South Carolina: Going Its Own Way, as Ever

From a nondescript boutique not far from this genteel city’s porticoed antebellum mansions, Sherman Evans is churning out item after item bearing a Confederate flag logo.

The shirts, shorts, vests and caps are selling fast--all with the familiar cross and stars. But there’s a big difference. Their flag isn’t red, white and blue--it’s red, green and black, the colors of African liberation. And the apparel carries slogans like “It’s 100 percent cotton--and we’re all picking it.”

This entrepreneur is black, and the flag image is fine with him as long as it’s on his terms.

“Being able to define things-- that’s power,” says Evans, 36, who co-founded NuSouth Apparel with Angel Quintero. “The South is definitely on the rise again; it’s a unified rise.”

It’s not surprising that a black-owned company that co-opts a symbol many associate with slavery should come out of South Carolina.

Contrariness has always defined this state, a 32,000-square-mile triangle stretching from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the west to the salt marshes of the coastal low country. It is a place of millionaire beach resorts and grinding rural poverty, of expanding golf courses and shuttered textile mills.

It is the state that gave birth to Jesse Jackson and has been returning former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond to the U.S. Senate for 52 years. It’s a major tobacco state where the largest grower is a physician. President Andrew Jackson fought to preserve the Union against his native state, which 30 years later fired the first shots of the Civil War.

Commenting in 1860 on the state’s secession, Charlestonian James L. Petigru observed: “South Carolina is too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”

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Saturday is presidential primary day. But right now, the only thing many Americans know about South Carolina is the Rebel flag atop the statehouse. That’s too bad, says Alex Sanders, president of the College of Charleston.

“The current problem is not that people don’t know about South Carolina; it’s that people do know about South Carolina,” says Sanders, a former appellate judge known for citing poetry from the bench. “We can hardly turn on a national newscast or open a newspaper without reading about that dismaying issue.”

But all the condemnation has just served to highlight an independent streak that runs back to colonial days.

In 1719, South Carolinians forcibly ousted the Lord’s Proprietors. When the full-scale American Revolution came along in 1776, the colony was among the first to tell King George III off.

For some, South Carolina has been a model of tolerance. French Huguenots fleeing persecution found a safe haven here. And until 1820, the state was home to the largest Jewish population in North America; the oldest Reform synagogue in the country is in Charleston.

But the state was also the center of the North American slave trade --and of the fight to maintain the ill-gotten gains of that forced labor.

Just two years ago, South Carolinians ended a constitutional ban on interracial marriage, though the amendment passed with only 60% of the vote. Thirty-three percent of South Carolinians are black. Of the state’s 170 legislators, 32 are black----but that’s up from none in 1970.

The flag--which has resulted in a tourism boycott led by the NAACP and a march last month by almost 50,000 protesters--flies across the street from where a black man, Ernest A. Finney, presides over the state Supreme Court.

As Walter Edgar, director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, puts it, “Blacks and whites are able to compartmentalize things.”

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“Wilkommen/Bienvenue/Bienvenido/Yokoso”

--Multilingual greeting at the South Carolina Welcome Center on Interstate 77

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“90 PERCENT of U.S. population growth in the 21st century will result from current IMMIGRATION. Stop it Congress.”

--Billboard near downtown Columbia

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The conference room at the Piggie Park in West Columbia could be a museum to one strain of South Carolina’s independent spirit.

On one wall, restaurant owner and self-proclaimed “Barbecue King” Maurice Bessinger proudly displays his Korean War service medals; on the other hangs a huge copy of the Confederate national seal. There’s an autographed picture of Republican President Ronald Reagan--right next to a signed photo of the late George Wallace, Democrat and longtime segregationist.

Bessinger himself ran for governor of the Palmetto State as a Democrat in 1974, riding through town atop a white steed and wearing a white suit. (He finished fifth out of seven.)

Until 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, he wouldn’t serve blacks at his restaurants. Today, at 69, he stands with Pat Buchanan.

“The country would be a lot better off if they were all like South Carolinians,” Bessinger declares. “Conservative. Believing in their heritage, where we’re coming from. For families and Christian attitudes --and obeying the law. . . . Best place in the world to live.”

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“First in Golf.”

--Optional slogan on new license plates, recognizing the state’s 350-plus golf courses

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South Carolina grows more peaches than the Peach State. It ranks second in flue-cured tobacco production. But the state that used to supply worlds old and new with cotton and indigo now also churns out BMWs and Hondas.

Nearly half the $6.3 billion of capital investment in the state last year was from international companies. The highway corridor around Greer, where BMW built its first full manufacturing plant outside Germany, is jokingly referred to as “the Autobahn.”

“You drive down I-85 and you look at all the flags and it looks like a U.N. meeting,” Edgar says.

Companies aren’t the only ones flocking to the state. People are also coming in droves--from the cold north, obviously, but also, surprisingly, from Florida. People like Don Harris, exotic-animals vet, looking for refuge for his family from the Miami rat race. South Carolina is “extremely courteous, friendly and helpful,” he says. “Right now it seems like it’s got everything going for it and nothing against it.”

Despite some anti-immigration sentiment, many foreigners are putting down roots in South Carolina too.

The U.S. Census Bureau says the state’s Latino population grew 62% between 1990 and 1998, to 49,000. Others say the real number is triple that.

On the road into Manning, a town of 4,400 where a water tower behind the courthouse is the tallest structure, a sign declares the city “matchless for beauty and hospitality.” That hospitality is increasingly Latino.

A cinder-block store that used to be the Rib Shack is now the M&M; Mexican Store. Outside hangs an advertisement for DolEx--a service to wire money to Mexico.

On a recent Thursday, the air inside the cramped store was sticky with the smell of frying hamburgers and pork chops. On weekends, the smells of salsa and cayenne fill the place.

“The Mexican people come in more on the weekends,” says Martin Urbina, who runs the store for his father. “Because during the week they go to work, and they sometimes get out real late.”

Brightly colored pinatas hang on the wall behind a video poker machine. Loaves of Mexican sweet bread sit on shelves along with herb teas like una de gato--cat’s claw.

“We have Spanish cassettes and CDs, what they usually hear,” says Urbina. “So they could feel like they’re at their home place in Mexico.”

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“South Carolina is the stormy petrel of the Union. She arouses the nation’s wrath and rides upon the storm. There is not a dull period in her history.”

--Kelly Miller, prominent early 20th century black educator

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Out on Ft. Sumter, Daniel Grinestaff makes an easy target. There he stands, disposable camera in hand, a “Team Rebel” hat complete with Confederate flag emblem on his head.

But, as with most things, there’s more to him than meets the eye.

Grinestaff, 36, a carpenter who was born in North Carolina and lived many years in its southern neighbor, is a Civil War reenactor--with a Union unit. He supports Alan Keyes for president.

Standing on the wind-swept parade ground inside the ruined sentinel in Charleston Harbor, he talks about the Confederate flag debate --he can see keeping it at the capitol, but acknowledges it has been co-opted by “a few wackos, social degenerates,” meaning Klan types.

People fighting over the flag should make a pilgrimage to Ft. Sumter, Grinestaff says.

“The whole war started at this one point,” he says, looking around at the crumbling brick walls. “How easily it could have been avoided. I mean, we’re a nation that’s good on compromise, but on this one we weren’t. It had to come to blows. . . . I believe compromise should be worked over and over again until we’re sick of it, then to compromise some more and discuss.”