But if that happens, there are many reasons to be careful about how this sign of progress will be used to cover up the state’s horrible racial past – and present. In South Carolina, there has long been a constant push and pull, between the public and the elites, between those who try to cling to a horrific racist story and those who rush to mark symbolic progress markers to declare all these racial tensions firmly a thing of the past. As a black Southern Carolinian, I am excited about a Senate delegation of two black men, but I am also concerned that this gives some people the opportunity to stop talking about the racial barriers that still exist in the state. Worse, it may even trigger a racist reaction; after all, we saw what happened nationally after the United States elected Barack Obama. I worry because I see this happening all the time in my state – and I see South Carolina take a step forward, then two steps back in racial progress as a result.
See March 29, 2001.
That day, while the rain sometimes fell hard and sometimes drizzled, a contingent of dignitaries was inside the South Carolina Statehouse before leaving when the weather cleared a bit to be among the first to see the opening of an African monument. US $ 1 million. Democratic Governor Jim Hodges talked about God and evoked the image of Nelson Mandela and a long list of big names in the state in a speech.
The monument was the culmination of a commitment only in South Carolina in 1999 and 2000, negotiated by the General Assembly and presented in large part in response to blacks agitating for the removal of the Confederate flag and the NAACP promise to impose a boycott on the state until though. That is why the African American monument was built. That was when Martin Luther King Jr.’s day was finally recognized as an official state holiday. In exchange for these concessions, the Confederate flag was removed from the Statehouse, but transferred to a monument of Confederate soldiers on Statehouse grounds, where it flew until a few weeks after the Dylann Roof massacre some 14 years later. That deal also made Confederate Memorial Day an officially recognized holiday and the passing of a law that would require a supermajority to remove or destroy Confederate memorials in the state.
The NAACP called the deal a scam. The same was true of most black elected officials in the state. It didn’t matter, it was considered progress and anyone who considered it less than that was put aside.
The monument that opened that day is 25 feet long and about two floors high. Scenes from the Jim Crow era were recorded on the sculpture. Allusions to the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Brown v. Education Council Supreme Court decision and black sharecroppers and an astronaut and graduates and men and women with briefcases and musical instruments helped to complete his message, that of the 400-year journey of blacks in Africa, from the currents to the perfectionists of democracy. The monument included stones from four places in Africa: Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal. Enslaved blacks were dispatched from these countries to Charleston from the late 1600s to the early 1800s and sold to slaves in various parts of the state.
It was a gesture of progress, but there was also something empty at the time, and the comments carefully skirted the other people who were honored on the Statehouse grounds. Sculptor Ed Dwight was careful not to portray specific people at the monument. South Carolina could not have manipulated a monument on the Statehouse grounds that celebrated a man like Denmark Vesey, a former slave from South Carolina and one of the first members of the Emanuel AME Church – where Roof committed the massacre that triggered the removal of the confederate flag on the Statehouse premises – which almost provoked one of the biggest slave revolts in history. That would have been very radical, very divisive.
But Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, a former South Carolina governor who boasted of lynching blacks, was never too divisive to be celebrated on Statehouse grounds. That is why visitors are greeted with a huge statue of him. Segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Confederate generals Wade Hampton, Robert E. Lee and J. Marion Sims, the man known as the founder of modern gynecology who experimented with black women performing surgery on them without anesthesia, were also honored there. with statues and plaques. Nor was it considered too divisive to keep the Confederate flag raised above the State House for decades as a rebuke to the advancement of black civil rights.
For many of the whites I spoke with that day, the inauguration of the African American monument was a symbol of progress at the center of the state’s political power. They didn’t mention anything about the white men whose memories were still being honored in a more prominent space at the Statehouse – a reminder that a firm racial hierarchy in the state remains unexamined, mostly intact and a barrier to the kind of progress the monument was to. celebrate.
It is similar to the way the country as a whole has long revered its founders as agents of freedom and freedom, while concealing their prominent roles in black slavery and the white racism and supremacy that has haunted us ever since. It is a kind of racial blindness. Although the African-American monument was well done and an important corrective, for many white minds in the state, it has become a kind of free letter to get out of racism.
These types of “commitments” illustrate what Nikky Finney, the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in creative writing and southern studies at the University of South Carolina, calls his “abacus theory”. “They say, ‘OK, OK’ after 400 years. ‘Alright, alright, we’re going to give you something to keep you quiet, but every time we give you something we’ll rebalance this SC thing, insisting on something else on our side,’ ”she told me this week. “We will take down the Confederate flag if you give us [funding] to a new confederate museum to protect you forever. ‘This is not progress. It may be how politics works in South Carolina, but it is not progress ”.
She was there that day in March 2001 and read one of her poems. The monument represented only 12 chapters in a million-chapter book, she told the crowd, as she reminded them of black men hanging from trees like kudzu, Joe Frazier’s struggle and the brilliance of black astronaut Ronald McNair.
Perhaps what causes most anxiety for me, when considering the possibility of two black senators, is another aspect of the state’s past: any racial progress here comes at a cost that is almost always borne by blacks. The end of slavery, for example, led to a Reconstruction that was quickly replaced by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching.
Two black senators, one elected without the support of the black vote, one who could be elected with him, would be praised even by whites who are trying to ensure that this does not become a reality. They will use it as a shield against accusations of racism, making the type of racism they practice much more potent. We’ll celebrate if that happens, but we won’t let our guards down.