hollings and John West were together here at the Citadel before World War II—a formative experience for both men, as it was for many Americans. As West recalls, We spent four years in public service of a very special but very demanding kind. And we realized that there were satisfactions in public service. The four years that we spent many of us had opportunities—Fritz Hollings for example in North Africa, I in the Pacific, including Japan with the occupation forces [and] you were then on a mission that was an unselfish mission in terms of you weren’t working for yourself. You were working for a bigger cause, a cause that transcended any selfish motives. The only selfish motive was trying to survive, of course. So, I think that our class, and I look back at the group that came into our university law school in 1946, many of them entered public service, and a lot of political people: Jim Mann, Hugo Sims in the Congress, innumerable people in the legislature and, of course, Hollings himself.⁶

Throughout the South, white veterans returned home determined to construct a better South. They went to law school under the GI Bill; they dominated the legislatures of, for example, Texas in 1946 and Mississippi in 1948; they organized GI revolts against local political machines and rings; they supported candidates for statewide office who were putting together coalitions of lower-income whites and the small but increasing black electorates, candidates who promised the long-overdue investment in public services that had been denied by conservative elites, candidates such as war hero Sid McMath in Arkansas.⁷

In South Carolina such a candidate was Strom Thurmond, war hero, injured when his glider crashed behind enemy lines on D day. When Thurmond ran for governor in 1946 and promised a progressive outlook, a progressive program, a progressive leadership, when he called in his inaugural speech for greater attention to African American education and equal rights to women, he sounded like so many of the New Deal–style southern liberals elected in the late 1940s. When he claimed the solution of our economic problems would cause racial problems to disappear, he sounded like Hodding Carter or Frank Smith. When he explicitly equated ridding the state of the influence of the Barnwell ring with ridding Europe of the Nazis—I was willing to stamp out such gangs in Europe—he sounded exactly like Sid McMath in Arkansas or Delesseps Morrison in New Orleans.⁸

But as with fellow veteran Herman Talmadge in Georgia, Thurmond argued that the freedom he had fought for in Europe was the freedom to fight for traditional patterns of race relations. Thurmond took the state not down the liberal GI route but the Dixiecrat route. Whatever he claimed later, race was at the core of the Dixiecrat challenge. It was important to tell the nation that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.⁹

Thurmond’s presidential run in 1948 may have been a quixotic gesture, born of opportunism and ambition. But it was fundamentally a preemptive strike against civil rights legislation. As such, it had the overwhelming support of most of South Carolina’s political establishment, especially the congressional delegation in the House, if not Senator Johnston. It was, as the Spartanburg Herald complained, a top-heavy organization. If the national Democrats were competing for the black vote, then the independence of the South manifested by the revolt in 1948 would either put a Republican in the White House or would force the Democrats to make concessions in the future. The convoluted stance of the national Democrats on civil rights and party loyalty in 1952 and 1956 suggests that this tactic did have an effect. Thurmond’s successor in the governor’s mansion in Columbia, his local friend James F. Byrnes, knew that third parties were never going anywhere. Instead, he adapted Thurmond’s strategy into, first, attempts to mobilize regional solidarity in the Democratic Party, to reinstitute Calhoun’s doctrine of a concurrent majority so that the South could thwart federal civil rights initiatives, and second, into support for Republicans for Eisenhower in 1952 and later for Richard Nixon.¹⁰

1. A gathering of governors: James F. Byrnes, J. Strom Thurmond, and John C. West in Camden, 1964. Courtesy of the John Carl West Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina

Byrnes returned to South Carolina as governor with immense prestige with both the traditional county and the new metropolitan elites in the state. He came back with unparalleled international exposure and experience in the highest echelons of the country’s legislative, executive, and judicial branches. No one was better placed to lead South Carolina into a realistic acceptance of racial change. As future superintendent of education C. B. Busbee recalled, whatever the problem was, the universal assumption was that Byrnes could solve it.¹¹

