by Herb Frazier
When the United States entered World War II, some men—black and white—left the cigar factory for the military. Ninety-year-old Emanuel member William Black was hired there in 1942. Eleven months later the Army drafted him for the war in France. At age seventeen, Black had been on the fourth floor as a “fuller” boy, as he calls it in his Gullah dialect. He earned seventeen dollars a week placing the filler for the cigar’s core in a machine that carried it to the next station.15
The war opened many jobs for women. Sumter County resident Lillie Mae Marsh Doster, who had just moved to Charleston, was lucky enough to be hired in 1943, on the first day she started looking. Some mornings, before the start of Doster’s shift, she dashed up to the fifth floor to view a brilliant sunrise over the Cooper River.16 It was a rejuvenating pause before the start of another day of mundane repetitive work. On the top floor of the factory, Doster and other black women and men placed labels on cardboard boxes before the conveyor carried them along. For black Charlestonians it remained the best-paying job available—at fifty cents an hour in the mid-1940s. But working conditions in the stiflingly hot plant, combined with the disrespect of black employees by white bosses, produced an intolerable situation. Black workers started a series of sit-down work stoppages, followed by talks with management. Workers had honored a no-strike pledge during the war, but when it ended, they demanded a twenty-five-cent raise and an end to racially discriminatory practices on the job. When their demands were not met, about a thousand workers, mostly young women who had formed a union, left the plant on October 22, 1945. Soon white workers followed them to the picket line to share leadership positions in the new union. The walkout was not limited to Charleston; it was part of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers protest at other American Tobacco Company factories.17
Segregationists and police harassed Doster and her coworkers—young female workers—many of whom were so naive they weren’t afraid of the potential ramifications of their actions. They should have been leery of challenging the company at a time when the Southern order was overtly crafted to keep workers—particularly black people—poor and uneducated so they would be ill equipped to stand up against authority.
Walter Brown also experienced this dispute when his mother, union leader Delphine Brown, and other women of both races didn’t passively allow themselves to be exploited. Delphine walked the picket line from eight o’clock to noon. She and others watched as support from fellow workers dwindled when “scabs” of both races crossed the picket line.18 Doster watched, too, as trouble was brewing. There already had been clashes on the picket line between striking women and others brought in from outside the city and smuggled in through a side door to work at the plant. Striking women boasted that they had already beaten some of the scabs and were planning to inflict even more pain. They had prepared sticks and ax handles spiked with nails. When the striking workers left the plant momentarily, Doster recruited a male striker to help her hide the arsenal. When the women returned and couldn’t find their weapons, they erupted in anger and put a good cursing on Doster before battling with more scabs.19
That winter’s extremely low temperatures, freezing rain, and a rare snowfall had tested the strikers’ will. During the walkout, plant worker Lucille Simmons joined the picketers at the end of the day to sing a traditional gospel song, “We Will Overcome.” It signaled the end of another day of protest and lifted strikers’ spirits. From Charleston, the song became an anthem for labor and civil rights struggles across America and the world. Decades after the strike, Simmons’s nephew, retired Circuit Court judge Richard Fields, discovered that it was his aunt who sang this early version of the iconic song. Simmons was a few years older than Fields, and they were raised like siblings. The song never again played a part in her life after the strike. She didn’t sing it in their home, and she didn’t mention it again.20
Lillie Mae Doster recalled that strikers joined in with “Down in our hearts I do believe we’ll overcome someday. You think about that it’s almost like a prayer of relief. We didn’t make up the song. We just started singing it as a struggle song.”21 Several years later some of the strikers were invited to the labor movement’s training grounds in New Market, Tennessee: the Highlander Folk School, founded by Myles Horton. Horton’s wife, Zilphia, was stirred by the old gospel song and taught it to singer Pete Seeger and musician Guy Carawan. They sped it up, added new chords, and changed the lyrics for a growing protest movement.22
On April 1, 1946, strikers returned to work with a fifteen-cent raise and promises of better working conditions. When they won the contract, everyone benefited. The American Tobacco Company strike was far ahead of its time. It led to a biracial labor alliance that never happened again on the same scale in Charleston. The divisions between working-class Southerners of both races increased under the pressures of anticommunist and anti-integration rhetoric that was soon to come.
