chapter 7 Life in the 1950s

I recall an unusually hot and humid July night in 1957 during the oppressive dog days of summer. Without the benefit of air-conditioning (which was a rare luxury at that time), it was much too uncomfortable to stay inside and engage in my usual pursuits such as building model airplanes or listening to music. My cousin, Charles “Charlie” Savage, and I evaded the sentinel eye of my Aunt Bert and slipped out into the night, looking for some respite from the mugginess of the evening. Although the mosquitoes were generally ubiquitous during that time of year, on that night they appeared languid, finding difficulty negotiating the thick humidity to attack humans.

We set off across the Savannah State College campus green in search of a gentle breeze near the creek. Logic dictated that of all places to seek comfort, the creek was most promising. Owing to the open expanse of seaweed over the marshland, a breeze would not be impeded by the legion of trees that stood farther away from the water. That night, the moon was full, or nearly so, and we were hoping that the pull of the tides would create an atmospheric disturbance that might tame the oppressive climate of the night.

The bright moon cast a daytime glow over the creek as it meandered through the marshland. The thought occurred to my cousin that we could defeat the oppressiveness of the night by submerging ourselves in the inviting waters of the creek. I did not argue and before we knew it, we had stripped down and were in the refreshing Page 90 →cool waters. We swam about fifty yards with the tide down creek and back against the tide up creek. Unbeknownst to me while enjoying the blissfully cool waters, my cousin had quietly exited the water by way of a makeshift wooden ladder leading from the water to the landing of the dock. When safely secure on the dock, he interrupted the tranquility of my swim with a shrill alarm: “alligator!” I immediately looked around and saw a triangular head swimming toward me. In a full panic and filled with adrenalin, I swam a sprint to the dock and reached for the ladder to hoist myself up when the bottom rung snapped. I suspect that the ladder had weakened owing to rot brought about by time and weather. Holding onto to a higher rung, which left my legs dangling in the water, I could not escape the water as the alligator was proceeding toward me. My cousin thought this was the funniest thing he had ever experienced and started to laugh uncontrollably. I kept yelling, “Charlie, pull me up” until finally the seriousness of the moment sunk in. He extended a hand to pull me from the water onto the dock.

When you are an invincible lad, you don’t think about near death experiences. I have often thought that I lived through one that night. Such was another day in my life one summer during the Fifties while growing up in Thunderbolt, Georgia, a small fishing village on the outskirts of Savannah.

Between the ages of 10 and 13, I spent a large part of every summer in Thunderbolt. I remember the excessively long car rides to get there. Although the trip from Orangeburg to Thunderbolt was a little more than one hundred miles, it took about three and a half hours to complete the journey since our car could only reach a maximum speed of between 50 and 55 miles per hour. Because the trip took that long, we stopped about halfway through the journey to eat lunch at Pocotaligo, located at the junction of US Highways 21 and 17.

My mother’s sister, Alberta Savage (Aunt Bert), and one of her brothers, Leroy Brown (Uncle Leroy), lived in Thunderbolt toward Page 91 →Tybee Island, home to Savannah Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. I loved Thunderbolt, with its distinct charm and intracoastal waterways lined with salt water–loving spartina cordgrass (marsh grass)—great for swimming, boating, and crabbing—that meandered as randomly as a crane in flight. I loved the Spanish moss that trapped the oaks in a thick cloak and made them appear to be weeping. I loved waking in the heavy morning dew with the smell of decaying fish parts from the docks that wafted through the yard with the lingering humidity. Thunderbolt was magical and mysterious.

Thunderbolt is located on a high bluff overlooking the Wilmington River. The coastal community has a rich and varied past. The town’s relationship to the river has been the one constant throughout its history. The river promoted Thunderbolt as a colonial settlement, as a military outpost during the American Revolution and Civil War, as a summertime resort, and as a twentieth century fishing village.

Shrimping was king in Thunderbolt. Shrimping boomed as a commercial enterprise in the early 1920s. Savannah was the major distribution point of the fishing industry in the South. Most of the shrimp were shipped north to Fulton Market in New York City, where they were sold to wholesale seafood dealers.³

Many of the local fishermen were descendants of Italian, Portuguese, and Scandinavian families with a history of fishing. My two uncles, James Albert Brown and Leroy Brown, worked on the docks tying up the shrimp boats when they returned after a day of trawling for shrimp. I can remember my Aunt Bert saying she was going down to Cesaroni’s on the docks to get a fresh catch. The Cesaroni Fleet was started by Italian brothers Joseph Adrio Cesaroni and Michael John Cesaroni.⁴

The seafood industry was a uniting force between the white and Black communities in Thunderbolt. Unlike many businesses during the early twentieth century, shrimping was not as discriminatory toward African Americans. Many Black shrimpers operated out of Thunderbolt and owned trawlers. In addition, the Black workforce Page 92 →provided much of the labor needed in the shrimp processing plants, primarily Magioni Shrimp Factory.⁵

The decline of the shrimping industry in the 1980s and 1990s hurt both the Black and white communities, with many losing their boats. The loss of a self-supporting industry greatly changed the community, and many residents today reflect on a lost era of cooperation and friendliness. When the industry declined, the differences between the white and Black communities reemerged. For the most part, the two operated as separate communities parallel to each other. The loss of a common profession discouraged interaction and today the local government acts as the link between the two communities.⁶

Savannah State College (now Savannah State University), a predominantly Black institution of higher education located in Thunderbolt, provided employment and business opportunities for the African American community. The college was an integral part of my upbringing.

