Studying the South

An impressive array of events took place in Fall 2018. Thanks to everyone who sponsored these events across campus.

Sept 2  “Yiddish Politics in New South Cities,” Dr. Josh Parnell  (Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture)

Sept 25 Policing Charleston during the Era of Slavery by Dr. Nic Butler  (Avery & Race and Social Justice Initiative–RSJI)

Frank Sturken ’51

Oct 13 Inaugural Sturcken Oratorical Competition, founded by SOST minor Tanner Crunelle (class of 2020) and named in honor of Frank Sturcken (class of 1951), who advocated for desegregation of the College while a student.

Oct 15 The Legacy of Slavery: Five Movements by Kwame Nimako           Avery/RSJI

October 17, 2018 “Last Seen”: Finding Family after Slavery with Dr. Judith Giesberg (Avery/RSJI/Friends of the Library)

October 23, 2018: Preservation of Lowcountry Foodways by Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson and Chef Kevin Mitchell  (Avery/RSJI/African American Studies)

Oct 25 Panel Discussion on Black Women in Higher Education (Women’s and Gender Studies, History)

Oct 18 Southbound: Photographs of and About the New South, an exhibit curated by Halsey’s Mark Sloan and Mark Long, begins its residence at Halsey Gallery and City Gallery, Oct 19 2018-March 2 2019

Nov 7 2018 Rise Up! Symposium on Anson St Burials in Randolph Hall, presenting research by Gullah Society and designs by Nathaniel Walker’s undergraduate students

Nov 1, Film Series, Oct 18, “Family Across the Sea,” Nov. 1, “The Language You Cry In,” Nov 8, “Priscilla’s Legacy,”  with Thomalind Polite and Edward Ball (CLAW)

Nov 10 Sounds of the South: A Music Symposium sponsored by the Halsey Gallery and the Southbound exhibit, with Rachel Boillot, Bill Carson, C of C’s Dr. Karen Chandler, Lisa Elmaleh, Bill Ferris, Jake Fussell, Cary Ann Hearst (C of C class of 2001), Jake Steber

Lucas Wilson wrote this post about research he did in Charleston this semester. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Studies, Florida Atlantic University.

I spent a week in Charleston as a Charleston Research Fellow this past February. It was my second time as a fellow through the College of Charleston’s Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. The first time I was in attendance in 2017, I explored archival holdings that pertained to the lived experiences of children of Holocaust survivors known as the “second generation.” The archive contained newspaper articles, op-ed write-ups, pamphlets, and other materials that detailed what it was like to grow up with survivors. I found much that spoke to how these members of the second-generation saw their parents, especially in relation to how they saw themselves; how they negotiated their parents’ pasts in their own lives; and how they lived with inherited traumas and embodied knowledges that stemmed from their parents’ experiences during the Holocaust. I was particularly interested in how these members of the second-generation spoke about and described their childhood domestic lives, how they inhabited homes that were marked by their parents’ Holocaust legacies. I wanted to know how sharing intimate space and time within the home assisted in the transmission of intergenerational traumatic knowledge. My first time as a fellow allowed me to wade through a rich body of ephemera and documentation that detailed these above-mentioned themes, facilitating an interdisciplinary approach to my work on second-generation Holocaust oral history and literature.

As a fellow this spring 2019, I was in Charleston not to go through the archives again. Instead, I came to help build an oral history archive. I was tasked with conducting eight oral histories with a number of second- and third-generation witnesses, six with women and two with men. Some of the narrators (the official name of those being interviewed) were siblings. Some were from Charleston. Some were from elsewhere. Two women were former school teachers. One woman was a physiotherapist. One man was an archivist and an award-winning historian. One man was a doctor. One woman used to own her own restaurant. One woman was a lawyer. And one woman was an artist.

Each individual I interviewed expressed a different understanding of how the Holocaust continues to impinge upon the present, be it in their own lives and/or the lives of other family members. As I was expecting, the narrators of these oral histories described a wide range of life experiences. My research demonstrates how members of the second generation (and the third generation, to be sure) are a vast, complex, and diverse group of individuals who share many characteristics but also are quite divergent in their relationship to the Holocaust. Some are seemingly unaffected by their parents’ pasts, whereas others are continually forced to grapple with (and are traumatized by) the burden of what their mothers and fathers went through leading up to, during, and after the Shoah. However, despite their many differences and despite their varied career paths, that which united them was their parents’ Holocaust pasts and their own engagement with social justice issues.