Following the strike, World War II vet William Black returned to the cigar factory, hoping to get his job back as a “fuller” boy. He was rehired—but not in his old job. Black was no longer a 120-pound boy. After three years in the military, he had become a strapping, 180-pound man and was assigned to a “floating gang” in the basement, where men muscled heavy bundles of tobacco into position. Black eventually moved up to an assistant supervisor under a white boss. After twenty years at the plant, the pay scale had been outpaced by other jobs in the Charleston area, particularly at the navy shipyard. Black regrets that he stayed at the factory so long before leaving to work on the housekeeping staff at Charleston’s Veterans Administration hospital.23
At age thirty Black was ready to surrender a lifestyle that included trips through the Arch, where moonshine flowed freely. His step-uncle, John Polite, was a class leader at Emanuel and encouraged Black, who was more like a brother, to attend church. When Black joined Emanuel in the mid-1950s, Emanuel could boast the choice of two Sunday morning services for its sixteen hundred members. At that time Benjamin Glover was a newly arrived pastor who was preparing Emanuel for social activism in the streets.24
In later years Black became Emanuel’s custodian. When his tenure ended, he handed the church’s keys over to Ethel Lance, who lived around the corner on Alexander Street. Lance, the second woman in the church’s history to serve as custodian, also worked as a custodian at the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, named for Charleston mayor J. Palmer Gaillard. Lance went to work at the auditorium when it opened in 1968, just as the labor dispute at the state’s teaching hospital was brewing on the west end of Calhoun Street. The dispute would thrust the mayor, the city, and local churches, including Emanuel, into an international spotlight.
In the meantime, the auditorium’s construction altered the Borough. With a federal urban renewal grant in the mid-1960s, the city began buying property for the start of the auditorium’s construction. To make room for it, three square blocks of homes, businesses, and the slums behind the Arch were demolished, displacing seven hundred residents, most of whom were black.25 Such a large exodus of Borough residents left a hole in the neighborhood and drained Emanuel of some of its membership as the displaced residents moved further up the Charleston peninsula or to North Charleston. Some of those who were pushed out found it difficult to make it back into the city on Sundays for service at Emanuel; many sought church memberships elsewhere.
The building that residents called the Arch—known by the city as the Arch Building—was saved and later restored because of its historical significance. Local lore has it that the two-and-one-half-story stucco building was built around 1800 and renovated fifty years later. It was originally built for the horse-drawn wagon business, wagons passing through its distinctive arch to the yard behind it.26 The presence of the Arch Building at the east end of Calhoun Street, not far from Emanuel, might explain why two African American blacksmiths, Peter Simmons and Philip Simmons (no relation), operated shops in the Borough from the mid-1920s to the late 1960s. Philip probably received his most impo
rtant education in the ironworks trade from Peter, the local blacksmith at the time, “who ran a busy shop at the foot of Calhoun Street.”27 Peter Simmons, who had been enslaved, probably learned the craft from his enslaved father, also a blacksmith. If so, the three men practiced a craft with roots in slavery and participated in the transfer of blacksmithing skills over a span of three generations and well into the twentieth century. Today Philip Simmons is remembered for his ability to adapt his skills as market demands changed—from making iron tools to decorative ironwork, such as the gates and window grilles that adorn many Charleston homes.
