USCTIMES
APRIL 2015 / VOL. 26, NO.3
BRICK & MORTAR War & Press
Great Wall of Carolina
Eye on the South
Historian Don Doyle follows America’s Civil War overseas , page 2
USC’s historic campus wall gets a makeover, one brick at a time, page 7
Faculty and alumni reflect on the Civil Rights era in politics and protest, page 10
USC TIMES / STAFF
FROM THE EDITOR USC Times is published 10 times a year for the faculty and staff of the University of South Carolina by the Office of Communications & Marketing. Managing editor Craig Brandhorst Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Chris Horn Page Ivey Liz McCarthy Steven Powell Glenn Hare Photographers Kim Truett Chrissy Harper Ambyr Goff Printer USC Printing Services Campus correspondents Patti McGrath, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College Submissions Did you know you can submit ideas for future issues of USC Times? Share your story by emailing or calling Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-3681.
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
WHAT BINDS US TOGETHER One hundred eighty years ago South Carolina College constructed a brick-and-mortar wall seven feet high and 18 inches thick around the entire campus perimeter. Originally intended to prevent rowdy students from running wild in the city, it has since borne witness to nearly two centuries of campus history: the good, the bad and sometimes, yes, the downright ugly. It has been altered, damaged, patched and altered again, its flaws a reflection of our own, its strength a reminder in kind. Think about it. Built by slave labor in 1835, the wall withstood the Civil War and the burning of Columbia, a period in our history when we were divided more than anytime before or since by race. A century later, the same wall originally designed to keep an all-white student population on campus provided the backdrop to the university’s desegregation, when we finally opened our gates to everyone, regardless of race, for the first time since Reconstruction. This spring the university commences a comprehensive two-phase restoration of the entire wall, and we’ve got the inside scoop, starting on page 7. But that’s the literal story. Contemplating the wall and its construction also has us thinking metaphorically this month — about our present and our past, about division and unity, about the qualities that bind us as humans. If that sounds heavy, it should. We’re talking bricks and mortar now, not paper and ink. Don’t believe us? Check out our heady Q&A with history professor Don Doyle, whose new book “The Cause of All Nations” examines the American Civil War as a war of public opinion, one that divided our nation over slavery and states’ rights but brought together the larger international community in a battle for liberty, democracy, equality and freedom worldwide (“War and Press,” page 2). Or jump forward a hundred or so years and check out our collection of eyewitness accounts from the Civil Rights era, as-told-to USC Times by two distinguished faculty members and two equally distinguished alumni (“Eye on the South,” page 10). But this issue’s not exclusively about history. It’s also about heritage and community, people and place. Witness “Exploring ‘The Gullah’ (page 4), our overview of USC faculty research on African-American sea island culture — how it has affected and been affected by the larger American culture. Witness, too, “Mouth of Cards” (page 6), our lighthearted look at the evolution of Southern accents, featuring the words, wisdom and East Tennessee brogue of linguistics doctoral candidate Paul Reed, who knows more about how we speak around here than just about anybody we’ve met. Where we come from, how we talk, what we’ve fought for, right and wrong — we’re not calling this the Southern issue, but we very well could. Now go check out our wall. It’s bound to make you think. Until next time,
CRAIG BRANDHORST MANAGING EDITOR
VOL. 26, NO.3 1
TIMES FIVE
“rite Smart talk of Peace” Tens of thousands of Civil War-era letters written by enlisted soldiers have been transcribed and will be made available online this month as part of Common Tongues, a research project conducted by USC linguistics professor emeritus Michael Montgomery and other scholars from around the country. The letters capture in print the speech patterns of ordinary soldiers and show the distinctions in pronunciations as they varied from place to place. According to Montgomery, the letters of enlisted men were chosen because the authors were less likely to be educated and more likely to write phonetically. Witness the 1862 letter of Confederate Pvt. A.H. Lister of Greenville to his sister Mary: “ther is rite Smart talk of Peace hear now,” Lister writes. “But I had rather se it than to hear it.” Read more at www.ehistory.org.
ACCESS THIS BOOK
WE’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER ORCHESTRA Donald Portnoy, USC’s director of orchestral studies, will conduct a performance of Hector Berlioz’s “Requiem” at the Koger Center for the Arts April 21 at 7 p.m. The performance will feature nearly 400 performers, including many students from Carolina’s orchestral, band and choral programs, as well the Coker College Singers and Broadway performer Christian Sebek (“Phantom of the Opera”). Portnoy, the Ira McKissick Koger Endowed Chair for the Fine Arts, is also a 2015 Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts recipient. Tickets are $25 for faculty and staff; $8 for students.
B
One of the largest financial burdens for university students is the high cost of textbooks, which can easily exceed $1,000 a year. The Open Textbook Initiative encourages faculty to use high-quality teaching and learning materials that are freely available online. Interested faculty are asked to sign up for a workshop, write a review of an open access textbook and decide whether to use the book in class. The first faculty members to sign up will be eligible for the SCoer! Faculty Award and $200. Student Government representatives and members of the University Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Committee will select award recipients. Application forms can be found at http://library.sc.edu/p/research/SCoerform. Deadline is May 7; winners announced May 22.
It Pays to Discover Discovery Day is April 24 at the Russell House. The annual daylong event showcases undergraduate scholarly pursuit in and out of the classroom. Students from all academic years, all disciplines and all campuses will present their experiences or findings from research projects, study abroad and national student exchange programs, internships and co-ops, service-learning and community service, and national fellowship competitions.
DENIM FOR A DAY, AWARENESS YEAR-ROUND April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. To raise awareness about sexual assault and violence, USC’s Office of Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention & Prevention will host several events. The programs will emphasize the importance of consent and bystander accountability. People across the USC campus will also be observing National Denim Day April 22. The annual event has been observed internationally since the late 1990s, when the Italian Supreme Court overturned a rape conviction because the judges believed the victim’s jeans were too tight. Wearing jeans on Denim Day has become a symbol of protest against destructive attitudes about sexual assault.
