South Carolina

"Almost nine hundred and ninety nine out of every thousand of the decent people of South Carolina belong to the Democratic Party."

"No South Carolinian, with the single exception of Calhoun, has ever made a profounder impression on his generation than Tillman."

"I've watched and read the public reaction to the slaughter of nine people, nine African American people by a white supremacist gunman who warrants the description of a terrorist. As I read that commentary, I wonder how people would react if the gunman was a black male and the victims were white. Make no mistake about it; such a terrorist act is the logical if extreme outcome of white supremacy and intolerance. Apparently, reasons this particular white supremacist gunman, 'if you can't own them, exploit them, or remove them, you kill them'... As one might expect, the gunman’s fondness for Confederate heritage has become a focus of discussion. We’ve had people calling for the banning of Confederate flags as symbols of hate while certain defenders of Confederate heritage, sometimes after offering perfunctory statements of regret, rush to disassociate their cause from this mass murder or to offer other explanations for the gunman’s behavior. That’s to be expected, and it is to be regretted. We’ve had far too much discussion of the Confederate flag, both by people who hate it and people who love it, that trivialize the whole matter by turning it into a screaming match between extremes. Thoughtful commentary flounders in such environments, precisely because both sides will assail it. It's Sunday. If you haven’t already done so, think about the victims and their families and friends. Pray for those who have suffered. And think before you respond … because if you think that this whole matter can be reduced to whether we should allow the display of the Confederate flag, you really aren’t advancing the discussion very far."

"I think it's time for all this discussion about the proper display of the Confederate flag, which in some quarters appears to obscure the enormity of the massacre at Charleston, to get to the heart of the matter. You tell me. Should the Confederate battle flag, including its versions as the Army of Northern Virginia flag, the Army of Tennessee flag, and the Confederate navy jack, be flown outside, period? Do you favor the removal of the Confederate flag flying on the grounds of the South Carolina State House? Why? If you believe that the flying of the Confederate battle flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State House should cease, are there any conditions when a Confederate battle flag should appear outside? Should the Confederate battle flag be banned from public display elsewhere? T-shirts, bumper stickers, headgear? Are your restrictions limited to the Confederate battle flag alone, or do they extend to other flags flown by the Confederacy, such as the trio of national flags?"

"It certainly looks like the days of the Confederate battle flag flying on the grounds of the state house in Columbia, South Carolina are numbered. This is in large part due to prominent South Carolina political leaders changing positions under pressure given the recent mass murder in the state. No one can deny that. The arguments concerning the display of that particular flag are neither more nor less valid than before. Nor will the flag’s removal silence white supremacists and Confederate heritage advocates (especially those who have freely associated with white supremacists)... So, what's next? Will this debate subside or continue, as people look to other uses of Confederate icons and symbols? Is this simply about a flag that is as much a symbol of resistance to civil rights and equality as it was a symbol for soldiers whose performance on the battlefield might have secured the independence of a republic founded upon the cornerstone of white supremacy and inequality? One thing is clear: it has not been a good ten days for Confederate heritage advocates. Between licence plates, several SCV divisions rebuking other Confederate heritage groups for outrageous and childish behavior, and the fallout from Charleston, it may be that in 2015 people marked the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War by doing to Confederate heritage what Grant and Sherman did to the Confederacy itself in 1865."

"Anti-slavery is essentially infidel. It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men."

"South Carolina... is more ideologically conservative, with a stronger local party leadership and a tradition of preferring mainstream candidates."

"Slaves shall be deemed, taken, reputed, and adjudged to be chattels personal in the hands of their masters, and possessions to all intents and purposes whatsoever."

"It has been suggested that the President intentionally left those forts in a defenseless condition, that South Carolina might seize them before his successor had time to take means for their safety. I cannot believe it; I will not believe it, for it would make Mr. Buchanan a more odious traitor than Benedict Arnold. Every drop of blood that shall be shed in the conflict would sit heavy on his soul forever."

"The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words."

"Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them."

"Now we have these hate groups and the symbols they use to remind African-Americans that things haven't changed and that they are still viewed as less than equal human beings. Well, let me tell you things have changed. Overwhelmingly, people are not being raised to hate or to believe they are superior to others based on the color of their skin."

