by Herb Frazier
Glover was not only getting attention from blacks, but whites, too, were now taking notice of his activities, especially after his courthouse confrontation. In September 1939, the Klan found out that Glover was leaving Due West for Greenwood; he was kidnapped, blindfolded, stripped down to his underwear, sexually taunted, and beaten for hours. His tormentors asked, “What you doing, nigger? Why don’t you leave things like they are?” They said the KKK made examples of “uppity smart nigger[s] from the North” who came back with wild ideas.30
Left alone to die, Glover was discovered unconscious by a prostitute who happened along, and who knew him from the community. She ran the considerable distance to Glover’s father’s home, yelling, “They killed B. J.! They killed B. J.!” His relatives brought him home, where a black doctor stayed with Glover through the night until he regained consciousness the following day. The young men in the community took turns standing watch around the Glover home until they were certain the Klan didn’t plan to bother him again. No one was charged, although the attackers were known to the black men in Promised Land. Glover recovered fully, and was never deterred from his mission of social activism.31 He brought that zeal with him to Emanuel Church, where he was well prepared to join the emerging civil rights movement in Charleston.
People were attracted to Emanuel because of its unique position as the founding congregation for African Methodism in the state, for its pastoral leadership, and also because it was an important hub of community and denominational activity. Emanuel was routinely the site for the meeting of the South Carolina Annual Conference of the AME Church, but sometimes there were special meetings held there too. When the Council of Bishops met at Emanuel in February 1937, church members and ministers came from all around the country and various parts of the world to witness the deliberations of one of the highest councils of the church. In addition to strictly religious matters, ministers and lay leaders also gathered to discuss race relations, Christian missions, education, crime prevention, and many other issues to strengthen the church and uplift the race.32
A variety of lectures and programs were held at Emanuel. On one occasion a lecturer provided the latest information on Liberia and Sierra Leone. During the interwar years of the twentieth century, Thomas Miller, the former president of the Colored State Agricultural and Mechanical College, spoke on the needs of the race and how important it was to remain on the land. Emanuel also planned a week-long Chautauqua program devoted to remembering Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who was a famous AME bishop from Charleston.33 There was also a variety of musicals performed at the church. One of the most popular was titled “Heaven Bound” and depicted aspects of African American’s religious beliefs. The notice placed in the newspaper noted that whites would receive special accommodations. The Allen University College Choir also appeared at the church.34
Emanuel supported other organizations such as the Workingman’s Cosmopolitan Club, allowing it to use the church for meetings. It sponsored a musical performance to raise funds for the American Red Cross. Emanuel also assisted the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ with its Race Relations Sunday. Its purpose was to bring people together across racial lines to further understanding.35
Emanuel AME Church fulfilled its mission within an all-pervasive system of racial segregation. It was an oppressive system that demeaned people and denied the common personhood shared by all humanity. This meant that in addition to serving the traditional role as a source of spiritual instruction and enlightenment, black churches like Emanuel had to heal souls in another way. Much of what occurred at Emanuel was designed to directly or indirectly blunt the destructive force of Jim Crow. This was done formally from the pulpit, by supporting organizations with progressive goals. This was also achieved by serving as the thriving center of an alternative world, where black people interacted freely with one another and reinforced their humanity, while obtaining the services required to navigate the larger, harsher, white world outside.
NINE
LIFE IN THE BOROUGH
During the 1950s and 1960s, three blocks down from Emanuel Church on Calhoun Street, the lights were switched on for the next Little League baseball game. Other boys too small for the Little League diamond improvised a game by swinging a broomstick at a fast-pitched half of a rubber ball; it curved sharply. Pipe-puffing women laid rags on smoky fires to repel the “skittas.” Children chased lightning bugs. Palmetto leaves rustled in the sea breeze.
Businesses around Emanuel lured people in search of new shoes, polished shoes, pressed clothes, haircuts, groceries, sweet treats, and liquor. From pushcarts, street vendors hawked fresh vegetables and seafood on ice. Big trucks carried cut firewood before mothers cooked with gas. Through the Arch—an opening in a wide, even stout building—loomed a congested three-tiered tenement, where drunken gamblers engaged in knife fights, laundry was dried on banisters, and courtyard privies were the only toilets. It made for real-life theater, of the kind portrayed in Porgy and Bess decades before the Broadway folk opera reached a Charleston stage.
The distant hoot of a tugboat whistle echoed on the busy Cooper River, signaling arrivals and departures of oceangoing vessels. White men in hard hats and bulky overalls filed in the shipyard to bend, bang, and weld metal. Some black men worked there, too, but it was a white domain. Outside the shipyard’s chain-link fence, the livelihood of black dockworkers was set long before—in contentious labor struggles after the Civil War. By day the waterfront’s prosperity glistened in the shiny cars driving down Calhoun Street near the baseball field where the big boys played at night.
These sights and sounds blended into a neighborhood mosaic of the Borough, a name derived from the Ansonborough Homes, a federally funded project built on low-lying land at the east end of Calhoun Street in the late 1930s when the city launched its first effort to eradicate “Negro slums.” Within the projects, bounded by Washington, Concord, Calhoun, and Laurens streets, and in the wider Borough neighborhood just beyond it, nearly all needs could be met within walking distance of the white world. Sometimes white police patrolled, but more frequently it was a white insurance salesman at the front door to collect the weekly premium. “Mama! Dah ’surance man,” a child called out in the Gullah accent.
