Day 4- Orangeburg and Charleston
We started our day in Orangeburg, where 3 college students were killed and 27 injured in 1968 after they protested to integrate the local bowling alley. Students from nearby Claftin and South Carolina State Colleges, brought increasingly more students each night to protest and when 300 students showed up on the third night, the National Guard was there. And things turned tense. And a window was smashed. And the police thought they heard gunfire. And 3 students were killed. Sounds eerily familiar. This was the first time that police brutality was tried in the courts and all 9 officers were acquitted. And in 2015, we witnessed the same reality for Tamir Rice in Cleveland. And Eric Garner in NYC. And we are living through that possible reality in Baltimore. Although the bowling alley is closed and there's not even an historical marker there, it was powerful and also powerfully sad to be in a place which witnessed the same reality that happens over and over again today.
We met up with John Winchester for a tour of Charleston, where he was refreshingly honest about some of the ugly realities of our history and gave us a lot of food for thought. It was a lot to take in all at once. Of the 500,000 Africans brought to this country, about 250,000 came through the port city of Charleston. So there were slaves sold in many parts of the city- often very publicly near the docks. And then it was realized how much of a spectacle this was and the movement to move these to interior streets and inside buildings. It seems right in line with some of the history in Columbia- the desire to preserve appearances and do things with dignity. But did it just help people to lie about the ugliness of the institution of slavery? Would it have been better to put it all out in the open and make Charlestonians look bad in the eyes of visitors until they would dismantle the system? When do we need to publicly put ugliness on display in order to change things?
And we also saw how stories were hidden because of decorum. The house below was occupied by a "free black woman of color" (the official terminology of the time). Although we don't know her story individually, many free black women gained their freedom after fathering children of the slave master. The masters would release these female slaves and their children and set them up in homes in the city. I'm sure many people knew the stories of these women, but they were not told publicly. They attempted to hide the reality that African Americans and whites were far more intertwined than they pretended to be in public.
And this marker, found at the Unitarian Church, reminded me of the deep value of truth. It is not an end- but perhaps it is a beginning for us. It says, "In memory of the enslaved workers who made these bricks and helped build our church." It acknowledges that the history of their church was connected to a painful part of history which was deeply and morally wrong. And it lifts up a tiny way that story and allows it to be told alongside the other stories of the church. Even be told BEFORE the other stories. And it honors the work of craftsmen that had no choice in the building of that place. But it realizes that they are a part of that church's story. What would it look like to make this kind of beginning at reconciliation? And what is the next step for this church and others? What happens after we name the evil that existed? How do we make a new story in a different way?
Tonight we are staying at Aldersgate Methodist Church in North Charleston with another group that is doing flood relief in the area. And we are staying in rooms set apart as a warming shelter for those experiencing homelessness in the colder months. It's a neighborhood that is economically disadvantaged and I learned today that it is also only 3 blocks from where Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was shot by police in April 2015. Another story that needs to be heard. Another story that has played itself out in our country too many times. Looking forward to hearing the truth of our history and our present again tomorrow.