"For the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based in part on the desire to continue the practice of slavery. Think about it for just a second. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves, and continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will. I am not proud of that heritage."

"The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it."

"We deny, without regard to color, that 'all men are created equal'; it is not true now, and was not true when Jefferson wrote it."

"If the Republican party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule -- it is a question of political and social existence."

"We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him."

"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."

"Republicanism means Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is supreme. That is why we Southerners are all Democrats."

"History has no record of Negro rule. The situation is grave, and calls for wisdom and all manner of statesmanship. If we had our say, the Negro could never vote. I believe that God made the white man out of better clay than that which the Negro was made from."

"We don't need another race to help us at this time. In some of the states, the Negro holds the vote of control."

"Look down that aisle, there's a nigger as black as the ace of spades!"

"We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man's country and the white men must govern it."

"The citizenship status of blacks was never quite clear. Obviously, they were not quite resident aliens, for they had no country but the United States. The federal government generally avoided taking a stand on black citizenship when the subject arose. A few blacks got federal passports implying that they were citizens... The Articles of Confederation stated that 'the free inhabitants of these states... shall be entitled to all privileges of immunities of free citizens in the several states', and Congress voted down South Carolina's proposal to insert the word 'white' into this clause. Chief Justice Taney, in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, asserted that blacks had never been, and could never be, citizens of the United States. He was wrong."

"The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the south... This war is the servant of slavery."

"How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence. We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility. After we had borne these indignities for eight years life became worthless under such conditions."

"In the 1950s, the battle flag was revived not just as a symbol of resistance to federally mandated desegregation. The stars and bars was also a symbol of terror, of the violent intimidation of African Americans who dared assert their rights. The stars and bars promised lynching, police violence against protestors and others, and violence against churches. S.C.'s state flag is a flag of slavery. But it is also a flag of terrorism. That terror is among other things anti-religious and particularly, anti-Christian. Churches have been bombed & burned for what it symbolizes. Ministers, worshippers, people singing hymns have been attacked time and time again by those who serve it and those who wave it. So here we are again. S.C. may lower the pro-terrorism, proslavery, anti-religious flag to half mast for a day. But they plan to raise it again."

"South Carolina, come on and raise up! This one's for you! This one's for who? Us, us, us! Yes, sir!"

"North Carolina, South Carolina, and all my little itty-bitty hick towns."

"If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up. Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor."

"Whatever is necessary to continue the separation of the races in the schools of South Carolina is going to be done by the white people of the state. That is my ticket as a private citizen. It will be my ticket as governor."

"I never know what South Carolina thinks of a measure. I never consult her. I act to the best of my judgment, and according to my conscience. If she approves, well and good. If she does not, or wishes any one to take my place, I am ready to vacate. We are even."

"With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected."

"The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery... No man of common sense, who has observed the progress of events, and is not prepared to surrender the institution... The time for action has come – now or never... The existence of slavery is at stake."

"To talk of maintaining our independence while we abolish slavery is simply to talk folly."

"We can trust white men to do right by the inferior race, but we cannot trust the inferior race with power over the white man."

"We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, grateful to God for our liberties, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the preservation and perpetuation of the same."

"I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America."

"I am actually looking forward to the day when I visit South Carolina. The actions of the people in demanding change that took place on July 10, 2015 have helped transform my perception of that state. The people have broken free from the shackles of a mythical past and the limitations of the racism that has impeded them for far too long. Their representatives acted on the demands of the people."

"A Philadelphia writer on this subject, Mr. A. K. McClure, declares that such prejudice was much stronger in his own State, in 1886, than in South Carolina."

"James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom. Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the black people of South Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth. Peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die."

"The world, if it resumes its march toward civilization, cannot ignore reason. This has been the tragedy of the South in the past; it is still its awful and unforgivable sin that it has set its face against reason and against the fact. It tried to build slavery upon freedom; it tried to build tyranny upon democracy; it tried to build mob violence on law and law on lynching and in all that despicable endeavor, the state of South Carolina has led the South for a century. It began not the Civil War—not the War between the States—but the War to Preserve Slavery; it began mob violence and lynching and today it stands in the front rank of those defying the Supreme Court on disfranchisement."

