Hilton Head Island native Emory Campbell, a legend in the state’s Gullah Geechee community, laments the days when politicians couched the bitter politics of race, class and gender in polite terms to hide racist intentions.
“But now it is coming from the top. I have never seen so many official rallies that shout out … racism,” Campbell, former executive director of the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, said in 2018. “And then you get ‘we want to make America great again.’
“That means we want to go back to the good old days … the most terrible days of my life,” he explained, citing the era’s proliferation of segregated public accommodations.
Even more relevant today
Campbell’s observations, which appeared in a 2018 documentary, remain relevant today, as the chant “not going back” has become an anticipated and contagious refrain during Vice President Kamala Harris’s rallies when she throws a verbal jab at her Republican opponent for the presidency.
“Not going back” is a defiant response that reverberates loudly in voter-rich swing states across the country as Harris tries to sell herself as a forward-thinking alternative to Donald Trump. For different reasons, the phrase resonates with people of different genders, ages and races. It may even have more relevance for Charlestonians who know the city’s history as a cradle of slavery and the legacy it has left on the nation.
A slogan is born
During Harris’s Aug. 6 rally in Philadelphia, 17 days after President Joe Biden ended his run for a second term, the Vice President used a slightly longer version of the now familiar catchphrase to introduce her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“Tim and I have a message for (former president Donald) Trump and others who want to turn back the clock on our fundamental freedoms: We’re not going back. We’re not going back,” she told the crowd.
That promise prompted Harris’s partisan supporters to spontaneously chant: “Not going back.”
Dr. Hollis France, chair of the political science department at the College of Charleston, said the slogan means more than a loss of reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade protections. It also means resisting the “idea of White Christian motherhood,” she said.
Rejecting a return to the past counters the notion that “somehow women should not be in the public sphere [because] they have nothing to contribute,” France stressed.
A witness to the past
Walter Brown, 91, a former volunteer poll worker in Mount Pleasant, lived as a boy in an integrated Charleston eastside neighborhood with the children of German and Greek immigrants. It gave him an edge so he was not intimidated by White people, he said.
Brown followed the rules when he took his “sweetheart” to the segregated Gloria movie theater on King Street. They sat in the balcony with other Black patrons. But Brown said he drank from the water fountain in the Condon’s Department Store labeled “Whites only.”
He defied the rules on the city’s Beltline bus and sat behind the driver when Black riders were required to sit at the back of the bus. Brown believes the driver didn’t perceive the young Cub Scout as a threat to the status quo, so he didn’t order him to move.
“I didn’t feel intimidated,” said Brown, a retired Charleston County school teacher who taught at the formerly all-Black Buist Elementary School. “I was just as good as any White person,” he said.
A new generation
“Every generation has a moment when they see something happen to them,” said the 42-year-old John Thomas III, an assistant professor of political science at the College of Charleston.
Thomas said his students remember the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota while in police custody. “In the short time the youth have been around, they can see this is something we don’t need to go back to,” Thomas said.
Thomas said his students, who’ve not yet reached adulthood, “sadly aren’t going to understand what it meant to have affirmative action because it was ripped out when they were in college.
“We have already been pushed back with the undermining of voting rights, a woman’s right to choose [to have an abortion] and the striking down of affirmative action,” he said. “So, when Kamala says we are not going back, for me, she is saying enough is enough.”
Buildings have memory
When Michael Allen’s two sons and daughter were younger, he took them to the old train station in North Charleston to show them the waiting room for “colored” travelers. In that setting, he told them what it was like to live in a segregated society.
“When I hear those words ‘we won’t go back’ it evokes those memories in me,” said Allen, a retired National Park Service community partnership specialist.
The excitement of the Harris-Walz campaign prompted Allen and his wife, Latanya Allen, to stand in a torrential rain Aug. 29 before they and thousands were ushered into Harris’s rally in Savannah.
“For me and my wife, we felt we were in the midst of history,” Allen said. “To hear people collectively say — won’t go back — that was emotional and a tone of confirmation of what Kamala is saying.”
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