The Borough was like other black neighborhoods, but its position against the Cooper River and at the end of a major street conjured a feeling of insulation within a space of friendly faces. The Borough’s children knew immediately it was a sheltered place to mature, where adults assumed responsibility for all the neighborhood children. To use an oft-quoted cliché, it was the proverbial village that raised the child. Children later learned, however, it was not a place to live as an adult, and many left for the military, college, or work; some left because they were sent to prison. They had not been taught, and they could not have imagined, that their neighborhood had been shaped by Charleston’s history. Much of what they saw, heard, and feared was set in motion centuries before their birth. Black children wouldn’t have learned those harsh lessons until the Borough was some distance behind them, or if they had been one of the unfortunate ones to taste the sting of racism at an early age. In one sense Emanuel was an extension of this safe space, tending to the spiritual and community needs just as Buist Elementary School across the street was a place to play and learn. The Borough, like many other communities in the city, was tight-knit and not always welcoming to people from other neighborhoods, regardless of race.
The city owed its seventeenth-century beginnings to Englishman Ashley Cooper, who was memorialized with rivers that bear his name flanking the peninsula that comprises the city’s historic core. Charleston is so old, at least by American standards, that some residents boastfully claim the two rivers combine to create the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, Calhoun Street extended east and west across the peninsula between the two bodies of water. The west end overlooked the Ashley River. Calhoun Street stopped at the Borough three miles away. On the peninsula’s eastern edge, East Bay Street carried tra
ffic north from the historic Battery against a panoramic harbor view of a distant Fort Sumter, where the Civil War’s first shot exploded. King Street, the city’s central shopping district, was Charleston’s commercial spine, where mothers trolled with youngsters in tow to buy new clothes at Easter, Christmas, and at the start of a new school term.
When the school bell rang to signal a new year in 1958, recent college graduate Walter Brown reported to work at Buist School across the street from Emanuel Church. He was a new sixth-grade math teacher and a recent graduate of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, a predominantly black campus seventy-five miles inland from Charleston. The tall, lanky Brown moved with long strides down Buist’s polished hallways as he explored the school that first day. The school and the church were the two most imposing buildings on the street. Built like a fortress, Buist was a sturdy, three-story, brown-brick structure that doubled as a fallout shelter in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. The church was an equally imposing cathedral—with a gleaming white stucco facade topped with a copper-clad steeple that seemed to balance the blue sky on its peak. Nearby buildings were shabby in appearance but historic in style. Some of the homes were typical Charleston single houses: long, narrow structures, typically one room wide with a porch, an architectural style inherited from Barbados.
Brown was not new to the bustling Borough although he lived several blocks north of the community and Emanuel, on Columbus Street on the fringe of the old Hampstead neighborhood. He was reared in an AME family that worshiped at Ebenezer Church, and as a very young boy, he had deduced that Emanuel held significance in the AME realm because it was the “mother church.” Emanuel was South Carolina’s largest black church in 1950, with twenty-four hundred members when Frank Veal was its pastor. Veal helped return Emanuel to its former physical glory, restoring, redecorating, and stuccoing the church’s magnificent brick structure. The city’s chamber of commerce cited Veal and the church for contributing to improvements to the city’s downtown.1 During Veal’s tenure at Emanuel, one of his members was ninety-seven-year-old Annie Ward Smith, who joined the church in 1865, when Richard Cain was its pastor. She was an important link to the past. She recalled the stories told about Denmark Vesey, and as a young girl, she helped carry wood to rebuild the quake-ravaged church. She lived long enough to assist in Veal’s efforts to renovate the current church.2
Walter Brown was more than just a classroom teacher who stood in front of a blackboard. He shepherded his young students to sites beyond the neighborhood and the city limits. They saw an Egyptian mummy and whale bones dangling from the ceiling of a dark and spooky Charleston Museum. A massive newspaper press in the basement of the News and Courier was a sight to see and hear too. From nearby Johns Island, a sea island, civil rights leader Esau Jenkins brought his bus to take Brown, sixth-grade teacher Juanita Jordan, and their students to Brookgreen Gardens, a former rice plantation north of the city. On the return they stopped at McKenzie Beach to sample Frank McKenzie’s famous hot dogs. McKenzie, a black man, had a thriving Pawley’s Island business when black people were barred from white-only beaches along the Atlantic coast.3
The excursions were the teachers’ way to show students that classroom lessons could be applied to real life. Some of their students were Emanuel members who would be touched by the tragedy at the church in 2015. Myra Thompson, murdered that night during Bible study, was a student in Brown’s class. Brown remembers her as quiet, serious, and smart. She lived over a corner store across the street from the baseball field and basketball court at the Calhoun Street playground that is today’s parking garage at the end of Calhoun Street.4
Susie Jackson, the oldest person killed on June 17, was a regular at the school’s Parent Teacher Association meetings, where she asked probing questions about her son, Walter, and his progress and behavior in school. Brown told Jackson that her son, like Myra Thompson, didn’t give him any problems. He didn’t tell her that sometimes he did have issues with her son because Brown could talk sense into young Walter and other boys. It was easier to do then, when teachers enjoyed respect from students and parents who didn’t object to tough love in the classroom.
