Our View: South Carolina lawmakers owe victims a vote on hate crimes

“You better keep running, boy!”

If that line sounds familiar, it should. You’ve likely heard it a hundred times in a hundred B movies, invariably shouted by the racist White guy who just fired a shot in the general direction of an innocent Black man who’s running for his life in the other direction.

Know who else has heard that line recently? Jarvis McKenzie. Only he didn’t hear it in a movie. Instead, he heard it from one of his White neighbors, Jonathan Felkel, in the Columbia-area gated community of Spring Valley last July.

Right after Felkel fired a shot in the air in his direction.

Why did Felkel do it? Because as he later told investigators, McKenzie was a Black man — and as such, no doubt associated with “dangerous criminals.” The kind of people who should “not be around this area.”

You better keep running, boy!

Last month, Felkel pleaded guilty to a hate crime in a Richland County federal courtroom, where he’s now facing up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Which, well, good. Imagine being terrorized by some rifle-toting rube who decided you didn’t belong in your own neighborhood because of your skin color. Mr. McKenzie deserved justice — and thanks to federal prosecutors, he got it.

The problem? His case should never have seen the inside of a federal courtroom. And the only reason it did is because South Carolina is one of just two states where lawmakers refuse to pass a state-level hate crimes law — forcing federal prosecutors to do our job for us.
What’s worse, S.C.’s hate crime bill — titled the Clementa Pinckney Act in honor of the former state senator and pastor who was murdered in the 2015 Mother Emanuel massacre — has long had majority support in both legislative chambers.

In fact, it passed the S.C. House overwhelmingly in 2021 and 2023, only to be killed by parliamentary maneuvers that kept it from coming up for a vote in the S.C. Senate, where opponents say its harsher penalties for crimes motivated by hate are unfair.

“I think we ought to treat everybody the same,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, told reporters last year. “If somebody assaults you, it ought to be the same as a penalty for assaulting me.”

Fair enough. And to Massey’s credit, he’s voted against other “enhanced sentencing” bills on the same grounds. But note that the operative word in that sentence isn’t “against” — it’s “vote.”
Which is precisely what hasn’t happened with the hate crimes bill.

In a City Paper story this week, Charleston Rep. Wendell Gilliard says he’s “optimistic” about passing the crime bill in the House again this year, noting that he met for 40 minutes last week with Republican Speaker Murrell Smith on the issue.

That’s right. We could be heading for another Senate showdown on hate crimes between now and the close of the 2026 session on May 14.

At which point, we’d ask only this of every senator: Listen to your constituents. Listen to the arguments. Listen to Jarvis McKenzie.

And then finally, at long last, take a vote.