Byrnes instead took the lead in masterminding the region’s resistance to racial change. Byrnes and attorney Robert Figg first conceded that the schools in Clarendon County, the subject of the Briggs v. Elliott case, were not equal. Then he put before the legislature a massive school equalization program and secured the passage of a three-cent sales tax to fund it. The aim was to render separate but equal genuinely equal and to forestall court-ordered desegregation. No other state mounted such a massive program. It was a remarkable achievement and had short-term success in persuading the local federal court, over Judge Waring’s passionate objection, to give the state time to make good its commitment to equalization. The dramatic improvement in black schools may possibly have lessened the African American leadership’s desire to push school desegregation cases in the state. It is also important to stress that this preemptive strategy meant that conservatives had the only coherent strategy on offer in the region in the years before the Brown decision. Southern liberals, as I have argued elsewhere, may have espoused the necessity for gradual racial change, but they did not lay out a strategy for achieving that change. Liberals may have believed that eventual desegregation was inevitable, but they did not share that insight with the voters. The Byrnes strategy instead had the field to itself before 1954.¹²

The second strand of Byrnes’s strategy was to take charge of the legal defense in the school desegregation cases: to persuade legendary lawyer John W. Davis to take the Brown case; then to lobby his old Supreme Court colleagues Fred Vinson and Felix Frankfurter to persuade his political ally, Dwight Eisenhower, to prevent the Justice Department filing an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the plaintiffs; and finally to persuade the attorney general of Kansas, a state in which facilities were genuinely equal, to join the case. This personal tour de force, of course, came to naught, to Byrnes’s bitter disappointment and surprise. But his efforts did make an important contribution to the short-term success of massive resistance. His warnings of bloodshed and demagoguery in the event of precipitate desegregation may not have finally swayed the justices in the first Brown decision, but the warnings, and Byrnes’s reputation among the judges and with the president, did influence the implementation decree the following year. They also shaped Eisenhower’s refusal to put his massive personal authority behind the Brown decision and the Court’s subsequent reluctance in the 1950s to assert its authority in school desegregation cases.

As the Court bent over backward to accommodate the South, the argument of moderates and liberals that white southerners had no alternative but to comply with the law of the land was undercut. It was patently obvious that the Court could be defied. The Clarendon County case highlighted that result. After Brown II, Judge Parker ruled that the decision did not mandate integration, only non-segregation, paving the way for pupil placement laws. The NAACP did not commit resources to appeal that decision because they feared that the Supreme Court, influenced by its faith in the reasonableness of southerners such as Jimmy Byrnes, would formally accept that the Parker interpretation was adequate.¹³

Byrnes had spurned the opportunity to provide moderate regional leadership before 1954, but in that year there was another opportunity. He might have led South Carolina into accepting Brown as the law of the land and mediated the state’s transition to some form of gradual compliance with the decision. That prospect was held out to Byrnes by historian Arthur Schlesinger, who communicated with Byrnes via Ben Cohen, the old New Dealer who had worked with Byrnes at the State Department. For Schlesinger, the ‘‘greatest challenge to constructive statesmanship that we have had in this country was for responsible southerners to bring forward plans that fully took into account local conditions but honestly directed to the abolition of segregation in the schools provided responsible northerners did not insist on abrupt or precipitate changes. Might, Schlesinger asked Cohen, Byrnes now accept the inevitable and dedicate these last years to an earnest attempt to work the thing out?"¹⁴

Schlesinger’s query reflected how much prestige Byrnes enjoyed in the North. One can only speculate on what might have happened if Byrnes, who had so much political power and prestige in rural and metropolitan South Carolina, who was as comfortable with farmers as with business giants, and Eisenhower, with his immense status as a military hero in the South and his reputation particularly among southern businessmen, had invested their prestige in making it clear to white southerners that the Supreme Court had to be obeyed. One reason why Eisenhower would not was because of the respect he had for Byrnes. What Byrnes and other conservatives in the South failed to realize was just how much understanding and leeway that northerners, including Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) liberals such as Schlesinger, were prepared to show the South. As Walter Jackson has shown, northern liberals were as gradualist as their southern counterparts. They accepted the southern argument that precipitate change would lead to violence and demagoguery. They were no more anxious to secure speedy compliance than white southerners.¹⁵

Instead of compliance, the General Assembly, under the grim leadership of George Bell Timmerman, passed just about every massive resistance measure known to man. Timmerman himself was determined that segregation would not end in a 1000 years. By the time that the Gressette Committee had done its work, the state had deleted its constitutional provision for public schools, taken the power to withdraw state funds from any schools to and from which courts had ordered a student transferred, given local school board rules the force of law, screened library books, investigated the NAACP at South Carolina State College, banned NAACP members from government employment, closed Edisto State Beach, and reaffirmed bus segregation. In 1956, in Howard Quint’s words, the General Assembly passed segregation measures at a mass production rate.¹⁶

