Regan Freeman had spent more than a year organizing a project to tell the story of a black pastor from South Carolina who reached out to members of the Ku Klux Klan who wanted him dead because of his race.
Freeman thought he knew the story well.
Then came a tweet that led to two gray storage boxes for some of the most racist newspapers, leaflets, posters, photographs and other material that Freeman had ever seen.
And the struggles that Rev. David Kennedy went through and his patience, love and affection for all men, even those with the most evil in their hearts, had a clearer focus for the young man born three months after The Redneck Shop and World Only Klan Museum adorned with
Confederate flags with the swastika painted on the back wall, opened at Laurens.
Under Freeman’s leadership, Project Echo raised more than $ 300,000 to renovate the decadent and risks being condemned by the historic Echo Theater, a cinema segregated for decades before becoming a store full of racist T-shirts and other merchandise with a large meeting room where dozens of hooded Klan members gathered in the back.
An architect and builder was chosen with the work starting soon and Freeman plans to relaunch the project’s website to expand its reach.
He wants to collect stories of black people around Laurens whose ancestors fought slavery and segregation and perhaps take on other projects, such as placing historic landmarks at the site of each of the more than 150 lynchings of black victims known in the state.
And that led Freeman to gray plastic tubs.
He saw a post on Twitter in October, where a woman who now owns the land where the owner of the Redneck Shop, John Howard, lived when he died, randomly informed the Southern Poverty Law Center account that she had a ton of her stuff.
The woman did not respond, so Freeman drove alone and after an unannounced visit, some negotiation and $ 500, he had decades of things marking Howard’s racist life.
There are negative cross-firing negatives. Adolph Hitler posters.
A “Klan Rally Instructions” manual. A pamphlet called “A boat ticket to Africa” with stereotypes and horribly offensive black cartoons.
A business card that a Klan member would leave to intimidate black families who said it was a social visit and “don’t make the next visit a business visit”.
This is not 100 years ago. Part of that is perhaps from the past decade or two, according to Freeman.
Freeman plans to have historians at the University of South Carolina help him examine the items in order to preserve and display those that best tell a story in theater exhibitions.
“But our plan is to take this theater and turn it into a place where you really understand what happened in the building, you know, take the story of the Echo Theater and this fight for justice, not only in Lawrence County, but in combination with that story longer and this bigger story across the country, “he said.
A Klan member named Michael Burden, who was already thinking of killing Kennedy, sold the theater to the pastor in 1997 after Kennedy helped him when he and Howard had a fight.
But Burden’s business allowed Howard to continue renting the theater to The Redneck Shop.
Kennedy finally won a 15-year court dispute and closed the store. The story became the film “Burden”, released earlier this year.
Now Freeman is leading the project to turn the old theater into Kennedy’s dream of a community center where racial reconciliation and harmony come first.
Freeman grew up in neighboring Clinton, and while at the University of South Carolina, he felt compelled to speak to Kennedy about his work. Kennedy asked him to lead the project and Freeman gave up a job at a law firm for his new calling.
The project has the collaboration of architect and construction company.
The first job for companies? Scraping a Confederate flag sticker on the marquee for decades and putting “The Echo Project” and its website.
(Image credit: AP)
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