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Don Doyle
WAR&PRESS HOW THE UNION AND CONFEDERACY ENGAGED OVERSEAS
Don Doyle’s “The Cause of All Nations” examines the American Civil War as waged through public diplomacy by journalists and diplomatic agents overseas. Rich in intrigue and memorable real-life characters from both the Union and the Confederacy, it is a must read for anyone interested in the root causes of the conflict and how each side appealed to public opinion abroad in support of its cause. USC Times sat down with the McCausland Professor of History to learn more about how America’s war played out on the international stage. There are plenty of battles in your book but they’re fought in the
permit them to secede? If the North did not respect the South, and
drawing rooms of Europe and in the pages of newspapers and
they did not approve of slavery, why fight to keep the South within the
magazines. It’s a history of public diplomacy, not warfare. What
nation?” So I began to think about our Civil War through a foreign lens.
attracted you to this approach?
But the story of foreign diplomacy has been told and told again, and told very well. I thought there was a story that had not been told about
When I was a Fulbright professor in Italy, the question my students
public diplomacy and something we now call soft power. Soft power
had was not “Why did the South secede?” but “Why did the North not
means that you align your aspirations with those of a foreign country.
VOL. 26, NO.3 3
Slavery, of course, is central to the debate. The vice president of
the Confederacy Alexander Stephens gave a speech early on calling
had been emerging for a decade between the free and slave states,
slavery “the cornerstone” of the new Confederate government then
and that the Republican Party was the antislavery party. What they
denied having said that. But the Union was also reluctant to say the
couldn’t understand was why they didn’t abolish slavery once they
war was about slavery, at least at first.
had power. This is where the American system of federalism and
But I think everyone overseas had understood that a conflict
states’ rights was hard to understand for Europeans, particularly in The Cornerstone Speech, I write, was a gaffe. Using the pundit
France, which had a more autocratic government.
Michael Kinsley’s definition, a gaffe is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. They tried to hush him, he tried to deny it or say he was misquoted, but he said the same thing earlier. It was what he
How much of the opinion abroad resulted from public
meant. The Confederacy was aware even early on that making the
diplomacy, and how much was lingering sentiment from
pro-slavery appeal might sell well at home, but overseas it was going
the failed European revolutions of 1848? How much did
to be in bad odor, particularly among the British public.
either side really move the needle? There was a widespread idea in Europe that popular government just
And yet, to this day, some still contend that secession was about
didn’t work, that it always ended in anarchy or despotism. Europe-
states’ rights, not slavery.
ans were cynical about the republican experiment. France had gone through this series of failed revolutions and they always wound up
Anytime you hear those arguments today, those are echoes of the ini-
with some despot — Napoleon, then Napoleon III in the Second
tial argument. Lincoln’s original position was that this was a rebellion
Empire. And Britain thought that with a constitutional monarchy
without cause, a domestic insurrection not justified in the way that
and a strong parliament they had found a moderate path forward.
the Declaration of Independence justified rebellion in an appeal to
But even free trade liberals thought pure democracy was a threat
the right of self-government against tyranny. He also said, in effect,
to liberty. The Confederacy politicized this, saying, “We’re rebelling
“Your states’ rights are not jeopardized by my administration.” He
against extreme democracy. We want to restore something like you
affirmed that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where
have in Britain.”
it existed but he intended to stop it from expanding. That was a gift to Confederate diplomats because they could say fairly and accurately, “We’re not rebelling because of slavery. Slavery is guaranteed
What kind of response has your book had so far?
already by the president.” Then the tariff issue came into play. The main tariff the South
People seem to be responding very evenly, which I’m happy about.
objected to was passed in March 1861, when the South withdrew from
I’m not trying to demonize the South or edify the North. I’m saying
Congress and the Republican Congress passed a bill to raise revenue.
that when it came to public diplomacy, the Union was successful
It was a blunder, and it gave the Confederacy another gift. They could
because it aligned itself with a more liberal, pro-democracy move-
make an argument for self-government and free trade, which was
ment. The South looked really smart at the beginning, aligning itself
very popular with British liberals and with liberals on the continent.
with anti-democratic forces, but that failed in the end.
All along, the South realized that they couldn’t outlast the North
in war, so they had to try to get recognition. And recognition was How hard would it have been in the 19th century to push one
not just a courtesy. It meant that they would become a legal entity
argument here — say, in the American South — and a different
protected by international law, that they had rights of other sover-
one overseas?
eign nations, that they could make treaties. And if the South had gotten that — and they came very close — they might have come out
Well, that’s the problem with print. It can be reprinted, which became
with independence and the world would look very different. As it
part of the job of the agents I write about. And, of course, the Corner-
happened, the Union victory led to a chain reaction of emancipation,
stone Speech became the classic example. It was widely disseminated
revolution and the retreat of empire in the American hemisphere.
by pro-Union advocates overseas. It was said that the cornerstone
The map of the world changed quite dramatically.
became the millstone around the neck of the American South.
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Exploring “the Gullah” BY PAGE IVEY
S
everal University of South Carolina professors are currently participating in a yearlong project called “Out of the Rice Fields: Vestiges of Gullah Culture in Modern Society.” Spearheaded by Dwight McInvaill, director of the Georgetown Public Library, the project has explored the language, music, history and culture of the sea island descendants of freed slaves who lived in isolated communities for generations before war and migration disrupted their lives. For South Carolina, the Gullah-Geechee are an important and rich part of the state’s heritage, says Val Littlefield, chair of the African-American Studies program at USC and coordinator of USC’s research participants. “I think it is extremely important that USC be a part of documenting, researching and telling this story,” Littlefield says. “We are the flagship university, after all, and this particular group is very much a part of South Carolina’s history, of South Carolina’s historical financial wealth.” The project includes lecturers, the creation of an oral-history video documentary on local Gullah-Geechee cultural leaders and physical and virtual exhibits. For her part, Littlefield is conducting interviews for a documentary to be featured this September at the “Rice Forum 2015” in Georgetown County, where the rice culture flourished before the Civil War. “The most fascinating thing that I have learned about Gullah is the richness of the history,” she says. “Every time you think you have a handle on it, something else comes up and you don’t have a handle on it, you need to learn more.”