"“Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy. To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice. This is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South. There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina."

"I have taught in South Carolina and lectured in the state numerous times. I have unfailingly been treated with courtesy and respect. Roof does not speak for all the white people in the state. Nonetheless, South Carolina has never really come to terms with its tortured history. Here are a few highlights of the state's extreme pro-slavery, white-supremacist past. In 1776, South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress forced Thomas Jefferson to remove a clause condemning slavery from the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, South Carolinians were primarily responsible for the constitution's fugitive slave clause and provision allowing the importation of slaves from abroad to continue for twenty additional years. Until 1860, a tight-knit coterie of plantation owners controlled the state; they did not even allow the white citizens to vote in presidential elections, the legislature chose the state's members of the Electoral College. Before the Civil War, South Carolina was one of two states, along with Mississippi, where nearly a majority of white families owned slaves, and had the largest black majority in its population, nearly 60 percent in 1860. This combination produced a unique brand of extremism in defense of slavery. The state was the birthplace of nullification, the first to secede, and the site of the first shot of the Civil War. During Reconstruction, black Carolinians enjoyed a brief moment of civil equality and genuine political power, but this ended with a violent 'Redemption', followed by decades of Jim Crow. More recently, South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest a civil-rights plank in the party's platform, and supported its native son, Strom Thurmond, who ran as the 'Dixiecrat' candidate for president."

"During the war of the Revolution, and in 1788, the date of the adoption of our national Constitution, there was but one State among the thirteen whose constitution refused the right of suffrage to the negro. That State was South Carolina. Some, it is true, established a property qualification; all made freedom a prerequisite; but none save South Carolina made color a condition of suffrage. The Federal Constitution makes no such distinction, nor did the Articles of Confederation. In the Congress of the Confederation, on the 25th of June, 1778, the fourth article was under discussion. It provided that 'the free inhabitants of each of these States — paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted — shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States.' The delegates from South Carolina moved to insert between the words 'free inhabitants' the word 'white', thus denying the privileges and immunities of citizenship to the colored man. According to the rules of the convention, each State had but one vote. Eleven States voted on the question. One was divided; two voted aye; and eight voted no. It was thus early, and almost unanimously, decided that freedom, not color, should be the test of citizenship. No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage."

"Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove…in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen. How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan."

"They were headed inland [from Myrtle Beach] through a landscape that reminded Milgrim of driving somewhere near Los Angeles, to a destination you wouldn’t be particularly anxious to reach. This abundantly laned highway, lapped by the lots of outlet malls, a Home Depot the size of a cruise ship, theme restaurants. Though interstitial detritus still spoke stubbornly of maritime activity and the farming of tobacco. Fables from before the Anaheiming."

"We all woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken. And so we have some grieving to do, and we've got some pain we have to go through. Parents are having to explain to the their kids that they have to go to church and feel safe and that's not something that we ever thought we'd would have to deal with. Having said that, we are a strong the and faithful state. We love our state, we love our county, and most importantly we love each other. And I will tell you there is a lot of prayer in this state. And so you are going to see all of us try and lift these nine families up in prayer, because they need us. These nine families need us, the Emmanuel AME church needs us, the AME church family need us, and the people of South Carolina needs us to come together and be strong for what has happened."

"We really kind of fixed all that when you elected the first Indian-American female governor, when we appointed the first African-American U.S. senator. That sent a huge message... On matters of race, South Carolina has had a tough history; we all know that. Many of us have seen it in our lives, in the lives of our parents and grandparents. We don't need reminders... For those who wish to respect the flag on private property, no one will stand in your way. But the statehouse is different. The events this past week call on us to look at this in a different way... We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer... The fact that it causes so [much] pain is enough to move it from the capitol grounds. It is, after all, a capitol that belongs to all of us... It will be fitting our state will soon fly the flags of our country, of our state, and no other."

"I ask you this-an honest question-why is there talk of Spain and Yugoslavia, of Palestine and Greece but no talk of Aiken County, South Carolina."