The Black community of Thunderbolt in the 1950s lived in modest but clean houses. Families took pride in their neighborhoods and kept their yards reasonably manicured. I should know because Charlie and I were enterprising lads who made good money mowing lawns and planting grass.

Charlie and I were inseparable during those days. We had a passion for building and flying model airplanes. The odd jobs at yardwork financed our hobby. Over the years, I made many good friends who were children of faculty members at Savannah State College. A favorite pastime was going to B. J. James’s soda shop on the edge of the campus and ordering an ice cream float or a dill pickle. One afternoon, we danced so vigorously at Clare and Josey Alexis’s house that the first-floor porch caved in.

The Black community was God-fearing and attended church often. We attended Sunday school at College Park Baptist Church. Aunt Bert played the piano at the church, just as my mother played Page 93 →the piano at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Jamison. The Brown sisters were very talented musicians, and good music was always playing in the house while I was growing up.

My extended family in Thunderbolt was an interesting lot. Aunt Bert and Uncle Leroy were very close to one another. Aunt Bert was a strong-willed person who tried to order everyone’s life, including her brother, Leroy, her sister, Anne, and mine. I remember her incessant bragging about how she named me. I was given the first names of my maternal grandfather, James, and maternal great-grandfather, Edward. Whether Aunt Bert named me was never disputed by my mother, although she too tired of hearing the story. My mother, the youngest of the four siblings, always assumed a passive role when it came to family matters. She probably thought it wasn’t worth the candle to argue her point among her sister and brother, who never gave a quarter. Uncle Jim, Aunt Bert’s twin, decided long ago to leave the fold and moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where he could pursue his dreams away from family competition.

Aunt Bert was married to Charles Savage (Uncle Syn). He always talked about his glory days as a baseball pitcher at South Carolina State College. His son, Charlie, attempted to follow in his footsteps as a pitcher at State College. During visits to Thunderbolt, a common pastime was going to Grayson Stadium to watch baseball games. Savannah had a minor league baseball team.

Uncle Leroy was an adventurous and colorful person who, during his early years in the late 1920s, rode a motorcycle with sidecar with his brother, James Albert, up and down the east coast. He was appointed a professor in the mechanical engineering department at Savannah State College. He was a jack-of-all-trades genius. Uncle Leroy was the unquestionable scion of the Brown family. He was by far the most successful in amassing wealth. In addition to teaching, he designed and built houses and owned many rental properties. He was rather colorful—he loved eating, drinking corn whiskey, and womanizing. He could be counted on to prepare a delicious Page 94 →breakfast of fried fish and grits. His drinking, while legendary, never seemed to affect his mental acuity. One evening, he had so much to drink that he fell asleep with a full glass of whisky in his hand. At a point in the surrounding conversation that required his authoritative advice, he awoke and held forth on the topic without spilling a drop. His one fault was his need to be the smartest person in the room. There was no doubt that he was, but I was irked by his incessant craving for recognition.

For three summers, Uncle Leroy financed summer camp for my brother, Wally, my cousin, Charlie, and me. Attending the 4H Club camp at Dublin, Georgia, was a joyful experience. I remember the interminable 117-mile-long school bus ride to camp from Savannah. I made several good friends there and idolized Frank and Robert Gordon, lifeguards at camp. Robert was an especially strong swimmer. He wagered a couple of campers that he could swim across the wide, current-ridden Oconee River adjacent to the camp. Robert swam across the river in good form and after collecting his bet, he pronounced: “I take the less I need and win the rest.”

The two were the sons of Asa (“Seth”) H. Gordon, dean of the faculty at Savannah State College, who lived a few houses down from Uncle Leroy and a good friend. He migrated to Savannah State from Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he taught, among other courses, a required history course, Problems of Negro Life, to senior normal students. He was an able scholar, educated at Atlanta University and Hamilton College in law, who published prodigiously, notably Sketches of Negro Life and History in South Carolina, detailing the struggles and successes of Black people in South Carolina.⁷

My mother reminded us to write postcards to Uncle Leroy while at camp to thank him for his generosity. One particular year, I forgot to send my obligatory postcard, and Uncle Leroy never let me, or the family, forget it. I felt like the black sheep of the family in his eyes. His behavior was insufferable. I really didn’t want to be around him.