May Day was a big day at Buist and other black public schools in Charleston. Myra Thompson and Walter Jackson attended Buist at different times, but they shared similar experiences, such as wrapping the maypole on May 1, traditionally a fund-raiser for the school and a festive after-school event for children who went home to bathe before returning in crisp, clean clothing. Brown could tell which ones were the children of dockworkers who loaded and unloaded cargo from oceangoing ships. They typically were better dressed because their fathers had some of the best-paying work in the city as union members on the waterfront. Longshoremen spent money liberally with businesses on King Street and along a three-block stretch of Calhoun Street between Emanuel and the Cooper River.5 Their higher-than-average pay didn’t come without a struggle.
The roots of the longshoremen’s comparatively high wages were developed shortly after the Civil War, when newly freed slaves began to transform the character of work along the docks and in other sectors of the economy. Before the war, slaves played critical roles as dockhands, and later as freedmen they continued such pivotal roles by capitalizing on their numbers and organizing to improve their wages (and sometimes working conditions). Two years after the war, black dockworkers joined together in successful strike actions. In 1869, the men incorporated as the Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association to promote greater unity. By the middle of the next decade, union membership was reported to be eight hundred to one thousand men, overwhelmingly black but with a few whites. On more than one occasion in the 1870s, the union went out on strike and completely shut down shipping at the port. By doing so its members were able to win regular working hours, higher hourly pay with overtime wages, and the exclusive use of union men on the waterfront.6 This may have been the period of its greatest strength, but this union remained a force to be reckoned with into the twentieth century and eventually joined with the International Longshoremen’s Association. In later decades among other sectors of Charleston’s economy, two notable union disputes erupted, involving hospital employees and workers in the cigar factory.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Charleston’s business leaders sought to boost the city’s role in manufacturing, leading to a campaign to lure industry, including textile mills. At that time, Charleston led the state in industrial activity, but those gains could not keep pace with other Southern cities. With limited access to investors and national markets, Charleston never became an industrial hub, nor did it become a haven for textile plants, like cities in upstate South Carolina. But Charleston got a Christmas gift in 1882, when the machinery began to spin in the Charleston Manufacturing Company’s “handsome” five-story cotton mill. It occupied a city block on the edge of the old Hampstead neighborhood, site of the old African Church and several blocks north of Emanuel Church and the Borough. Sunlight beamed through ceiling-to-floor windows. One side of the building overlooked the Cooper River. At night, gas-fueled lanterns lit the interior. Raw fibers flowed uninterrupted from the basement picker house through machines that produced cloth from cotton or wool.7
When the plant opened, black people were hired but only for custodial jobs. Skilled white workers from Northern cotton textile plants supervised local whites.8 Blacks had been barred from textile jobs and other skilled positions based on white people’s perception that black workers were best suited for low-level positions. As the mill began a slow decline using white workers, an attempt was made in 1897 to boost production with black employees. It was a historic decision, but the company only experienced mixed results and the plant closed.9
Two years later a final effort was made to revitalize the textile mill using a black labor force that included black women from nearby Sea Islands, but to no avail. Some whites seeking easy answers blamed the failures on the ineptitude of black labor, a claim that outraged black Charlestonians.
10 An infuriated Reverend M. W. Gilbert, pastor of Central Baptist Church in Charleston, penned a lengthy rebuttal that was published in the News and Courier: “It does look to us sometimes as though a gigantic conspiracy has been formed by the newspapers, especially the reporters, to magnify the negro’s [sic] faults and minimize his virtues.” Furthermore, “the poor negro [sic] is expected to do better in a given situation than a white man under more favorable conditions, to avoid the vigorous and merciless assaults of his enemies. He is expected to work a miracle in order to win a little praise.”11
The textile plant switched from spinning fiber to rolling cigars in 1903 under the ownership of the American Tobacco Company. At the peak of the Great Depression, the factory employed about fourteen hundred people.12 The precedent had been set to hire workers of both races when the plant made textiles; they were, of course, segregated. In 1931, the News and Courier reported that on the fifth floor “Negro workers are employed exclusively” to produce thirty thousand cigar boxes daily. Down in the basement “Negro men are kept busy” processing tobacco leaves.13
A decade later Marguerite Michel, Emanuel’s oldest member at the time of the slayings at the church in 2015, went to work at the cigar factory in 1942. Michel was pregnant at the time, and her job was to position the outer layer of the cigar on a machine that rolled it into shape. Her pay was based on the number of cigars she made. “Don’t ask me how many I made and how many it took to fill a box,” Michel sharply warned her interviewer. “My memory is not what it used to be. At 104 years old, I thank God for what I can remember.” She worked at the cigar factory for about a year but didn’t return following the birth of her daughter and eventually took a maid’s job at lower wages in the Francis Marion Hotel, located down the street from her church.14