I was particularly struck by two of the women whom I interviewed, two women who were sisters and whose mother was a child survivor. They were both sharp, articulate, engaging, and each had a strong sense of humor. They were both college-educated, and each had families of her own. Although they shared much—particularly their emphasis on family, helping others, and a keen sense of empathy—they were also emphatically different in how they approached the knowledge of their mother’s past.

One sister—a physiotherapist and a mother—was afflicted by panic attacks since she was a child. These panic attacks have lessened as time has gone on, but she told me that she still wakes up from night terrors and is never sure when they will overtake her. As a child, when she would have one of her panic attacks, she would sprint as fast as she could and would not stop until the sense of panic had lessened. She was also one who did her best not to think about the Holocaust. This is not to say that she has not in some ways engaged with her mother’s past (for she emphatically has), but it is to say that she disengaged and tried her best to separate herself from having to hear about the Shoah, particularly through film, books, and other media. Such an active disassociation and refusal to engage was and is an act of self-protection. When children are inundated with stories that instill a great amount of fear, they naturally do their best to remove themselves from the situation and keep themselves (psychologically) safe. When I spoke with this narrator about how she would sprint when she felt panicked, I thought about how her sprinting away could be a way of trying to run, figuratively and literally, from that which was haunting her. Such a somatic response is of course very much an externalization of the inner emotional/psychological turmoil that has commonly plagued children of Holocaust survivors.

The other sister—a former restaurant owner and also a mother—diverged significantly from her sister in how she dealt with their mother’s Holocaust past. She was the historian, so to speak, of the family. She was very much engaged with keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, and she was in the process of writing her own memoir that detailed both her mother’s story and her own. Unlike her sister, she read books on the Holocaust and watched Holocaust films. Through her active grappling with Holocaust memory and history, this sister was seemingly trying to make sense of not only her mother’s past but her own life as well—which makes sense because for the second generation, the Holocaust is personal. And though these individuals were not alive during the Shoah, the Holocaust continues to impinge upon them and impact their lives in ways that seem, almost, as if they were.

As I asked these two women about their childhood homes, I was again struck by how different two individuals raised by the same survivor can respond so differently. As I said above, I am interested in how members of the second generation describe their childhood homes, and when I asked these sisters to describe theirs, their descriptions underscored again how differently they respond to the Holocaust. When I asked the first sister who actively disengaged with the knowledge of the Holocaust to describe her childhood home, she did not once actually mention the inside of her home. She described playing outside, traveling, hanging out at other friends’ houses, but she never once described the interior of the home. The sister who actively engaged with the Holocaust, on the other hand, offered a detailed description of the house in which she grew up. These divergent descriptions reflect how the first sister disassociated herself from the intimate space of the home, a space that is defined for her by her mother’s sadness that stemmed from the Holocaust. The other sister, the one who consistently confronted her inherited trauma, was contrastingly more than willing to describe her home and the sadness therein. These descriptions, again, reflect how the children of Holocaust survivors relate to their parents and their parents’ traumas.

My time in Charleston this spring was fruitful, as it was my first time around, and the oral histories I conducted offered me powerful insights into the transmission of traumatic knowledge from one generation to the next. These oral histories will reside in the Jewish Heritage Oral History Archives and will be made publicly available through Addlestone Library’s Lowcountry Digital Library. Once they are posted, I encourage all to listen to these first-person accounts of the lived experiences of the extraordinary men and women I was fortunate to interview.

The following post was also published on May 3 in the Post and Courier. However, they left out the quotations I included at the beginning and ends of the article, so I have included those here.

Honoring Charleston’s Ancestors

Julia Eichelberger

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.                  Ecclesiasticus 44:9

There’s a lot of history to study in Charleston, but isn’t it mostly the history of wealthy white families, the people whose records fill most of our archives and whose homes are most carefully preserved? Their names are on streets and buildings; their oil portraits and antique furniture are most often on display; theirs are the few families who had the means to write and preserve their letters, diaries, plantation ledgers. We’re grateful their artifacts survive. To be able to handle and walk through these bits of the past is exciting, even magical, making us feel transported to another era. And yet these archival remnants deceive us if we imagine they offer a complete, representative picture of our past. The hands who built and tended these historic structures, the bodies compelled to create these households’ wealth, are all but invisible in Charleston’s picturesque streets, unless we know what to look for: fingerprints in bricks, “servant” quarters, benne seed wafers.