For many longtime black Charlestonians, the Arch’s survival is a bitter reminder of how a black neighborhood was crushed in the name of preserving another neighborhood. That’s because the demolition for the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium was done in tandem with saving the mostly white Ansonborough neighborhood, just south of the Borough, where residents were feeling encroached upon by “renters” in decaying houses of historical significance. This could not be tolerated in a city with an influx of tourists who were drawn by Charleston’s high concentration of historic homes. To resolve the problem, the Historic Charleston Foundation launched a revitalization effort in the peninsula’s historic core to preserve Ansonborough’s architectural inventory.28
As the foundation saved some homes, the city began to destroy “the slum,” called the Borough. Ansonborough was a concentration of historic brick and wooden structures, but the Borough was crammed with frame dwellings that had evolved into black tenements, many of them structurally unsound. This type of area had a new name—urban blight—and city governments across the United States were eager to put a stop to it. Removing the slum was important to create a buffer zone between the Ansonborough rehabilitation project and the predominantly black neighborhoods and the slums of the upper east side, north of Emanuel, that residents called Little Mexico. Ben Scott Whaley, the foundation’s president, said at the time that the “eradication of urban blight in the heart of our community . . . would greatly improve the setting of the six blocks of significant period architecture in which we are working, and help us toward our goal of giving Charleston in-city residential areas which are also tourist attractions of great value.”29 The foundation was successful in its goal, but it began a process of gentrification that is still advancing through the city and deepening mistrust of city government among some black Charlestonians. That suspicion of government, however, first flared in the early 1960s, when a much larger relocation of black homes and businesses preceded the 1969 completion of the Septima P. Clark Expressway, which locals call the Crosstown, a six-lane extension of Interstate 26.
The Charleston Municipal Auditorium (later dedicated to Mayor J. Palmer Gaillard) opened on July 1, 1968. For the first two years, the auditorium was open to white audiences only. When Porgy and Bess came to the auditorium’s stage for the city’s tricentennial celebration in 1970, the nearly all-black cast performed before the auditorium’s first integrated audience. It was not the first time, however, the city tried to stage a production of the 1935 Broadway show, which depicts black life in Charleston much as the daily life children in the Borough would have witnessed through the Arch.
As the color of springtime azaleas exploded across the city, plans were being made in April 1954 to stage a production of Porgy and Bess by the Stagecrafters, an all-black dramatic group, with sponsorship from the Dock Street Theater. But there was a problem. Jim Crow was in the wings at County Hall. To overcome South Carolina’s prohibition of race mixing at amusement events, the Stagecrafters suggested a compromise, one that the local NAACP rejected. The civil rights organization’s rejection of the proposed plan, to segregate the audience with whites on one side of the venue and blacks on the other, coupled with the state’s ban on integrated audiences, resulted in the production’s demise.30
Advancements to end segregation were not going to occur with the showing of Porgy and Bess, but the following month Jim Crow was shaken by the United States Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. It would take nine more years, however, before the curtain rose on integrated classrooms in Charleston.
TEN
CIVIL RIGHTS
Charleston’s white community had no intentions of discussing racial inequities even a century after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the old Confederacy. In early 1963, Charleston had settled into a comfortable social rhythm of racially divided schools, and lunch counters and retail jobs on King Street reserved just for whites, along with other bedrock Jim Crow restrictions. But this status quo was increasingly frustrating for Charleston’s black population. In the spring of that year, the civil rights movement’s “children’s hour” in Birmingham, Alabama, gave nonviolent protesters there the upper hand against the police force.1 A transfixed nation watched televised images of police dogs attacking children and high-pressure water hoses knocking them down. The NAACP in South Carolina used a similar strategy of engaging children on the front line for social justice.
An elaborate organization was designed in Charleston to stage meetings, prayer marches, restaurant and lunch counter sit-ins, theater stand-ins, parades, and picketing; this plan was backed by nearly twenty churches, a steering committee, and a woman’s group of thirty-four people, all directed by James G. Blake, the NAACP’s national youth chairman. Emanuel was selected as one of the sites for rallies, and B. J. Glover was assigned to recruit high-profile speakers for events.2 Glover and Blake, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr., may have both asked King to speak at Emanuel and lead a march down King Street.