South Carolina’s version of massive resistance worked. It created a society just as closed as Mississippi, in which dissent was not tolerated. Fear, said an Episcopal minister, covered the state like a frost. Dissenting academics both black and white at the University of South Carolina, Benedict College, Allen University, and South Carolina State College were fired. Dissenting clergy were driven out by their congregations. Jack O’Dowd from the Florence Morning News left the state. What happened to Will Campbell and Hazel Brannon Smith in Mississippi happened to their counterparts in South Carolina. Public advocacy of moderation was restricted to the publication, organized by Episcopalian ministers, of South Carolinians Speak: A Moderate Approach to Race Relations, itself a tortured and defensive volume; to the occasional church resolution; to the few chapters of the South Carolina Council for Human Relations led by the redoubtable Alice Norwood Spearman; and to the defense of public schools by women’s clubs.¹⁷

This climate of conformity was not created simply by persuasion or even social ostracism. It was created by blatant economic pressure and by violence. One of the abiding impressions of this conference in both papers and personal testimony is the countless examples of violence and economic intimidation, often unacknowledged in the records, directed especially at African Americans. Black plaintiffs such as Harry Briggs and his wife were fired. Other black activists, such as Joseph De Laine, were fired on and his church burned. An African American candidate for the Gaffney City Council in 1952 withdrew because of death threats. Whites who helped blacks were flogged and beaten. The Klan revived in the Piedmont in 1957, and as Tim Tyson has vividly described, Klansmen on three occasions attempted to dynamite the house of Claudia Thomas Sanders, who had contributed one of the less tortured essays to South Carolinians Speak and was consequently ostracized by her friends and extended family. As Tyson concluded, No public figure of any stature uttered one public word against either the attempt to kill Claudia Sanders and her family or the acquittal of her assailants. The silence was louder than the dynamite.¹⁸

Defiance in South Carolina, then, was not a restrained response by a leadership anxious to channel popular white supremacist thought into safe channels until an accommodation with inevitable change could be worked out. If there were politicians who saw the writing on the wall, they were silent. As a black minister once wryly observed to Calvin Trillin in 1960, if all the white politicians who said they were working backstage for racial justice actually were, it must be pretty crowded there behind the scenes. What white leaders were concerned about was not that whites in the state or the region were too fired up on the race issue; rather they worried that they were too quiescent and resigned. Conservative journalist W. D. Workman bemoaned a blight of submissiveness, the cry of surrender. Citizens Council leader Farley Smith complained of the apathy of the average white citizen. Alice Spearman described the committee of fifty-two leading clergy, businessmen, and professionals, who called for maintaining segregation and interposition, as a revolt in high places. When the South Carolina Association of Citizens Councils gathered to hear James Eastland in early 1956, the entire political leadership of the state was on the platform. When Strom Thurmond drafted the Southern Manifesto, his aim was not to assuage popular racism but to stir up popular segregationist feeling by convincing wavering politicians and their constituents that the Supreme Court could, and should, be defied. Defiance in South Carolina was a top-down phenomenon.¹⁹

Would the defiance have been any less if the NAACP had not made education its primary target? The immediate postwar violence in response to any signs of black assertiveness does not suggest that an alternative strategy would have provoked less opposition. If the NAACP had concentrated on voting, progress would not have been quick. The hysterical reaction to the end of the white primary, and the fact that only ten thousand additional blacks were able to register in the fifteen years between 1946 and 1961, did not suggest a calm reaction to an emphasis on voting. As in the rest of the South, violence was as likely to be the response to voter registration as it was to school desegregation drives.²⁰ In short, South Carolina’s leaders united for the long haul to defend segregation and white supremacy.

Thurmond and Byrnes, in particular in 1948, 1950, and 1954, had separate opportunities to lead their state in a different direction. They chose not to. Instead the leaders worked to convince white South Carolinians that the Supreme Court could be defied. These leaders did nothing to disabuse ordinary South Carolinians of that notion. White South Carolinians, like their leaders, saw no reason voluntarily to give up the privileges of whiteness, even if they had doubts about segregation, if they did not have to. And South Carolina’s leaders were telling them that they did not have to.

3

Fritz Hollings, as a member of the General Assembly and as lieutenant governor, had been part of the inner circle