Isolation and Influence The Gullah-Geechee communities were their most robust during the years after the Civil War, when the isolation of the sea islands allowed them to solidify an identity not quite African and not quite American. But the intrusion of the outside world following World War I and the Great Migration of black Southerners to the north and west in search of work, education and freedom from the oppression of the Jim Crow South disrupted that life. “The Great Migration is much more important that I ever imagined in the history I am reporting,” says Melissa Cooper, an assistant professor in USC’s Institute for Southern Studies. Cooper is working on a book about the emergence of the Gullah in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s, ’30s and beyond. Using Sapelo Island, Ga., as a case study, she wants to know why the Gullah-Geechee captured the attention of writers, artists and others during that time. “My research into the Gullah began many years ago, part genealogy, part just the curiosity of a historian,” Cooper says. “The Institute for Southern Studies presented a nice opportunity for me to engage with a community of scholars who were really interested in asking new questions about the South, and certainly there was great motivation to be here to be closer to wmy research subjects.”
VOL. 26, NO.3 5
African-Americans use mortar and pestles to pound rice; Prevost-Kaminski collection, courtesy of the Georgetown Public Library
Language and Lexicon
Song of Africa
“Gullah is a systematic, rule-governed language variety that serves as a marker of culture, history and identity in the communities where it is spoken,” says Tracey Weldon, a sociolinguist, specializing in the study of African-American language varieties. “It has contributed significantly to the linguistic fabric of the South and more broadly to the American dialectal landscape.” Words such as “tote,” meaning “to carry,” and “nana,” meaning “elderly woman” or “grandmother,” represent Africanisms that have been retained in Gullah, Weldon explains, but they have also made their way into the broader American English lexicon. “In fact, many of the distinctive pronunciation and grammatical features that we associate with Southern American English today, particularly those spoken in and around Charleston, were significantly influenced by Gullah and, by extension, the West African languages that contributed to Gullah’s development.” The stigma associated with the language has led many to worry that it may die out, but Weldon sees hope for preservation and new life. “I am interested in exploring modern-day uses and perceptions of Gullah, particularly among younger speakers who seem to have developed a renewed appreciation for the historical and cultural significance of Gullah, many of them embracing what they call a “Geechee” identity,” Weldon says. “I would like to explore the role that language plays in the construction of this identity and the ways in which it is similar to, and different from, the Gullah of earlier generations.”
For her part of the “Out of the Rice Fields” project ethnomusicologist Birgitta Johnson discussed the music tradition of the Gullah-Geechee communities and how because of their isolation they were able to preserve many African traditions. “For me, it was more of connecting this broader history: Who are the Gullah people? What is their music like? What music did they retain and preserve that is distinctive, particularly from other African-American music?” Johnson says. “Many times people don’t realize the Gullah music story is part of a larger story about musical retentions, and African retentions, in America. The Gullah represent this extreme case of things being preserved because of the location and the isolation of their communities.” Johnson calls one particular Gullah song the “biggest surviving African song in the United States’ experience.” That song, a sort of ceremonial funeral dirge, was sung by Georgia sea islander Amelia Dawley, a descendant of slaves, and recorded in the 1930s by linguist Lorenzo Turner. One of Turner’s students in Chicago recognized some of the words in the song as Mende, a language of Sierra Leone. A documentary called “The Language You Cry In” traced the song’s roots to a small community in Sierra Leone that had preserved a traditional burial ceremony that included singing the song and sharing a last meal at the grave of the recently departed. “With the Gullah culture, because they had been brought in as specialists in the rice harvest, their ethnic groups for the most part stayed together and they were able to maintain a lot more of their traditions, including the singing,” Johnson says.
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RESEARCHER TRACKS CHANGING ‘SOUTHERN ACCENT’
MOUTH OF CARDS BY PAGE IVEY
Anyone who has watched the Netflix series “House of Cards” knows that Kevin Spacey is supposed to be from the South Carolina Upstate, but what many people outside the state and outside linguistics circles don’t realize is that his accent is all wrong. Spacey affects an accent more like that of Fritz Hollings, former U.S. senator and South Carolina governor from Charleston. The accent he should be going for is more akin to that of current U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who grew up in Edgefield, S.C., not far geographically and linguistically from Gaffney, S.C., Spacey’s character’s hometown. “Spacey’s accent is not Gaffney. Gaffney would not sound like that ever at all,” says University of South Carolina linguistics doctoral candidate Paul Reed. In fact, the accent is so far off to Reed’s ear, it nearly kept him from watching the show, which drips with Southernese. “They’re probably just trying to get him to sound Southern in some way, because his accent is not even really completely Charleston. It’s akin to Charleston, but it’s the generation ahead of him. It’s certainly not Gaffney now, certainly not Columbia now and not even Charleston now.” Spacey’s vocal miscue may be the result of what Reed calls a misrepresentation of a one-size-fits-all Southern accent. “There is this misconception outside of the South that every Southerner sounds the same, which is a kind of humorous and slightly ridiculous assumption because we’re talking about 115 million people. There is no way that all of them are going to sound the same,” Reed says. “It’s the same way we have this misconception of everyone in New York sounding the same or everyone in Chicago sounding the same. “As Southerners, we know that an Alabaman, a Tennessean, a South Carolinian all sound different, and even within a state we can detect differences.” Those distinctions and differences, however, are shifting, and in some cases, disappearing, which is the subject of Reed’s doctoral
dissertation. As part of his research he records his subjects as they are simply talking to him. He then asks them to read something, followed by an exercise in which they say words that seem to reveal or be most associated with Southern accents. The stereotypical Southern long-i sound, known as monophthongization, is most pronounced in words like white and rice. Another, more subtle clue that you are talking with a Southerner is when certain words start to sound the same, like “pen” and “pin” or “heel” and “hill.” He also notes the ways folks with fairly pronounced conversational accents work to cover them up as the tests become more blatant in their attempts to reveal them. “I look at how people are connected to a particular place. I have some questions about how they feel about where they grew up, how they feel about where they live now,” Reed says. “Over the course of the interview, we draw their attention to speech to see what things they change. The South has one of the most distinctive and salient accents. Studies show that people view Southerners as sounding friendly, polite and likeable, but also sounding dumb.” That can lead some Southerners to mask or cover up the more obvious parts of their accents, especially when dealing with “outsiders.” A Tennessee native, Reed himself seems to have tucked his own Cumberland Gap brogue into a box that he only brings out to make a point. “I know the stigma about it. Where I grew up particularly is very poor, very rural and — even within East Tennessee — it’s kind of looked down upon,” he says. “I want to sound like I’m from there because I’m proud of it, but at the same time, people want to deduct a hundred IQ points when they hear me. That’s the internal struggle that I deal with and I think a lot of people have a very similar thing.”
