by Herb Frazier
After the end of Reconstruction, white supremacy took a quantum leap ahead in the 1880s and 1890s, and these decades each witnessed the erection of a Calhoun statue. The first was erected in 1887, but displeasure with its design led to its replacement by the much taller present version emplaced in 1896. That year was the occasion for the Supreme Court’s infamous Plessey v. Ferguson decision, which provided the legal basis for and therefore encouraged the creation of two American societies, one black and one white, separate and supposedly equal, except by design the latter never happened.4
The way the Calhoun statue was defaced after the shooting at Emanuel contained an implicit question: Why don’t we tell the whole story about men who are lionized in Charleston’s landscape? The handwritten descriptors added to the Calhoun statue are only the most recent display of a deep-seated and widespread animosity toward the fact of white supremacy, its symbols, and the long roots in Charleston’s history.
The former slave Elijah Green was one of the five men who dug Calhoun’s grave, and he cleared off the land where the monument is located today. He was unusually honest in sharing his contempt for Calhoun with a white interviewer in the 1930s. He said, “I never did like Calhoun ’cause he hated the Negro.” Green wanted to make it clear that many other black Carolinians shared his feelings, and he asserted “no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people.”5 One youthful observer from the early twentieth century recalled that “blacks took that statue personally” because he embodied the whites’ sentiments toward blacks. Walking nearby, she recalled, there was Calhoun staring down at you with the message: “Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.” That’s why she said that children and some adults sometimes threw objects at the statue to show their disdain.6 There were many new policies that were instituted in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth that signaled a harsher era of race relations—and Calhoun was the symbol of their plight.
One of the most troublesome developments in the new racial order was the rise of disenfranchisement. Even after Reconstruction ended, African American men continued to vote and hold office in South Carolina, albeit in much-reduced numbers. There was at least one black Republican state legislator until 1900, but the last African American congressman from the state left office in 1897. Almost a century passed before another was elected.7 The black electorate was being undermined across the South through methods that can only be described as legal sleight of hand and political manipulation. In South Carolina the process began in the 1880s, with the introduction of more complicated voting procedures that only intensified in the next decade. In 1895, with leadership from the rabidly racist senator Ben Tillman, South Carolina convened a state constitutional convention expressly designed to disenfranchise black Carolinians. The 1895 constitution included a variety of provisions including residency, literacy, and property qualifications, all of which made it more difficult to vote.8
Some of the new requirements also allowed election officials sufficient latitude to administer the laws unfairly. Blacks who attempted to register to vote frequently faced more difficult questions than their white counterparts, and when this was not sufficient to discourage them, fraud could always be used. In the opening years of the twentieth century, a black Charlestonian complained to a visitor about the way such political chicanery had nullified his community’s vote. “To his certain knowledge” the Charlestonian said, he and other black men “cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.” The foregoing methods were effective and ultimately destroyed the black electorate. This is how—despite South Carolina’s black majority in 1900—Senator Benjamin Tillman could still announce that of its 114,000 registered voters, only 14,000 were black.9 Simultaneously with their elimination from the voter lists, black men also had less influence over the criminal justice system. In the 1880s, Charleston black men (and some from other places around the state) continued serving on juries, but by the turn of the century, they had been completely removed from this civic responsibility.10
The deterioration of race relations could be further seen in the proliferation of legally enforced racial segregation that physically separated the races in public spaces. The South’s duo-chromatic order followed the Civil War as blacks and whites gravitated to different social spheres—but these early racial divisions were established by custom, and they were not rigid. In the two decades following the Civil War, it was possible for the races to interact on the basis of equality on public conveyances and in recreational areas, such as parks and theaters. The rise of white supremacy in the late nineteenth century, however, dictated a more complete and thoroughgoing separation of the races embedded in law.
This new system was informally known as Jim Crow; the origin of the name is central to understanding the purpose of the system. Jim Crow was originally the name given to an antebellum character found in a type of popular musical known as the minstrel show. He was portrayed by whites who darkened their faces and then performed caricatured and demeaning representations of “the Negro” that demonstrated his inferiority and unfitness for freedom. The widespread use of this term to describe the system of racial segregation reveals a twofold purpose. First, Jim Crow was devised to separate and insulate whites from the contamination of a group of people who were deemed their inferiors in every way.11 The second function of Jim Crow was educational: the segregated facilities were never equal in quality, and thus the differences provided a constant and pervasive stream of visual cues that established and seemingly reaffirmed the evidence of white superiority and black inferiority.
