We loaded the sousaphones, bass drums and smaller band instruments into the belly of two Greyhound buses and then left Charleston for a half-time performance during a football game at Robert Smalls High School in Beaufort.
At sunset, 60 members of the Charles A. Brown High School Marching Band, dressed in black uniforms adorned with gold epaulets and buttons, stepped onto the Robert Smalls campus.
I was one of those excited and impressive-looking musicians in the fall of 1964 on that road trip to an all-Black high school I thought was named for a White man like our school, C.A. Brown.
Decades later, I learned that South Carolina’s segregated school system denied me and other Black students the lesson that Beaufort native Robert Smalls, an enslaved man, was a Civil War hero.
Smalls’ actions thrust him into the annals of history and politics after he, his men and their families escaped Charleston harbor on May 13, 1862, with a steamer, the Planter.
Smalls skillfully masqueraded as the ship’s white captain to smuggle the Planter out of the harbor to give it to the blockcading Union Navy. Smalls made the early morning run past the harbor’s Confederate fortifications seem even more credible by giving the proper whistle signals.
The daring escape will be told on stage Oct. 6 at the Charleston Gaillard Center in the world premiere of the play Finding Freedom: The Journey of Robert Smalls. It’s the first-ever original theatrical production presented by the Gaillard, the city’s premier performance venue that would not have had the courage in the 1960s to tell this story in a segregated Charleston.
The Gaillard said through this production the venue “will once again open its doors to the Charleston community to acknowledge America’s difficult history of race and slavery using the arts to bridge divides and build dialogue in a city that historically saw some of the first enslaved men, women and children enter through its port.”
When I was a C.A. Brown student, our teachers likely didn’t know the Robert Smalls story. “I knew the name of the school, but I didn’t know the history of that name,” 90-year-old George Kenny of Charleston, the school’s former band director, said recently. “Black history was not taught in the schools,” he said. “If I didn’t know that then how much more I didn’t know of the history of Charleston and South Carolina?”
Students in Beaufort County’s black community, however, knew the Robert Smalls story when Ron Daise graduated in the mid-1970s from Beaufort High School. The Penn Center on St. Helena Island, the first school opened to newly freed people, later placed Black history in Beaufort County at center stage. “I am the son of Penn School graduates so we knew our local history,” said Daise, retired vice president for creative education at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet.
A little known story
Smalls’ inspiring story is worthy to be told in as many venues as possible, but he was not the first enslaved man to escape with a vessel under the Confederates command.
About two hours after midnight on April 28, 1862, less than a month before Smalls’ escape, an unexpected sight appeared from the darkness, moving ever closer to the USS Bienville, a Union vessel blockading Charleston’s harbor.
A barge detached to Gen. Roswell S. Ripley, the Confederate Army’s commander in Charleston, was about to become the property of the Union Navy, according to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.
Allen Davis and Gabriel were among the 15 men on the general’s barge as it crossed the harbor and into the open sea toward the Bienville. The vessel was described as a barge, but actually it was a long, shallow-draft rowboat unsafe in rough swells, making the crossing even more dangerous.
The enslaved crew of the rebel boat later described the Confederate defenses in the waterways, they told how blockade runners sneaked through enemy lines and they reported that two wooden gunboats were under construction but no ironclad boats patrolled the harbor.
After Smalls turned the steamer over to the Union, he told a Union admiral a “great fuss” was made when the general’s barge was carried off. But he modestly said the Confederates will make more of a “to do” when they learn the steamer is gone, according to a report in the Civil War Naval Chronology.
The transfer of Ripley’s barge in recent memory has been overshadowed by Smalls’ and his crew’s great feat less than a month later, said Russell Horres, a retired Mount Pleasant independent researcher.
The Confederate harbor patrol should have been on much higher alert following the disappearance of the general’s barge, Horres said.
When Horres was a St. Andrews High School student in Charleston in the 1960s he was taught from the Southern perspective Smalls was a villain. “He was the bad guy until we understood he was seeking his freedom and the whole scheme was dangerous,” he said. “They put their lives at risk.”
I am looking forward to seeing that dramatic moment in the play when Smalls, his crew and their families sailed to freedom. But if you go to the play, remember Smalls’ great achievement came after Allen Davis, Gabriel and their comrades also risked their lives to escape with Ripley’s barge.
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