VOL. 26, NO.3 7
THE GREAT WALL OF CAROLINA BY CHRIS HORN
I
n 1902, not long after USC fielded its first football team, the Gamecocks pulled off a 12-6 win over Clemson, and (some things never change) tempers flared. Clemson students — cadets with bayonets and swords, actually, because it was a military school back then — marched down Sumter Street toward the Horseshoe. USC students dug in and readied for a violent scrum. Cooler heads prevailed, thankfully, but for a tense 60 minutes, the only thing separating the rival students was the Horseshoe wall.
Th at wall, now 180 years old, is the object of much attention these days as a $1 million restoration project gets underway to replace its crumbling cap and remove thousands of damaged brick and mortar joints. “The wall is the largest historic structure on campus but also one of the most invisible. People pay attention to the campus’ antebellum buildings but overlook the wall that surrounds them,” says Bob Weyeneth, a history professor who in 2010-11 led undergraduate
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and graduate seminars that studied the wall’s origins and conducted a first-ever survey of the wall’s condition. Weyeneth’s students, with assistance from university archivist Elizabeth West, documented that the 7-foot-high wall was built in 1835–36 at the request of university trustees. African-American slaves made many, perhaps all, of the brick, which came from the east bank of the Congaree River and from Charleston. Slave laborers built the wall itself under the supervision of two contractors. The student-led survey of the wall detailed numerous examples of spalling — places where under-fired brick had weathered away. Those spalled brick will be chiseled out and replaced with hand-made bricks manufactured by a N.C. company that specializes in historic restoration. New brick will also be used to replace the wall’s cap. “The new brick won’t be easy to spot because they’ll have the same soft outlines and texture as the original hand-made brick,” says West, who calls the wall one of her favorite aspects of USC’s historic campus. When it was first built, the wall surrounded the Horseshoe on every side, with only one opening on Sumter Street. It was built, after all, as a means of keeping rowdy Carolina students confined to campus. “The wall failed miserably at its original purpose — keeping students on campus and out of taverns,” West says, “but Emma LeConte [a daughter of a Civil War-era professor of South Carolina College] wrote in her diary that when Columbia was burned in February 1865, the flames swept up to the campus walls. The wall helped keep the ground fire off of campus.”
Later, the same wall built to keep students in was altered to open campus back up. In 1883, the Sumter Street portion between Lieber College and South Caroliniana Library was lowered to make the campus more visible from the street, and by 1899 there were two entrances connecting to the now-familiar horseshoe-shaped driveway. The easternmost-portion of the wall was removed when McKissick was built in 1940. Of course, Mother Nature has also taken her toll. Over time, moss, lichens and ferns have found footholds in the cap of the wall, which has degraded in several spots along the wall’s 3,000-foot traverse. “That’s where I’m torn as a landscape architect because those moss and lichens add character, but they’re not good for the architectural integrity of the wall,” says Emily Jones, USC’s landscape architect and project manager for the wall’s restoration. And invading plants haven’t been the only culprits, Jones says. Repairs using modern mortar have wreaked their own havoc while generations of students have likewise contributed to wear and tear, even using a portion of the brick edifice facing the Russell House as a billboard space for campaign and event banners. Yet for all the damage, the wall is important to the ambience of the campus, says West. It’s also been the backdrop to two centuries of campus history. “The wall predates half of the buildings on the Horseshoe,” West says, “so its place in campus history is pretty solid.”
Restoration of the wall will take place in two phases and will require partial sidewalk closures. The first phase will focus on the wall from Pendleton Street to the first driveway opening on Greene Street and is scheduled for completion by July, 2015.
18 inches
12,000 square feet
160,000 bricks
approximate thickness of the wall
wall area in first phase of the restoration project
total number of bricks in the wall
VOL. 26, NO.3 9
WHAT’S OLD IS NEW BY STEVEN POWELL
The mortar that binds Carolina’s historic wall harks back to antiquity. According to a scientific analysis by consulting engineer Denis Brosnan, the wall’s 19th century builders added clay to the mixture of lime and sand that would typically have been used at that time to form a pozzolanic hydraulic lime mortar, similar to what the Romans used millennia ago. That kind of binder is more corrosion resistant than the standard hydraulic lime binder. The original masons, aware of the durability of “Roman cement,” meant to build a lasting edifice. Modern Portland cement, the use of which spread world wide in the early 20th century, is now the most prevalent binder used in mortar. Much stiffer than its predecessors, it is incompatible with soft historic bricks fired before the 20th century because it can cause flaking of the brick face, or “spalling,” due to a mismatch of elasticity. For the latest repairs, masons will once again use a pozzolanic hydraulic lime mortar, mirroring the choice of the original builders nearly two centuries ago.
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EYE ON THE SOUTH CIVIL RIGHTS BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
Segregation may be 50 years in the rearview mirror, but its legacy is still with us — in story, in memory, in reflection — as we’re reminded by two alumni and two longtime faculty members who witnessed one of the more tumultuous eras in modern Southern history firsthand. These are their memories of that transformative period in Southern history as told to USC Times and Carolinian magazine.