This week we will re-inter 36 African-descended people whose remains were discovered in 2013 near the corner of George and Anson Streets.  When the city was renovating the Gaillard Auditorium, no one expected to find a burial ground there. One early owner of this property, George Anson, gave the streets his names, but neither he nor subsequent owners left records of the cemetery that clearly existed there. That’s not surprising. Once dead and no longer able to work or bear children, the bodies of enslaved people who could yield no further profit would have held little interest to most white Charlestonians. Someone, probably a community of enslaved people, carefully laid these dead to rest, but within a few decades, they disappeared beneath the earth, joining the many thousands gone whose unfree labor built so much of our beautiful city.

Thanks to efforts by the City, the Gullah Society, the National Geographic Society, University of Pennsylvania, and C of C student researcher Adeyemi Oduwole, these human remains have been carefully excavated and analyzed.  DNA indicates the areas in Africa where most people came from, and isotope analysis even suggests how many years they’d spent on this side of the Atlantic. Researchers are now comparing these findings with DNA samples taken from present-day Charleston residents.

So these ancestors, having enriched the city with their labor centuries before, are now increasing our knowledge of who we are and how we’re connected. The bodies of the living are joining these rediscovered dead in an enlarged archive of historical information and human understanding. In providing this knowledge, the ancestors continue an old tradition in which the living receive guidance and encouragement from the dead. In the Kongo cultures from which some enslaved people came, there were two realms of existence,  “the visible and the invisible intertwined in the same space,” writes Ras Michael Brown (African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry). Burial grounds, where ancestors are embedded in the landscape, give the living a link to the invisible realm of the dead. For people brought to a strange new land where they were enslaved, ancestors would have been especially important. Brown and other scholars even posit that the famous tale of the Flying Africans at Ibo Landing may have been a tale of self-sacrifice: those enslaved people may have chosen to drown themselves, transforming an alien land into a sustaining home. In Brown’s words, those dead gave themselves as “a sacrifice, an offering to the land and waters to consecrate the landscape of the Lowcountry with the lives and spirits of captive Africans brought in chains to this shore.”

Whatever you may believe about visible or invisible realms, it’s clear that the Anson Street burial ground is enriching 21^st-century Charleston with new knowledge and inspiration. On May 4, the City and the Gullah Society will return the remains of these individuals very near to their original resting place on the Gaillard grounds.

If you’d like to join the procession down George Street and the celebration that follows, meet at the College of Charleston, 58 George, between 9:30 and 10:30. The Center for the Study of Slavery is hosting the procession’s starting point. Before we set out at 10:30, you may also write a personal message to be buried with the ancestors.  Thanks to them, we’ll walk down a beautiful Charleston street, together.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;

We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last,

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

James Weldon Johnson

Southern Studies is a co-sponsor of this event on Wed March 27, 5:30 pm in Randolph Hall, entitled “The Long Afterlife of Brown v. Board: A Commemoration of the Supreme Court Decision and Its Legacy.” Panelists Dr. Millicent Brown and Caroll Turpin will discuss their experiences desegregating SC public schools in the 1960s.

Reception is at 5:30 followed by the panel discussion beginning at 6 pm.

Students on the Cistern, Friday, March 8th.

Many people within and beyond the South don’t know enough, or don’t want to know enough, to recognize the horrors of slavery and the shame it still brings upon us all. That was proven once again last week, when some C of C students posted a video they’d recorded while on a class trip– laughing about slavery, having fun making racist comments, then sharing them with the world. These students have embarrassed us all, but other C of C students have made us proud. One day after the video made the news, students organized a protest on the Cistern, where they shared publicly the pain and anger they felt, not just in response to this recent incident, but to many others they’ve experienced as C of C students of color. As several of them said, when it was their turn with the microphone, “We’re tired.”

I emailed one student afterwards to find out which groups to thank for last Friday’s effort.  She told me, “The more general black student body is really who organized this event. The students . . . were acting simply as black students who attend this university. Leadership of the Black Student Union, Collegiate Curls, Human Rights Alliance, I-CAN, SGA, and various Non-Panhellenic Greek organizations just so happened to be the main people behind the organization and promotion of the event.” When I spoke to a few of these students on the street the same day, they weren’t taking much individual credit either. “It’s all hands on deck,” as one of them said. To all of you wonderful students, thank you for your solidarity and courage and determination. I hope we as an institution can be worthy of it.

