Although our tour will take us across more than 20 states, many of the people
sharing stories with us have traveled arduous journeys in communities
we will never see ourselves.
In South Carolina’s capital of Columbia, Jacqueline West came
to the State Museum to recount how she was born and raised in Philadelphia
alongside Jews, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, and so many others. “All
of us played together,” she said. “We liked different kinds
of music,” but otherwise didn’t distinguish much amongst
themselves. Her first real taste of racism came decades ago during
a family trip to Saluda, a South Carolina town where her mother had
once lived. One hot August day, they stopped their car at a restaurant
in West Virginia to get milk for West’s newborn baby cousin.
The restaurant’s bright yellow interior and countertop display
of cakes and pies engaged West right away. But so did the employee’s
comments. She told the family they couldn’t sit in the dining
area and would have to go around back. One of the family elders decided
to simply buy the milk and leave, rather than be treated as second-class.
As they left, West heard the employee say the word “nigger.”
“I had never heard that before,” she said. “I asked
my mom, ‘What’s a nigger?’ ” She said, “It’s
a word that white folks call colored folks. They don’t know any
better.’ ”
Like many others we are interviewing, West described how gains in
civil rights came slowly. Painfully slowly.
In 1989, Saluda drew controversy over a swimming pool incident. That
summer, three black teens participating in a church-sponsored home-building
project were denied admission to the private Saluda Swim and Tennis
Club, which was on land owned by the local Jaycees. A 56-year-old policy
barred blacks from the property. Public outcry arose. “This was
the first protest I ever went to in my life,” West said. “I
felt good. This was 1989! Come on!”
Eventually, South Carolina passed legislation making it illegal to
discriminate in public accommodations and private clubs.
While in Columbia, those of us on the bus tour also visited the African
American History Monument, the only one of its kind located on the
grounds of a state capitol in the South. About 40 percent of enslaved
Africans brought to America came through South Carolina’s port
city of Charleston. Sculptor Ed Dwight of Denver, Colorado, modeled
the monument after an African village built in the round. A map of
the continent mounted in granite shows the original homelands of the
slaves. The monument’s panels depict the African American story
from the arrival of slaves up to present-day events. They include slave
experiences such as rice planting and cotton picking, the Civil War
and Emancipation, Jim Crow laws and the subsequent exodus from the
South, and the desegregation of schools. The monument also celebrates
the accomplishments of Carolinians such as tennis star Althea Gibson
and astronaut Ron McNair.
But what struck me most was the panel at the foot of the monument.
It was a representation of a ship’s hold with 336 enslaved Africans
chained together for the duration of the trans-Atlantic voyage. Their
bodies were packed together so tightly that there hardly seemed space
left in the ship’s hold.
As is often the case on city sidewalks, ants were crawling about.
Their path that warm Carolina morning was across the relief of the
panel of the ship’s hold, so it was as if the ants were crawling
on the bodies of the slaves.
In real life, that would have been only one of countless indignities
and pains they suffered.