SEMINARY TO SELMA Carl Evans, professor emeritus, religious studies; activist
In March of 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. led the voter rights march in Selma, Ala., that became known as Bloody Sunday, professor emeritus of religious studies Carl Evans was still a seminary student in Dallas, Texas. But following the violence of that day, when King announced plans for a second march a few days later, Evans saw it as a call to action. “There wasn’t anything I could do but go,” he says now. At that time, the country was really nervous about what was happening in the Civil Rights movement. When we arrived in Selma there were local marchers as well
as folks from all over the country. Some of the locals had been in the march on Sunday and you could see their wounds. An 11- or 12-year-old girl, I remember, had her ear bandaged because a bullwhip had clipped it. There were people with broken arms, cuts on foreheads. People lined both sides of the street, but what made me especially nervous were the men on top of buildings. The thought went through my mind that King was an easy target. I was probably two-thirds of the way back. The bridge itself arches up over the Alabama River, so King was out of sight until we got up to the crest of the bridge. From my vantage point, I saw two rows of state troopers wearing blue helmets, arms
crossed, shoulder-to-shoulder, two-deep, across the highway ahead and on both sides so they formed kind of a cul-de-sac. The front rows of the march went as far as the point where the bloodshed had taken place on Sunday. We knelt on the road and prayed, then King turned around and led the marchers back across the bridge. One of the ironies was that we were singing the civil rights song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” — as we were turning around! As far as we knew the march was going to continue on toward Montgomery that day. But King always wanted to avoid violence, and I think the turnaround was, in part, due to his determination to avoid any more bloodshed.
VOL. 26, NO.3 11
After the Ministers March we drove back to Dallas, but we knew there would be another march so I made arrangements to be absent again. Five of us went back to Alabama and were directed to the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was the local arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s organization. They had us go door-to-door encouraging people from the African-American community to join a huge rally to take place outside the capital in Montgomery. There was a sense of triumph, I think, after everything that happened, and frankly, what was happening in Alabama and other Southern states in the mid 1960s was a test of the democratic system. Had we not succeeded in getting passage of the Civil Rights Act in ’64 and the Voting Rights Act in ’65, we would be living in a society that’s very different from the one we’re living in now. As King said so many times, justice denied to one is justice denied to all — especially when it comes to something as basic as voting rights or civil rights. Any injustice anywhere must be confronted and overcome if we are to preserve a democratic system.
ORANGEBURG AND AFTER, 1968 Jack Bass, ’56, ’77 masters, journalism; journalist and historian
On February 8, 1968, reporter and alumnus Jack Bass covered the student protest and police shootings at South Carolina State University that came to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre. That day, three African American students were killed and 28 others were injured. What began as an attempt to desegregate an all-white bowling alley would go down as one of the darkest chapters in modern SC history and inspired the 1970 book “The Orangeburg Massacre,” which Bass co-authored with journalist Jack Nelson.
National Guard troops at a roadblock in Orangeburg, South Carolina the night after the “Orangeburg Massacre,” 1968; photo by Bill Barley, http://billbarley.com
“I was never interested in writing a book before Orangeburg, but it was the first time I had a story that was too big to tell in the newspaper format,” Bass says now. Considering the ripple effect Orangeburg had on American politics and history, it may have been bigger still. In 1967, the year before Orangeburg, there were a lot of urban riots in places like Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles. Bob McNair was governor of SC at that time — and he’d been a very progressive governor — but he had a soft spot for law enforcement. His father was a deputy sheriff in Berkley County, and he got it in his head that if anything like that ever happened in S.C., he was going to show everybody how to deal with it. So he had some highway patrolmen get rudimentary training in crowd control from an FBI agent. All the crowd control manuals at the time said that nobody should fire a weapon without the
order of a senior officer, but at Orangeburg if an officer felt that a fellow officer was in danger he was authorized to shoot, which is what happened. In the FBI interviews nine officers said they fired at the crowd. Five more said they fired in the air. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. In eight seconds at least eight people fired shotguns. One fired his service revolver six times. Anyway, all that was in February. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and Robert Kennedy in June. Then comes the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, with all the protests about Vietnam and what amounted to a police riot. I was at the convention as a stringer for CBS and the New York Times. McNair was there, too, as part of the South Carolina delegation — and McNair was politically ambitious. He wanted to
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be Hubert Humphrey’s running mate. He’s chairman of the Southern Governors Association and president of the National Democratic Governors Association, and in those days governors were a big deal in presidential elections. He’s also got six black half-delegates and six black alternates with him, and they’re the absolute cream. You’ve got Matthew Perry, before he was a judge, and you’ve got the president of the NAACP, and then you’ve got I. DeQuincey Newman, who was field director of the NAACP and really ran things in SC. But Orangeburg is sitting in the background. So when Humphrey’s people come around vetting potential vice presidential candidates, one of them goes up to the state president of the NAACP and asks about McNair, and the president says, “If it weren’t for what happened in Orangeburg, I would support him with great enthusiasm, but because of that I would not.” That’s when Edmund Muskie gets picked instead. At the time, though, there was a lot of turmoil and nobody on Humphries’ staff even let McNair know. McNair didn’t know Humphries picked Muskie until he heard it on the television in his hotel room. I also covered the Republican Convention in Miami that August, when Strom Thurmond helped Richard Nixon get the nomination. Nixon had met with Strom in May or June in Atlanta and told him he agreed with integration, but if he was elected he would appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, and that’s really all Strom wanted to hear. Strom was everywhere at that convention. He understood that if Nixon didn’t get the nomination on the first ballot, a lot of northern support would go to Nelson Rockefeller. Then once Ronald Reagan got in the race, a lot of the Southerners’ hearts went for Reagan. But Strom had a great capacity for getting a complex political situation into a sound bite, so he went around telling the Southern
delegates, “a vote for Reagan is a vote for Rockefeller,” and he would explain why. At some point I was in the lobby of Nixon’s hotel and saw his advisor Harry Dent. I had a good relationship with Harry, so he comes over and says, “Strom’s upstairs in his room with Reagan and he wouldn’t let me stay” — meaning Reagan wouldn’t let him stay. So I did what any self-respecting reporter would do: I went over and stood by the elevator. About 20 minutes later Strom comes down and I say, “Senator, I understand you were upstairs with Governor Reagan.” He says, “That’s right.” So I ask him what he told him. He says, “I told him I’d be for him next time.” Turns out, next time was in Kansas City four years later. Gerald Ford was president and by then Dent was working for Ford. Strom, who had been everywhere in 1968, this time stood in the shadows. But when the SC delegation voted he put his hand up for Reagan. He said he’d be for him next time, and by God he was. But what Strom did in 1968 changed the direction of American history. He got Nixon elected and Nixon ended up putting four justices on the Supreme Court. If it hadn’t been for Orangeburg, I think Humphrey would have picked McNair and Humphries would have won. SC was at the center of all that, but nobody really knows it.