Plenty of people here are trying. I was touched by an open letter from the SGA to the student body, written to “rebuke and condemn the racist messages of this video, and to let every student of color on this campus know that you do matter, that you do have a home here, where you are welcomed, valued and loved, and that we stand in solidarity with you against this vile and disturbing act of racism, that is so contrary to our values as an institution and to our common humanity.” We have a lot of work to do, though, to make those truths self-evident on our campus.

So let me commend the SGA and the student protestors for your heartfelt and timely response, and let me record one more note, to myself and anyone else who wishes to be an ally. When the students stood on the Cistern calling for meaningful action in response to racist incidents, they were not just talking to College administration. “I really appreciate y’all for being here today,” one protestor said to the many white students, faculty and staff in attendance, “I love y’all, but let me just tell you something. Check your people.”

When racism and its attendant stupidities and cruelties show themselves confidently, it harms us all. It’s on us—especially those of us who are white–to protest, out loud.

C of C students gave us a master class last week. Thanks, y’all.

–Julia Eichelberger, Professor of English, directs the Program in Southern Studies and serves as an Executive Board member for the College’s new Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston.  

Supporters of March 8 student walkout and protest against racist video other students made & shared on social media

Four acclaimed interpreters of Charleston will reflect on their beginnings as writers Thursday, Feb 21, 5:30 PM in Stern Center Ballroom. Marcus Amaker, Harlan Greene, Josephine Humphreys, and Michele Moore will present their reflections. Moderated by Julia Eichelberger. Booksigning and reception to follow.

This is part of a 3-day conference sponsored by the Eudora Welty Society and the Department of English, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Southern Studies. There are 12 academic panels, and on one of them, two Southern Studies minors  (Stella Rounsefell, ENCW, Mary Scott Gilbert, HIST) will present on their research on Welty’s unpublished letters. That one’s Friday, 10:15, EHHP Alumni Hall.

College Hosts Conference on Eudora Welty

http://eudoraweltysociety.eventbrite.com

eudoraweltysociety.org

Full conference program

Five students will discuss capstone projects they did for the minor. Each capstone began in one of the student’s Southern Studies minor courses. For their capstone project, they enriched the original project using ideas, skills, and knowledge gained in other disciplines and courses from their program of study. Join us for celebration, discussion and snacks Feb 14, 3 pm, Addlestone 227.

UPDATE: Go here to learn more about these students’ projects and their wide-ranging coursework.

This post is written by Philippe R. Girard, Professor of Caribbean History, McNeese State University.

© Philippe Girard 2019

Charleston, where I spent a week doing research in January 2019 as a fellow at the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture, is famous for its rich architecture and history. Some of it has not yet been fully explored: that is the case of Abraham Sasportas, who built the two houses now known as the “Sasportas tenements” at 44-46 Queen St., and whose name is also mentioned on the plaque in front of 54 Tradd St., as one of the “distinguished residents” who once lived at this address.

Abraham Sasportas was the scion of a wide-ranging Sephardic family, which, like all members of this Jewish community, originated in the Iberian peninsula before branching out to various Atlantic ports of Europe, the United States, and Charleston. Born in Bordeaux, France, Sasportas visited Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue (now Cap-Haïtien, Haiti) before settling in Charleston, SC, where in 1778 he married another Sephardic Jew with Caribbean connections: Rachel da Costa.

Sasportas became a noted patriot during the American Revolution. He served in the French militia that helped defend Charleston during the British siege (other members of the Sasportas family living in London and Amsterdam helped John Adams and Alexander Hamilton sell U.S. bonds in European markets). Then, when the British occupied Charleston, he left for Philadelphia rather than live under British rule. In Philadelphia, he helped finance a new synagogue as well as privateers to attack British shipping. This dual allegiance to his faith and to the age of revolutions defined his life.

Returning to Charleston after the American Revolution, Sasportas became one of the town’s leading figures. Ads for his mercantile house appeared regularly in the press: using his family connections, he imported sugar and other tropical goods from Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, as well as wine and brandy from Bordeaux. He often appeared in legal records as well, usually over unpaid debts, either as a defendant or a plaintiff. He was also active in freemason circles as well as the Jewish congregation, which was the largest in the United States and in 1792 began work on an impressive synagogue (now burnt) on the site of the current synagogue on Hassel St.

