We Are Charleston

by Herb Frazier

  Glover drew laughter when he reminded the audience that black people once could get much of what they wanted if they were subservient. “There was a time that we could go to the back door and whites would give us whatever we wanted, if we bowed,” he said, repeating “if we bowed” several times for emphasis. “But that day is gone now. You can bow all you want, and all they will do is give you a kick out of the back door.”7

  Nearly a decade before voter registration efforts began to take hold across the state, in 1950, black parents in Clarendon County, South Carolina, filed a federal lawsuit challenging inequalities in public education. In South Carolina black children walked to classes in inclement weather as buses with white pupils rolled by. That inequity motivated James Miles Hinton, chairman of the South Carolina NAACP, to challenge an Allen University audience in December 1947 to recruit teachers or ministers to contest the discriminatory practices of the state’s school bus system.8 AME pastor Joseph Armstrong DeLaine was in the audience at his alma mater, and he heeded Hinton’s words.

  In addition to serving several small AME congregations, DeLaine was the principal of a small school near Summerton, South Carolina, a town that today is situated in the “Corridor of Shame,” one of the state’s most impoverished regions. Four years after that unexpected meeting and with help from the NAACP, DeLaine and a few Clarendon County residents, including Harry and Eliza Briggs, filed the lawsuit Briggs v. Elliott in federal court after the county schools refused to provide school buses for black children. In 1951, the lawsuit was expanded to go beyond a request for school buses to attack segregation. Two of the three judges ruled that the county schools must be equalized but not integrated. Judge Waring, who dissented, wrote that segregation in education can never produce equality. The decision was appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where it was combined with four other cases from around the nation to form the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

  While the country waited for the court’s decision, South Carolina got busy demonstrating that racially divided schools could be equal. From the early to mid-1950s the state went on a massive construction program to build new schools and provide modern buses. Only a third of the money went to white students, who comprised about 60 percent of the school enrollment statewide. The sudden shift in spending for black children still was not enough to eliminate three hundred years of neglect.9 South Carolina took other measures to buttress its “separate but equal” doctrine, believing that segregated schools were within the state’s “police powers” to promote education to prevent disorder.10 In May 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools. South Carolina took a blow, but the fight was not over.

  White voters passed a referendum to undo the constitutional requirement that the state provide education. White citizen councils sprouted up across the state to resist desegregation. Retaliation in the form of economic pressure that took away jobs, credit, and homes rained on those who opposed segregation. In 1956, the South Carolina legislature was so obsessed with fighting integration that News and Courier reporter William D. Workman Jr. called that legislative season the “Segregation Session.”11 One of that session’s laws made it illegal for any public employee to join the NAACP, and it cost acclaimed Charleston educator and civil rights activist Septima P. Clark her job as a teacher—and her retirement benefits. Years later, seventeen members of Emanuel Church signed a petition in support of Clark receiving her retirement following an “illegal suspension” from her teaching position.12

  The anti-integration effort was not limited to white lawmakers; whites from all walks of life embraced segregation. Although 20 percent of the state’s white population could not read, a significant number of whites said segregation was more important than education.13 Whites also cheered in 1952, when Judge Waring decided to retire.14 Waring was a seventh-generation Charlestonian, but his lineage didn’t insulate him from the backlash over his controversial court decisions. Starting with his ruling to end the white primaries to his dissenting vote in Briggs v. Elliott, whites in Charleston considered Waring a race traitor. He was vilified and ostracized to the point that he had become the “loneliest man in Charleston.”15 To make matters worse, Waring had divorced his Charleston-born wife and married a woman from Connecticut. He and his new wife entertained prominent members of Charleston’s black community at their home. Eventually the Warings decided to leave Charleston in 1952, but not before black Charlestonians gave them a farewell dinner at Buist Elementary School across the street from Emanuel Church.16

  Schools in the United States were segregated when Glover had to explain to his six-year-old daughter, Oveta, why she couldn’t play in the playground at Julian Mitchell Elementary School across the street from Emanuel’s parsonage, where he and his wife and their two daughters lived. The school and its park was for white children only, Glover told Oveta, but he promised her that one day she would be able to play in that park and attend that school. Meetings on how best to integrate the schools were held at Emanuel Church. When Glover left home to attend those strategy sessions with ministers, the local NAACP, and community leaders, Oveta tagged along.