“LET’S GET THINGS TOGETHER” Luther Batiste, ’71, international studies; attorney
Luther Battiste came to USC as a freshman in 1968, the same year as the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Three years later he orchestrated the election of the first African-American student body president in USC’s history, Harry Walker. “It was a really big deal at the time,” he told Carolinian magazine in 2013. “It still is.”
I don’t know what my expectations were when I came to Carolina, to be honest. There was a lot of racial tension and tension between students from the North and from the South. Then my freshman year you had Martin Luther King being killed and the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State. It was really a difficult time, a challenging time. I had already participated in the civil rights movement growing up in Orangeburg, and I brought that mentality, but I also came from a situation that was very nurturing. Going from that to a large university that made few plans for African-American students was a culture shock. As Modjeska Simkins said, we had to make our own way out of no way. But I was always interested in politics, and I always knew that you had to organize — that you had to get people to work together — to producechange. And then at Carolina, majoring in international studies, I studied how politics works and how it can make a difference. I got the idea that Harry Walker should run for student body president after an African-American woman named Dorothy Manigault was almost elected homecoming queen. That happened in part because the African-American students voted as a bloc. Then I saw that there was also some anti-mainstream sentiment on campus, because of the times. There was an opportunity to present an attractive candidate who just happened to be African-American. Harry Walker was well known on campus, a combination good student and good person. He was very intelligent, very articulate — yet he didn’t represent the typical person who got elected. He was the perfect antiestablishment candidate while also very normal and appealing. I went to him and said, ‘I think you can win this race.’ We had a cross-section of appeal Harry was president of the Association of Afro-American Students, but the issues were not based on race. The issues were based on
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Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, lead the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.
what students were concerned about. Our slogan was ‘Let’s get things together.’
SOCIAL MORALITY IN POLITICS Don Fowler, adjunct instructor, political science; political strategist
Don Fowler has enjoyed a 50-year career as a professor of political science at USC, a public relations consultant and a political strategist for the Democratic Party. He also served 30 years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves. He has played a role in some of the defining moments of modern political history, including the 1996 presidential election, when he was National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He knows Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and a host of other prominent Democratic and Republican leaders. He’s had a front row seat for some of the defining moments of modern political history, but asked what
one moment stands out in his mind, he doesn’t hesitate. “That’s easy,” he says. “And it predates just about everything else…” I came to teach at USC in 1964 when the civil rights question was most intense. I was also president of the SC Young Democrats in the 1960s and then executive director of the state Democratic Party. At that time, white candidates would not go to speak to black people because anybody who did would just be raked over the coals in the media. So in ’66 and ’68 and ’70, I was the white boy who worked with the black voters. I went to hundreds of black bars, restaurants, nightclubs, NAACP meetings, churches and community action committees for several years, and I knew almost every black leader in SC. Then we got to the gubernatorial race in 1970, when Lt. Governor John West was running against Congressman Albert Watson. Watson was a pure racist, he really was, and John West wasn’t. He’s my favorite
all-time politician, but as a candidate he was more like a college professor or your old Uncle Henry. Another factor that weighed heavily on our planning was that for the first time the United Citizens Party had a candidate for governor — an African American attorney named Tom Broadwater, who we feared would attract many of the black voters. What we did then, if we did now, we’d be sent to jail. But campaign finance laws were quite different then. We gave money — cash money — to various black leaders to go out and register voters. In every town and every county where there was a large number of black voters, we had voter registration rolls, we had runners that would pick people up to go vote, we had taxi cabs right there waiting to take them, we had telephone callers. I was constantly working on this all over the state, and then right before the election I came back to Columbia and got $65,000 cash in a Stetson hatbox. I’d never seen that kind of money in my life, but I went all around the state between Thursday and Monday night and distributed it. See, we had to have a budget for all of these great local workers, because they had regular jobs, they were workers, and they couldn’t afford to miss work. So we paid them. That was legal then (now everything must be reported and cash is not permitted, which was not the case at that time.) In 1970 if anybody had known about it, and could have proved it, it would have been political suicide. This was all clandestine stuff at that time. But I ascribe social morality to what we did. It was immoral to deny black people the right to vote and to be full participants in the political system, and I helped erase that. I also met some of the finest, most wonderful people in the world during that time, and John West won by twenty or twenty-five thousand votes and got 92 percent of the African American vote. That is the most worthwhile thing I have ever been a part of in politics. No question.
14 USCTIMES / APRIL 2015
BREAKTHROUGH BREAKOUT
BY STEVEN POWELL
Where no one has gone before SEARCHING FOR OFF-AXIS VOLCANISM
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hese days, a few mouse-clicks can open a virtual window onto any location worldwide, thanks to centuries of work by cartographers and all of the software tools now harnessing it. But on just about any given map, online or otherwise, continents are typically surrounded by a uniformly blue ocean. That undoubtedly contributes to a lack of awareness that associate professor of marine biology Scott White knows is all too common. “Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is underwater, and most people still think it’s all a flat plain covered with sand,” White says. “That’s always astounded me.” Discovery is never far from White’s mind, and underwater volcanism was his quarry last fall. He and undergraduate Avery Lee sailed on the RV Atlantis to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean 500 miles from the Central American coast. The ship arrived at the intended longitude and latitude, but it took the Alvin deep-sea submersible to get to the true destination: more than a mile below sea level near the ridge of the East Pacific Rise. A mountain range that runs longer than any of the continental ranges, the East Pacific Rise is not nearly as well known as, say, the Rockies or Andes because the entire thing is obscured by the ocean. The underwater range is the result of the slow westward movement of the Pacific tectonic plate. As the Pacific plate moves west at an average rate of a few inches per year, adjacent plates to the east move east. Fissures periodically open, releasing lava. Each lava flow adds a bit to the ridge’s peak and creates a new surface rich in volcanic features. Those features include a variety of forms of hydrothermal venting, including the hydrothermal chimneys that caught Lee’s imagination as a student (see sidebar). The East Pacific Rise is a hotbed for superheated upwellings, which can emerge from the seafloor at temperatures of 400 degrees Centigrade, meeting bottom waters that average just a couple of degrees above zero.