Sasportas never severed his links with France, particularly in the 1790s, when the French and Haitian Revolutions led to multiple waves of migration from France and the Caribbean, reinforcing Charleston’s distinctive French and Caribbean flair. This was the time when Sasportas became even more of a revolutionary activist and trouble-maker. He sided with pro-revolutionary Frenchmen, particularly the French consul Mangourit, and France’s local allies in the Democrat-Republican Party. Conversely, he made numerous enemies among exiled French monarchists and slave-owners, as well as the pro-British Federalist party. He joined the French Patriotic Society, the first and most radical of the pro-revolutionary societies in the United States, and involved himself in public battles that were the talk of the town. One was so bitter that Sasportas came close to fighting a duel with a French aristocrat he had insulted.

Just as he had done during the American Revolution, Sasportas outfitted privateers to harass British shipping. He was also the official French prize agent in Charleston, in charge of selling the British merchant ships seized at sea. The administration of George Washington, however, wished to remain neutral in the European war and banned such activities for US citizens. Sasportas, using his ambiguous status as a dual French-American national, continued his activities nonetheless, leading to sharp complaints by the British consul in Charleston and various lawsuits that ended up on the docket of the US Supreme Court.

Once, when visiting the prison of Charleston, Sasportas met a prisoner named Jonathan Robbins, who was accused of having been the ringleader during the mutiny of the HMS Hermione, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. British authorities spent years tracking down the mutineers, eventually locating Robbins in Charleston. Sasportas immediately took up his cause and hired lawyers for Robbins. No stranger to controversy, Sasportas found himself at the center of yet another political and legal maelstrom over impressment, extradition, and citizenship that attracted national attention (Robbins lost the case and was eventually hanged in Jamaica).

To prevail against the British and Spanish monarchies, the French revolutionary government had an ambitious plan: to raise funds and troops in the United States, then use them to invade Louisiana and Florida. French Consul Mangourit in Charleston was charged with organizing the invasion of Florida. The man who handled logistics for the expedition was none other than his prize agent: Abraham Sasportas. After years of preparations, the expedition was cancelled at the last minute at the request of the US government, but not before a group of French and American adventurers had invaded Amelia Island in Florida in 1794.

In the Caribbean, the French went one step further: they abolished slavery in 1793-1794 and employed black freedmen to attack British colonies and free local slaves. In South Carolina, where slavery underpinned the plantation economy, fears grew that French exiles would attempt a similar scheme. When slave conspiracies were uncovered in Virginia and South Carolina, Abraham Sasportas was immediately cited as a possible conspirator. The evidence for Sasportas’ involvement is thin, however: like most elite white men of his time, Sasportas was a slave-owner and remained so well into the 1800s. Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, he saw no contradiction between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the peculiar institution of slavery.

Another Sasportas disagreed: Isaac Sasportas, the son of Abraham Sasportas’ brother in Saint-Domingue. From 1793 to 1795, Isaac lived with his uncle in Charleston. Isaac was a young man and an idealist who had embraced the more radical ideals of the French and American revolutions, including universal emancipation. After returning to the Caribbean, Isaac Sasportas hatched an ambitious scheme to invade British Jamaica with an army of 4,000 freedmen from Saint-Domingue and free the slaves of Jamaica. If successful, the plan would have changed the course of history, allowing the Haitian Revolution to export itself to foreign shores. With the help of the French representative in Saint-Domingue, Isaac recruited troops, armed ships, and went to Jamaica to set the plan in motion. But details of the plans were leaked—amazingly, by none other than the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture—and the British were able to arrest and execute young Isaac in 1799. The slave revolt in Jamaica never took place.

Armband with slogan “Vanquish or Die”

When news of Isaac’s death reached Charleston, local planters again accused Abraham Sasportas of being again tied to the cause of abolition. He demurred, explaining that he had nothing to do with the Sasportas executed in Jamaica—even though he was his own nephew and he had lived with him for years.

Possibly because of his controversial political activism, Abraham Sasportas distanced himself from Charleston in later years. After remarrying to another member of a Jewish Charleston family, Charlotte Canter (who was 33 years his junior!), he made extended visits to his native Bordeaux and eventually re-settled there permanently. This leaves us with another mystery about his cultural identity: did Sasportas see himself primarily as a Jew? An American? A Frenchman? It’s difficult to know.