Before the Charleston movement’s launch on June 7, 1963, at Calvary Baptist Church, black South Carolinians had already secured federal court victories before District Court judge J. Waties Waring of Charleston, who was hailed by some as “the Moses for black people.”3 The corps of black lawyers who would take civil rights cases to state and federal courts in the 1960s resulted from a Waring decision. World War II veteran John H. Wrighten of Edisto Island near Charleston, a member of Mother Emanuel, was denied admission to the University of South Carolina Law School in Columbia in 1946, and his five attorneys, one of whom was NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, filed a lawsuit in federal court.4 The following year Waring ruled that Wrighten was entitled to the same opportunity and facilities available to whites who pursued legal training in South Carolina. Waring gave South Carolina three choices: (1) admit Wrighten to USC; (2) establish a law school at the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina in Orangeburg, South Carolina; or (3) close the USC law school.
South Carolina chose to open a law school at the Orangeburg campus. By the 1960s, Wrighten’s lawsuit had produced a windfall for black activists. The law school not only trained Wrighten, who is considered the “granddaddy” of black lawyers in the state, but it also produced others who became the friendly faces in state and federal courts to argue civil rights cases. Among them were Emanuel member and South Carolina Circuit Court judge Daniel E. Martin Sr.; South Carolina Supreme Court chief justice Ernest A. Finney Jr., the first black man elected to South Carolina’s Supreme Court since Reconstruction; and Columbia attorney Matthew J. Perry, the first black lawyer from the Deep South appointed to the federal bench. Before the law school closed in 1966, fifty men and one woman obtained legal training there.
In the summer of 1947, when Waring decided the Wrighten case, he also ruled on a voting rights lawsuit that concerned the exclusion of black voters from Democratic Party primaries. Denying black people the right to vote helped South Carolina maintain “separate but equal” schools and public services, and Democrats had controlled party politics in South Carolina from the end of Reconstruction. Through the 1930s and 1940s, blacks had defected from the Republican Party as a result of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies to free the country from the grips of the Great Depression.
In 1944, the United States Supreme Court ruled that white primaries were illegal. To counter that, South Carolina’s Democrats reorganized their party as a private club to prevent black participation. Two years later South Carolina’s all-white Democratic Party primary was challenged in federal court, and the following year Waring’s ruling opened the primary to all voters.
William Watts Ball, editor of the News and Courier in Charleston, explained in an editorial that the state’s primary operated like a private club. But Waring wrote that private clubs don’t vote or elect the president and other elected officeholders. “It is time,” the judge said, “for South Carolina to rejoin the Union” and accept the American way of holding elections.5 A federal appeals court upheld Waring’s ruling, and in early 1948, the United States Supreme Court refused to review it. In 1949, thirty-five thousand black South Carolinians voted in the Democratic Party primary, the highest number of black voters since the 1890s. In Charleston County and elsewhere, voting became an imperative. Charleston’s social activism was well suited for Emanuel’s pastor; Glover had defied the Klan in Greenwood County and almost paid for it with his life.
In the late 1940s, B. J. Glover pastored a congregation in Columbia near Allen University, where he taught Bible literature and psychology. After a few years he was assigned to Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston and, in 1953, to Emanuel Church, which had been restored to its present grandeur during the leadership of Frank Veal. Glover left Greenwood County far more educated and confident than when he had returned home from college. Years later in 1959, Glover spoke during the Palmetto Voters Association annual program: “I am not afraid of anyone. I speak my mind whenever I have the opportunity, and I tell [whites] I am going to stay right here [in South Carolina].” He explained that unless black people vote, “we are not going to make any further progress. Although we have made strides in education to a certain degree, and in some areas of human relations and some areas of economics,” in politics black people had lost ground, and voting was the best means to uplift the race.6