The three-man crew of senior Avery Lee (left), pilot Bruce Strickrott, and associate professor Scott White descended more than a mile-and-a-half below sea level in the Alvin DSV (background) last November, looking for deep-sea volcanism in the east Pacific.
The collision of hot water loaded with dissolved minerals from under the earth’s crust with ice-cold bottom waters creates deposits that, under the right conditions, build chimneys that can extend ten to twenty meters above the seafloor. There are plenty of chimneys and other vents clustered around the ridge itself, and some recent subterranean mapping revealed magma pools just below the seafloor even further from the ridge — about three miles from it. That observation led White to consider the possibility that venting might occur far from the ridge of the East Pacific Rise. The monthlong Atlantis cruise included a couple of shots across the bow to explore that thesis. Two forays of the Alvin deep-sea submersible were conducted about three miles off-axis; that is, away from the ridge that has long been the focus of scientific attention. The two dives went to places that no human being has ever seen before, and although the team didn’t find chimneys or other obvious signs of hydrothermal vents, they did see enough to want to keep looking. Besides finding ropy and sheet-flow lava, two kinds of underwater expressions of past volcanic activity, they found that sediment covering the seafloor was of differing depths. They think the shallower sediment
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DOWN & BACK
might indicate that parts of the terrain were the result of more recent volcanic activity than thought possible. Their instruments also registered changes in water conductivity that could indicate seepage of subterranean minerals. Subterranean seepage would demonstrate volcanic activity close to the surface. If that were the case, it would be a mater of covering enough ground to find its full expression. The Alvin deep-sea submersible viewed just the tiniest sliver of area off-axis of just a single point on
the East Pacific Rise, which extends from near the California-Mexico border to Antarctica. Being able to visit and document a planetary landscape hardly ever visited by humans is one of the reasons White got into this line of work. “I really like the idea of being an explorer, seeing and discovering stuff that nobody has ever seen, finishing off the mapping of the planet,” White says. “It’s pretty fascinating.”
Avery Lee was far from home, some 500 miles off Central America’s Pacific coastline, descending into pitch-black waters. The Alvin submersible was noisy as it dropped into the abyss, creaking and popping as it dropped more than a mile and a half below the sea’s surface. The DSV’s periodic rumbling didn’t bother Lee, though. The senior geology and marine science major understood that water pressure 2,500 meters below sea level was enough to deform the hull of the Alvin, shrinking its diameter about an inch in the hour-and-a-half it took to get to depth. Even high-strength titanium will groan under that load, and knowing so kept the pressure off Lee, who was able to concentrate on more important matters — namely, documenting his observations of a seafloor never before visited by humans.
He had no idea what to expect, but once the landscape came into view, the natural structures he had seen in books, photos and videos appeared just a few meters from the porthole. Ropy rock from sheet-flow lava. Pillow basalt. A crater from a lava collapse. He wasn’t sure before arriving if they would see sediment or not, but it turned out to be abundant. And some of it was moving.
With a quick double take, Lee realized that the ambulatory sediment was actually one of the creatures content to live in the near-freezing waters of the deep sea. And he saw plenty more. “There were sea stars, crabs, purplish sea cucumbers off in the distance,” he says. “Some very slow-moving fish, an octopus perched out in the open. What really capped it off for me was seeing polychaete worms swimming through the water.”
Lee and his team saw a variety of critters, such as this sea star, in frigid bottom waters of the Pacific.
One sight he didn’t see was a hydrothermal chimney, a fixture in volcanically active areas of the East Pacific Rise. Black smokers, white smokers and other forms of deep-sea vents fascinate Lee and drove him to study ocean and earth sciences. In four-and-a-half hours of bottom time, the three-man crew of Lee, mentor Scott White, and Alvin pilot Bruce Strickrott explored the seafloor terrain about three miles away from the ridge of the East Pacific Rise. They didn’t find any obvious hydrothermal vents, but data they collected gave them reason to think off-axis volcanism might be possible — perhaps to be uncovered on a future trip. “I would definitely do it again,” Lee says. “It was everything I hoped for, and then some.”
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CAROLINA ROAD TRIP
USC LANCASTER A COMMUNITY’S COLLEGE
When a delegation from Lancaster’s Chamber of Commerce came calling at USC in 1958, the timing couldn’t have been better. “Springs Industries was going great guns in Lancaster County back then, but the chamber wanted more opportunities for young people,” says Walt Collins, dean of USC Lancaster since 2013. “USC was eager to start creating new campuses around the state, and they welcomed the idea of starting one here.” The community support that helped launch the campus in 1959 has never wavered. As proof, Collins points to USC Lancaster’s Bradley Building, a $10 million facility funded entirely by community donations. Then there’s the community center, built on campus 20 years earlier with community donations, and Founders Hall, a classroom/office building completed in USC Lancaster’s 50th year with a lead gift from the Lancaster-based Founders Credit Union.
And community involvement goes deeper still: Two Rotary Clubs meet regularly on the campus, a high school holds its annual prom in the Bradley Building, and some of the campus’ 1,750 enrollment includes local high school students earning dual credit. Now USC Lancaster is hoping to broaden access to a bachelor’s degree in hospitality and tourism through a partnership with USC Beaufort beginning this fall. “We envision students completing an associate degree in business here, then completing the baccalaureate degree online through Palmetto College,” Collins says. “With NASCAR, Caro winds and professional sports in the Charlotte area, there are lots of venues for internship slots. There isn’t a degree like this available in the Charlotte area.”