Several descendants of Sasportas remained in the United States, however. Some were white and Jewish; others were Protestant and mixed-race. Some of these mixed-race descendants, like Joseph Sasportas, owned slaves and did not challenge the existing racial order. Others, like Thaddeus K. Sasportas, were active in Republican politics during the era of Reconstruction and helped broaden black educational opportunities at Claflin University. Those complex dynamics are appropriate for the descendants of such a fascinating figure as Abraham Sasportas, who was at once an American patriot, a French sentimentalist, a Sephardic Jew, an outrageous Jacobin, a privateer, a tireless litigant, and a slave-owner. The plaque on Tradd St. might have to be enlarged to fit all the ways to describe the man who once resided there.

Here are a few upcoming events where you can learn more about the South and issues facing the region.

January 28 5-6:30 pm, Maybank 100 WGS Year of Women “Intersections” series on Gender, Race, and Medicine, with Kathleen Beres Rogers, Latecia M. Abraham-Hilaire, Allison Foley, Beth Sundstrom, Lisa Young, sponsored by WGST and English; refreshments will be served.

January 29, 6 pm Simons 309    Lecture on Southbound mapping project by Rick Bunch, UNC-Greensboro, sponsored by Halsey Institute & Southbound project

Feb 5, 6 pm, Randolph Hall  Panel discussion “Bridging the Divide: Placemaking for Communities of Color in the SC Lowcountry.” Bernard Powers, moderator; keynote by Stephanie Johnson-Cunningham; panelists Grant Gilmore, Wayne Smith, Kwadjo Campbell, Herb Frazier. Sponsored by OID, Avery, AAST, Arts Management.

Feb 7 5-7 3rd Floor Addlestone “Dynamic Pasts, Changing Futures: Student Reflections of Life in the Lowcountry” Sponsored by Voices of Southern Hospitality oral history project & Southern Studies program

Feb 8 6 pm 3rd floor Addlestone: Lecture by Bernie Powers, part of CLAW’s “The Vesey Conspiracy at 200”

Feb 9 7 pm 3rd floor Addlestone: Lecture by Michael Moore, part of CLAW’s Vesey conference

Feb 11, 6-8 pm. ECTR 118   AAST Film Festival “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with discussion led by Lisa Young

Feb 12 6 pm, City Gallery at Waterfront Park, An Evening with Nikky Finney, sponsored by Halsey Institute and Southbound

Feb 19, 3:30-5 pm, Addlestone 227    “Intersections” panel on Women in SC, with Amy McCandless, sponsored by WGS & History

Feb 20, 6-9 pm Gaillard Center, Hate Crime Forum, sponsored by Avery & Charleston Police Department

Feb 21, 6 pm, Halsey Institute Curator-led tour of Southbound

Feb 21-23 The Eudora Welty Society presents an international conference: “The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty Reconsidered. Daytime panels are in Stern Center Ballroom Feb 21 and in EHHP Alumni Center Feb 22 and 23. Sponsored by English Department, WGST, HSS, and Southern Studies. Free to C of C community; click here to register.  Others should register for the conference at eudoraweltysociety.org.

Feb 21. 5:30-7:30 pm Stern Center Ballroom, “Charleston Writers Discuss Their Beginnings  with Josephine Humphreys, Harlan Greene, Michele Moore, Marcus Amaker. Part of Eudora Welty Society conference.

Feb 22, 6:15 pm, EHHP Alumni Center, Dramatic reading of Eudora Welty’s “Moon Lake”  Part of Eudora Welty Society conference.

Spectators at Marion Square for MLK Day Parade, 1.21.19

Charleston Area Justice Ministry members wait their turn to join parade.

Today was a chance for us to see each other.  A parade can’t do the hard work of building and re-building the beloved community. But it can help if it shows us that we’re “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” as today’s honoree wrote in 1963. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He also wrote, “One day the South will recognize its real heroes. . . . One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream.”

At today’s parade, marchers and spectators kept waving to each other. “Happy King Day!” everyone said. “Keep the dream alive!” some people added. Nobody seemed to get tired of waving. In the group I was marching with, people occasionally called out to friends they recognized along the way, but most of the day’s greetings were between strangers. Our common denominator:  thinking this parade was something worth showing up for.

We were seeing each other in our beautiful city– un-flooded for the time being, high-end condo construction projects casting shadows over Upper King Street, kids in our group running out to give candy to spectators, the Burke High School band putting spring in everyone’s steps.

We were seeing the city and the region, what we are and what we can become. Multicultural, diverse, dynamic, oddly hopeful. In need of so much repair.

That’s the South I study—the region I care about, pay attention to, strive to understand more deeply.

Happy King Day; keep the dream alive.

Julia Eichelberger, Director, Program in Southern Studies