In 1889, South Carolina repealed its civil rights law passed two decades earlier.12 Over the next two decades, Jim Crow facilities, with “Colored” and “White” signs, spread across South Carolina like an invasive kudzu vine, choking off any resistance and trapping the state in a racial mire from which it has yet to become fully disentangled. The process began with the railroads: the first law establishing racial segregation on first-class railroad cars was passed in 1898, and two years later new legislation required trains with multiple cars to maintain separate coaches for each race. In 1917, railroads were prohibited from even unloading and loading black and white passengers at the same locations. During this time, steamboats and ferries were segregated. At the turn of the twentieth century, black Charlestonians still had access to most seats on the city streetcars where the old, informal customs still applied.13 The old practice was that blacks would take seats in the back and fill forward, while whites would take seats in the front and move further into the car; the two groups would meet somewhere in the floating middle. One black Charlestonian saw the absurdity in this arrangement and noted, “If you could be looking from above—if you could see it as God saw it—you would see black and white ‘stripes’ getting wider and thinner as black people and white people got off and on the car . . . [with a] blank stripe in between.” The unwritten rule was that the two races could not sit next to each other on the same seat. A new law passed in 1912 destroyed the system’s earlier flexibility and relegated black riders to the back seats.14
The segregation laws extended to most other areas of life, including major institutions, such as theaters, hospitals, jails, and schools—and even included the more mundane but apparently crucial water fountain. In the early twentieth century, public parks may not have been officially segregated, but the police and other white officials warned African Americans away, unless they had official business in these places. White Point Gardens (also known as the Battery) at the tip of the peninsula and Hampton Park to the north were examples of such interdicted zones. The one exception at the Battery was the Fourth of July, which many white Charlestonians still regarded as a “Yankee” holiday. On this day the park was turned over to black Charlestonians, who frequently had picnics and formal programs that included reciting excerpts from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass speeches, as well as singing the Negro National Anthem.15 The general lac
k of access to public parks ensured that church grounds like those of Emanuel would be important locations for African Americans’ outdoor activities.
Public and private schools were segregated by law, and this had a devastating effect on African American education. In keeping with the real goals of Jim Crow, black children attended schools that were physically inferior to those of their white counterparts: they were usually more crowded, and their educational materials were often items that had already been discarded by white students. The lack of attention to black students is evident in racial disparities in school funding; in 1926, for example, Charleston County spent five times more on white schools compared to its black schools.16
Although white students had access to a public high school for decades, Charleston failed to provide a public high school for African Americans until the eve of World War I. Even then, it was established as the Charleston Colored Industrial School and specialized in teaching manual skills, such as carpentry, bricklaying, and needlecraft, while lacking college preparatory courses. The prevailing belief among whites was that black Charlestonians had no need for an advanced or classically oriented education to fill the limited jobs that would be available to them. A private high school operated by the American Missionary Society, Avery Institute was available for black students. It had a fine reputation and prepared many of its students for college. In certain respects, Avery was the antithesis of what a Jim Crow education was supposed to produce. Eugene Hunt graduated from Avery in the 1930s and became a well-known South Carolina musician and educator. Reflecting back on his high school years, he believes many whites had little fondness for Avery, which they saw as teaching “negras” to become “smart alecs” who didn’t know their place. One of the school’s greatest achievements, according to Hunt, was “teaching blacks that they were the equal of anybody and need not apologize to anybody.”17 Those attitudes shared by the teachers, administrators, and students explain why Avery Institute became an important site for civil rights activism.
There was a peculiar exception to strict segregation in Charleston city schools, though—in the early years of the twentieth century, black teachers were generally excluded from employment in the city schools, even the ones for black students.18 These urban jobs were reserved for whites because the school buildings were more substantial with more inviting work environments compared to their rural counterparts. City employment also allowed teachers to avoid having to travel long distances into the countryside, which often required taking ferries or being rowed across rivers to reach schools in the country.
Teachers often used public institutions to supplement their teaching—fields trips to theaters, libraries, and museums. As an educational institution, the Charleston Museum had only been patronized by whites, but in 1915, for the first time, its new charter explicitly designated the institution for the benefit of white citizens. The museum soon deviated from strict enforcement: in 1920 a progressive-thinking director arranged special hours on Saturday for African Americans to attend.19
While education was designed to improve people and fit them for participation in society as responsible citizens, racial segregation—particularly in education—undermined those goals and ultimately produced a corrosive effect on human relations. Mamie Fields, who grew up in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Charleston, watched Jim Crow expand and become more comprehensive. Observing its effects, she concluded that segregation “made friends into enemies overnight.” For years, she recalled, her brother had played with a German child across the street, but the tightening grip of segregation choked their former relationship; the two boys began to use racial epithets and to sometimes fight. Fields observed the same behavior among black and white children on the street as groups of kids walked home from school. Previously they might speak, but under Jim Crow as they approached one another, their bodies stiffened and threats were exchanged, which sometimes resulted in violence.20
Violence—which had a long and well-established place in Southern history—was the implicit force lurking behind racial segregation. If one stepped out of line or transgressed the accepted racial etiquette, one’s life could be in danger; there was not a year between 1882 and 1900 that South Carolina did not have at least one lynching.21 The threat was increased with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915—almost simultaneously with the release of the ultra-racist film Birth of a Nation, which depicted black men as corrupt Reconstruction-era politicians and rapists. The mass migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities during World War I, combined with the recession following the demobilization, brought these tensions to a boiling point in 1919, when the country experienced twenty-six race riots.22 The very first flared up on the streets of Charleston.
