Something that Emory Campbell, the sage of Hilton Head Island, said in 2018 has been rumbling around my head as South Carolina marches backward toward more discrimination against Black voters, transgender students and women who want to make decisions about their bodies.
At that time with Donald Trump in the White House whipping up people with “Make America Great Again” sloganeering, many Black South Carolinians saw an attempt to turn back the clock. And many throwback Republicans, from governors to regular guys, weren’t shy about glorifying the past, just as many Southerners hold on to the myth of the Lost Cause of the Civil War.
Campbell was talking about that old Palmetto State bugaboo, race. He sat in a comfortable brown rocking chair on a porch at the Penn Center, the cherished St. Helena Island school turned nonprofit.
“It’s more open, this business of race and differences and class and gender. It’s coming now from the top, openly,” he said. “When i grew up it was coded. Politicians, it seemed like, our elected officials were more polite about how they said it. Now it’s naked, it’s pretty open. I never seen so many official rallies that shout at you — shouts out the flavor of racism.”
He said the Make America Great Again rhetoric was frightening.
“That was meaning that we’re going to go back — we want to go back to the ‘good old days’ which means those are the days that were the most terrible days in my life, where I couldn’t go into a lunch counter and eat as I pleased. I couldn’t go into a movie . Or I couldn’t go to the white school.
“We had two buses. The schools were about a half a mile apart. The white kids waved at me as they went that way and we went that [other] way. That was a great America in terms of what they’re saying now.”
Now Trump, empowered and fueled by angry hordes of right-wing zealots and acolytes, is trying to take back power to create what many fear as an authoritarian state. It didn’t help that earlier this week, during his felony trial in New York, his campaign shared a slick video with Hitlerian-sounding language talking about plans for a “unified Reich.”
What seems to be happening in South Carolina and across the country is there’s a growing institutional disappointment. Progressives and liberals see a compromised U.S. Supreme Court that is handing down decisions taking away rights from women who want abortions and voting power from Blacks in the First Congressional District. They’re unsettled by new institutional discrimination emanating from the Statehouse against transgender students. They worry about attacks on public education by steering public money into ill-considered private vouchers.
On the other side of a very wide aisle are voters who are reacting with anger, not disappointment, in democratic institutions. They’re mad that Congress can’t get its act together on reasonable immigration policy. They want the current president’s son to go to jail just because their favored president, Trump, has been tarred and feathered in the media for his corruption. They’re irritated at anything that smacks of liberalism, reasonable consideration for people who don’t look like them and any possible attempt to control the epidemic of gun violence.
America’s culture wars and polarized electorate have turned into America’s battle for the future.
If we don’t find a way to unify as one nation of America, a new season of secession may be around the corner.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
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