  While South Carolina obstructed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP in South Carolina would test the force of the court’s decision. With few options for black students in Charleston to integrate schools, Oveta Glover and Minerva Brown, daughter of J. Arthur Brown, president of the Charleston NAACP, were selected to enroll in two schools in the fall of 1960. As a high school student, J. Arthur Brown was reminded most nights that just a few blocks away was a college he could not attend because of his race.17 Through his bedroom window he heard the buglers’ reveille in the morning and taps at night played at the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college, “yet my parents who were taxpayers in this community had to bag me up and send me off to school,” he said. “There were five Japanese boys attending the Citadel. They all rode together in a little blue Chevrolet car. You saw one, you saw five, and they were able to come from Japan to the Citadel when I couldn’t go four blocks to the Citadel. And I think I took the position then that if I ever got a chance to hit [segregation], I’m going to hit it hard.”18

  Glover took Oveta to Mitchell Elementary School, the school across the street from their home, and Brown’s twelfth grader, Minerva, and another student, ninth grader Ralph Dawson, attempted to integrate Rivers High School. The Glovers dressed Oveta in her best Sunday dress and shoes, along with lacy socks, and on the morning of October 10, 1960, she held her father’s hand as they crossed the street to Mitchell Elementary School.19 The hallway was lined with students, parents, and teachers, and a blond-haired boy stabbed her in the thigh with a pencil as someone yelled, “Nigger, go home!” As she turned to the boy, her father tightened his grip on Oveta’s hand. In the principal’s office they received another surprise. The Glovers were told Oveta couldn’t enroll because the letter from her previous school, A. B. Rhett Elementary, didn’t name the school she would transfer to.20 Minerva and Ralph had similar setbacks at Rivers High School.

  Following those failed attempts to integrate the schools, the Glover household experienced white hate. When the phone rang, Oveta rushed to answer it. The voice on the other end uttered words no child should hear. Callers made death threats against her father if he didn’t leave the city. Lydia Glover was fired from her teaching job, which forced her to leave Charleston in 1962. For one year she taught home economics at Kentucky State University before rejoining her family. The Glovers’ oldest daughter, Madrain, was enrolled in Boylan-Haven-Mather Academy, a black boarding school in Camden, South Carolina. Lydia and Oveta later went to live with Lydia’s mother in Sumter, while Glover remained in Charleston to continue his civil rights work and lead Emanuel Church.

  The next attempt to integrate Charleston’s schools came on the first day of school in September 3, 1963.21 Thirteen children had been selected, but that morning only eleven of them reported
to the white campuses.22 Oveta and her father arrived early at James Simons Elementary School and were greeted by the principal. White students and their parents had not yet arrived when they were escorted to Oveta’s class. “Your seat is back there,” the teacher said as she pointed to a chair at the rear of the classroom. As the white students arrived, one of the students, Kathy, sat next to Oveta. After a few days Oveta got the impression the teacher had paired them together. For the remainder of the school term, Oveta helped Kathy with her schoolwork, but at recess they didn’t play together. Oveta had very little contact with the other children; it was as if she could hear them saying to themselves, “Don’t sit next to the nigger girl.” Her only enjoyment in school came during violin lessons. It was her time alone with her music teacher.23

  Millicent Brown was enrolled in Rivers High School, located just a block north of the James Simons campus, but a bomb threat delayed part of her first day at school. For Millicent and Minerva Brown, being the daughters of the president of the Charleston NAACP had a profound effect because they experienced Charleston’s civil rights movement as it intersected with prominent national and international activists who often met at their home. “Mike King was Mike King before he was Martin Luther King, and I think that that was such a very, very rich background to have had that made a big difference on me when I did go into Rivers that first day,” Millicent said in retrospect years later.24 At Burke High School, Brown was a rising tenth-grade student who looked forward to socializing with her friends and being a popular student on campus. But those youthful hopes were dashed when she walked into Rivers High School. She didn’t experience physical violence there, but psychological trauma was cutting as white students seemingly on cue gave her wide berth in the hallways to strongly communicate they did not want to touch her. After graduating from high school, she saw enough of the world and America and education in this country to recognize that physical integration was superficial. “Black bodies being under the same roof as white bodies is not integration. And the harm, I think, that has been done to our feelings of self-worth, because we somehow thought if we could just be with white children that that was going to somehow alleviate our ills.”25 Sending black children to the white schools was not about going to school with whites, Oveta Glover explained years later. “If we had the same kind of books and educational material, there might not be any integration because it was all about equalization.”26 Millicent Brown and Oveta Glover and the other students were placed on the threshold of history at a time when black Charleston stepped up and confronted the city’s segregated schools. Families willing to take those bold steps to integrate the school required courage, but “somebody had to do it.”27

  Before black students were enrolled in predominantly white schools, a protest of another kind against Jim Crow was brewing in Charleston. In 1958, Burke High School students decided to protest at the all-white lunch counters at Woolworth and Kress, variety stores on King Street. James Blake prepared the students for what they would encounter. “We went through a whole regimentation as to how you would act when you would go to a lunch counter. How you would act if you were arrested. What you would do if the police placed his hands on you. We took our folks through a course for about five to six weeks before we actually pulled the whole demonstration on them.”28 The protest in Charleston went mostly unnoticed outside of Charleston compared to a similar protest in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first salvo in the lunch-counter battle in Charleston may have come in early 1960, when forty students stood outside a Woolworth. They didn’t enter the store, and they left soon after they arrived.29 A year later nine teenagers and five juveniles were arrested at the Kress lunch counter. The teens were released on bond, and the younger protesters went home with their parents.30 Four months later twenty-four high school students staged a five-and-a-half hour sit-in at the Kress store on King Street. The South Carolina Supreme Court later upheld the students’ trespassing conviction, ruling that a private restaurant can select its customers on the basis of race.31 By the spring of 1962, the protesting was beginning to yield some results in Charleston: at least two stores hired three black salesclerks.32 Those small gains were not nearly enough to prevent stepped-up demonstrations, and by the summer of 1963, lunch counters weren’t the only integration targets.