USC Lancaster wants to make itself more visible to passersby. A strategic master plan is about to be updated and will probably include plans for developing university land on Hwy. 521 to make a grander entryway onto the campus. “521 is the path to the beach for Char lotte residents and just about everyone else around here,” says Dean Walt Collins.
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PRESERVING PIECES OF THE PALMETTO STATE’S PAST With the world’s largest collection of Catawba Indian pottery and close proximity to that tribe’s reservation in York County, USC Lancaster plays a key role in preserving the cultural heritage of what once was the state’s largest Native American group. That role has grown even larger with the opening of the campus’ Native American Studies Center on Lancaster’s Main Street in a building provided by Lancaster city government. “Renovating the building for us was a strategy to increase tourism, and it’s paying off,” says Stephen Criswell, USC Lancaster’s director of Native American Studies. “We’ve averaged 7,000 visitors per year.” In addition to Catawba pottery, the center highlights cultures of several other tribes and Native American groups in S.C., including the Beaver Creeks, Edistos and Pee Dees. The campus hopes to get approval for a new Native American studies focus for Palmetto College’s bachelor’s of liberal studies. Criswell and his colleagues also are using a provost’s grant to create a digital clearinghouse of all things Native American in the Palmetto State.
TRADITIONS AND NON-TRADITIONALS Brandon Newton likes to say he has the best of two worlds. He
decided to stay home and attend USC Lancaster, but as a Palmetto College student he got to participate in the ring ceremony at USC Columbia and stays active in the Lancaster community. “My goal was to save money; I have no student loan debt and don’t anticipate having any when I graduate next year,” says Newton, who is earning bachelor’s degrees in organizational leadership and liberal studies along with three associate degrees. The eclectic mix of students on campus, which include those straight out of high school and older adults coming back for more education, has its own benefits, he says. “It changes things from being in class with all 20 year olds to being in class with older students,” says Newton, a firstgeneration college student who holds the campus’ Thomas Mangum Scholarship and an Education Lottery Life Scholarship. “It expands your ability to work and communicate with older people, which is a good life lesson.”
SHOW YOUR MUG AT MEDFORD How do you get students to come to the library? Keep it simple, says Kaetrena D. Kendrick, the assistant librarian at USC Lancaster’s Medford Library. “Undergrads always like to eat, so we offer study snacks the week before exams,” says Kendrick. “My goal is to get
“I was looking for a program close by and saw that USC Lancaster had just started theirs,” says nursing student Kelly Banholzer. “I always promised my dad I would finish college.” This spring, 21 USC Lancaster students will earn BSN degrees and Banholzer will be one of them.
more people into the library. The idea is that they can use it as social space, and then they start talking to me and pretty soon it turns into a research consultation and they figure out how much we can help them.” To that end, she started “Show your mug at the Medford,” a fun campaign to get students to bring coffee mugs to the library to get a hot drink. “That might not sound like a big deal, but this is a small campus and there aren’t any coffee shops,” she says.
Kendrick has introduced USC Lancaster faculty and students to technologies that help with teaching, thought organization and information seeking, such as Dropbox, Text2MindMap and Evernote. An even quicker dose is 15 Sec Tech, which are video tutorials Kendrick has created on Instagram that show students things like how to change their Blackboard password or indent citations on a paper.
‘EVERY NURSE A LEADER’ When USC Lancaster started its BSN program in partnership with USC Columbia’s College of Nursing in 2010, the goal was to enroll students like Kelly Banholzer. A recent transplant, Banholzer moved to Rock Hill from Illinois with her husband and young son, so USC Lancaster was an obvious fit. But Banholzer is doing more than merely earning a degree. She has become vice president of the state Student Nurses Association and successfully advocated a resolution to promote awareness of carbon monoxide poisoning. She’s also been nominated for the College of Nursing’s Outstanding Leadership Award. “We are very service-minded here,” says Courtney Catledge, a faculty member in the BSN program, “and Kelly exemplifies our motto, ‘Every nurse a leader.’”
ENDNOTES Our historic campus wall has helped define life at the University of South Carolina for 180 years. During that time, though, it has been altered, damaged and repaired more times than we can count. While broken bricks, deteriorating mortar and encroaching vegetation add character, they also compromise the wall’s structural integrity. Before the university began the comprehensive restoration project now underway, USC Times sent out a photographer to document the imperfections. We also captured a glimpse of the future, photographing the test panel behind Flinn Hall (left), where two possible types of replacement mortar, “White” and “Old Post Office,” are on display. These test panels, once cured, will inform the decision about which mortar to use going forward.
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1. Plant growth adorns the wall in several spots, but the floral encroachment comes at a cost. “That’s where I’m torn as a landscape architect because those moss and lichens add character, but they’re not good for the architectural integrity of the wall,” says Emily Jones, USC’s landscape architect and project manager for the wall’s restoration. 2. For years, USC students wanting to advertise campus events hammered nails into the mortar of the wall along Greene Street before hanging their banners. Now rusty with age, they serve as a reminder of an earlier time — and that even something as small as a single nail can cause significant damage. 3. Several years ago the university mounted eyebolts along the Greene Street portion of the historic campus wall so that different campus groups would have a way to hang promotional banners without doing additional damage to the brick.
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4. Nearly all of the east wall was removed when McKissick was built in 1940. The part adjacent Currell College remains, but like the stretch along Sumter Street at the entrance to the Horseshoe, it has been lowered from its original height. 5. Spalling refers to the disintegration of under-fired brick. Bricks that have deteriorated over time will be chiseled out and replaced with hand-made bricks manufactured by a N.C. company that specializes in historic restoration. It’s always good to learn a new word, even if it does refer to destruction and decay. 6. Since its original construction the wall has been repaired several times using various types of mortar. In places, that mortar has succumbed to the elements and begun to crumble.