Outside a pool hall in the city, a group of black men clashed with sailors stationed at the naval base in North Charleston on May 10, 1919. The conflict began inside the hall, probably over a minor matter, but then escalated outside into a violent confrontation using cue sticks and fists. As the fight intensified, two white sailors shot and killed an unarmed black man. It didn’t take long for the brawl to boil over into a race riot when white Charlestonians joined the sailors to chase black men through the streets, shooting at any black face they saw. One black man was pulled from a streetcar and killed while diners in a nearby restaurant looked on in horror. The mob at one point grew to several thousand, taking control of the downtown area as the black men shot at the sailors on their return to the navy base.23
The riot lasted about four hours before three black men were killed and scores of blacks were beaten and shot. City officials pledged to investigate the riots, but many black Charlestonians doubted it would be fair or thorough. Edwin G. Harleston, president of the NAACP local branch and owner of the funeral home across the street from Emanuel, conducted a probe into the riot and characterized it as an outright lynching. Harleston and the NAACP joined with the Interdenominational Union of Ministers, which included Emanuel’s Reverend T. R. Nelson, to demand the city prosecute the mob and take action to prevent more violence. The ministers also called for an expansion of the police force to include black officers, upgraded housing in the city, and better sanitation and education for black residents.24
The navy eventually convicted six of the sailors involved in the riot, but the black community in Charleston considered it a small gesture and not a full remedy to a much larger problem. Because he didn’t relent in his calls for improvements for blacks in Charleston, Harleston’s life was threatened, but he refused to walk away from the challenges. “We are continuing this work,” he told an NAACP convention that summer. “We have the right to live in Charleston in pursuit of happiness. We keep it up [but] if we go down we want you, The National Association to know we go down fighting.”25
A number of the ministers that eventually came to Emanuel had been active in the fight against the racial strictures imposed in a Jim Crow society and were prepared to continue the struggle to expand the opportunities available to African Americans. The effect of Jim Crow on public school funding and operations was one of the top concerns among black educators, including R. E. Brogdon. In 1910, Brogdon was on the faculty of Allen University, an AME-supported campus in Columbia, and joined a group of nearly twenty black grade-school and college educators who brought their concerns to the state’s secretary of education. Representing “the best sentiment and hopes of our people, assembled here,” they sought the creation of supervisors of rural schools to bring order to the curriculum and inspect the work of teachers and students. The supervisors would also advise schools on sanitation. They also contended colleges should require courses in practical economics and industrial training.26 This educational work showed Brogdon’s interest in the social gospel and helped prepare him for the pastoral work he would assume twenty years later in the pulpit at Emanuel. With each succeeding Emanuel pastor, social activism was lifted to another level, either as a result of the pastor’s personal mission, or experiences with Jim Crow–related racism.
For Benjamin James (“B. J.”) Glover, who arrived at Emanuel in 1953, it was likely the latter.
Twenty-one years before Glover moved to Charleston, he had boarded a train for Cincinnati—to attend high school in preparation for theological studies at Wilberforce University, an AME-supported campus in Ohio. He intended to follow his father, Reverend C. G. Glover, into the ministry. Sending B. J. north for school was part of the elder Glover’s plan to ensure his children would acquire the education they needed to live outside of Promised Land, a small community in Greenwood County, South Carolina. Situated midway between Charleston and Atlanta, Georgia, the approximately one thousand residents of Promised Land were descendants of freedmen who made a living as small farmers or sharecroppers.27
B. J. Glover returned to Promised Land an educated man who could read not only English but Latin and Greek. He was bursting with the idealism of a typical black youth of the 1930s—eager to engage in social reform. He was assigned the pastorate of an AME church in Due West, South Carolina, fewer than twenty miles from Promised Land. The causes he espoused to his congregation were inconsistent with those of a Jim Crow society. Glover spoke about advancing the “Southern Negro” through educational parity and voter registration. He established a “no drop-out program” for the children in his church and encouraged local teachers to work with him to ensure that youth returned to the classroom after the annual harvest. When like-minded black teachers ran into trouble with white supervisors and lost salary as a result, Glover devised a successful plan to help them obtain their back wages. He quickly built a reputation as a problem solver.28
In 1936, Glover put his words into action. He walked up the steps of the courthouse in Abbeville, South Carolina, and attempted to register to vote, a move that extended his social activism into a direct challenge of disenfranchisement. Although Glover easily passed the literacy test, after conferring with a supervisor, the clerk dismissed his application with the definitive declaration, “I just can’t register you.” An emotionally charged Glover left quietly, but that Sunday he preached from his pulpit in Due West about the unfairness of the voting laws and the need for black people to vote.29