  That night in 1959, when Glover spoke during the Emancipation Day observance on Johns Island, he speculated that black people could exert pressure on King Street merchants with a one-day boycott. In the summer of 1963, the NAACP initiated a selective buying effort as part of the Charleston civil rights movement. Many of the foot soldiers were high school students like seventeen-year-old Harvey Jones, who lived several blocks north of Emanuel Church. Jones decided that he was going to participate in the student protest because he’d had just about enough of Jim Crow laws. “I realized I would rather die than not be able to go into a restaurant and eat like regular people. I didn’t want to be forced to go upstairs in a theater to watch a movie. I rather be dead than be treated as less than a human.”33

  Jones joined the picket line, and during one march, he had an opportunity to protest alongside Dr. King. During that march, activists were stopping at each of the businesses that had refused to integrate, when a white man came out of a bar and threw a beer on Jones. King saw what happened, and he told the teenager, “Son, don’t do anything. If you feel that you have to do something, go back to the church.” Jones assured King, “I am fine, Dr. King. I am fine.”34

  After numerous marches that led to many arrests and brief stays in jail, Jones was given a new protest target in July 1963. He and other students were asked to walk a short distance from Emanuel Church to the YWCA—to try to get in the pool. Glover also instructed them that if anyone attempted to block their entrance, they should throw their money on the counter and jump in the pool with their clothes on. That’s what they did. The students weren’t in the pool too long before they felt the burning sensation of chlorine the janitor had poured in the water as he yelled, “Niggers in the pool! Niggers in the pool!” The following month the local YWCA told the group’s national board that it “cannot and must not” integrate, although the national organization had voted to launch a nationwide effort to speed up desegregation of local YWCAs.35 The week of the YWCA pool demonstration, twenty-eight youths were arrested after they rushed into the city-owned pool on George Street and swam for about an hour before the pool was drained and the police took them away. While that protest was going on, eighty black people had left Emanuel and marched to the city’s police station on St. Philip Street.36 The protesters defied a judge’s order in early July against mass demonstrations.

  The following day a much larger group left Emanuel Church and returned to the police station, while inside the station, AME bishop Decatur Ward Nichols and four others were being booked on charges of trespassing at the Fort Sumter Hotel overlooking Charleston’s historic Battery. One of them was former Avery Normal Institute teacher Ruby Cornwell, who was friends with Judge Waring and his wife.37 As the protest dragged on, a flyer was circulated asking black people not to shop on King Street “because King Street merchants want our money, but we cannot work on King Street unless we are maids, janitors, or stock clerks.” Black Charlestonians also were reminded they were the great-grandchildren of slaves, and the Charleston movement was “asking [that they] be treated as any other American because this is our home.”38

  Charleston’s two daily newspapers—the News and Courier and its sister paper the Charleston Evening Post—gave the protest limited or no coverage, and often what was reported was one-sided. The newspaper’s “blackout” was designed to prevent local blacks from being informed of what was happening in their city, but also to prevent outside supporters from joining the movement. James Blake observed, “So the people across the country never received the story of really what happened here.”39 Out of frustration, on July 16, 1963, about five hundred people took their songs and chants to the newspapers’ doorsteps on Columbus Str
eet for a late-night protest that became a “near riot.”40

  Harvey Jones wasn’t supposed to participate in the nighttime march because he and the other youth protested during the day while adults were at work, letting the adults take over in the evenings. But Glover wanted the young people who had participated in previous marches to help manage the group; the older people had to be continually reminded to keep moving to reduce their chances of being arrested. Blocking traffic or a driveway could result in a trip to jail. The trouble that night started, Jones recalled, when someone in a nearby alley threw a brick that hit a policeman in the mouth. According to news stories, that triggered a rock-and-bottle-throwing melee that injured six police officers and a firefighter.41 Police had their guns drawn, but no shots were fired; the dogs weren’t released, and high-pressure fire hoses remained dry. Harvey Jones said, in retrospect, that police used restraint to avoid charges of brutality recently lodged against the police in Birmingham, Alabama. Besides, in the Holy City it would have been a national embarrassment if police dogs were released on the preachers. More than one hundred demonstrators were arrested, and later some of them were charged with rioting, including Harvey Jones. But if there were rocks and bottles thrown, he said, they didn’t come from the organized protesters.

  Glover was not jailed that night, but he promised that more marches would follow. “If those people think we will drop the demonstrations because others have been arrested, they’ve got another think coming.” He urged his followers to engage in “peaceful street demonstrations.” Mayor J. Palmer Gaillard responded that “the city would meet lawless force with overwhelming lawful force.”42 At the mayor’s request, South Carolina’s governor dispatched the National Guard to Charleston. The mayor said the protest had halted “adjustments” planned by King Street merchants who didn’t want to be seen as yielding to mob intimidation.43