Page 95 →Many years later, Uncle Leroy expressed satisfaction that I would soon be graduating from USC. At a family holiday gathering, he asked about my plans after college. I told him that I was going to apply to Harvard Law School. Uncle Leroy could not believe what he had heard. His response, likely thinking that only he was smart enough to get into Harvard, was: “If you get into Harvard, I will help finance your legal education.” Then he mused with misty eyes: “If you got a degree from Harvard Law School, you could come back to South Carolina and run for governor.”

When I was accepted at Harvard, I finally received redemption for slighting him with the postcard many years before. My acceptance was one of the happiest moments of his life. His feeling was genuine—maybe out of deference to me as his possible equal. His sincerity touched me so much that I wrote him a very warm letter during my first year of law school, acknowledging his many contributions in life. I know he was proud of that letter because my mother told me he showed it to several family members and friends. In a funny way, I miss that old man and wished that he had not put up a wall while I was growing up. I could have learned a lot from him.

I am especially proud that Uncle Leroy was elected in 1970 as the first African American to sit on the Thunderbolt Town Council. He broke the race barrier and set a pattern for the modern-day town government. His picture hangs in Town Hall. Today the town government is mixed, with Black and white residents serving side by side on the town council, zoning board, and town administration.

In the 1950s, Savannah Beach was off limits to Black folk. If African Americans in the greater Savannah area wanted to swim in, or picnic near, the ocean, they had to take a ferry boat from Savannah and traverse the salt marsh waterway to Daufuskie Island. The ferry trip takes 30–45 minutes. The island is located between Savannah and Page 96 →Hilton Head Island and has three miles of beach on the Atlantic Ocean side. The island is beautiful. I once sailed from Hilton Head Island for two miles through the Calibogue Sound to Daufuskie.

Daufuskie Island’s legacy of slavery produced a colorful and rhythmic language called Gullah among Black inhabitants, who were descendants of enslaved West Africans. The language likely had its origin in the mixed languages spoken in the multicultural environment of the “gate of no return” slave castles. Because of the island’s remoteness and isolation, the Gullah culture was incubated and preserved over the generations. The cotton trade precipitated the import of slaves to the island during the early 1800s. During the early twentieth century, Black labor supported a once-thriving oyster industry.

After many years of traveling to Daufuskie, Uncle Leroy and his good friends, Dr. Stephen McDew Jr. and Dr. Henry Collier Jr., decided to develop beaches on Hilton Head Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Hilton Head had been a thriving Black community during and after the Civil War. Black people owned a large portion of the land. The island, known as Gullah/Geechee Nation, is home to many descendants of those early Black inhabitants, some of whom have maintained the Gullah language.

A friend and caretaker of our family beach house, Charlie “Fuskey” Simmons, was a descendant of the historic Mitchelville community of former slaves on the island. The Simmons family was prominent on the island since the days of slavery. William Simmons (ca. 1835–1922) was born a slave and later served in the US Army during the Civil War, enlisting in the 21st US Colored Infantry. He bought land on Hilton Head after 1865, as did many other Black people. Regrettably, over the years, many Black residents lost their land to rising property taxes or sold most of the land to white developers for a pittance. Many Black residents were duped into selling and were no match for determined white developers.⁸

Page 97 →For the better part of the twentieth century, Charlie Simmons Sr. (1905–2005), affectionally called “Cap’n Charlie,” operated a ferry boat that provided a vital transportation link to the island before a bridge was built in 1956 connecting the island to the mainland. He ferried people, produce, livestock, seafood, and the mail through the Calibogue Sound, stopping at Daufuskie en route to Savannah. On the return trip, he brought back needed home supplies. As a boy, I took the ferry boat, “Alligator,” that transported people and supplies from Buckingham Landing, South Carolina on the mainland, across Skull Creek, to a landing on the island before construction of the bridge. In recognition of the transportation services he provided, Cap’n Charlie, also known as “Mr. Transportation,” was posthumously honored in 2014 by the naming of an island bridge on Spanish Wells Road after him.

In 1954, Dr. McDew bought a large tract of land leading to the beach and named it Bradley Beach, to honor his wife’s birth family. He bought the land from Samuel Christopher, a Black landowner with roots on the island. Later, Dr. McDew created the Bradley Memorial Subdivision, a plat of lots that ran to a pavilion on the beachfront. In 1957, Uncle Leroy purchased a lot in the subdivision adjacent to Dr. McDew. In the early 1960s, Uncle Leroy designed and built two identical brick and frame two-story houses with porches next to each other, one for Dr. McDew and one for himself. Uncle Leroy bought a contiguous lot in 1961 from Samuel Christopher. A few years later, family friends, John and Ann Lawton, from Atlanta, Georgia, built a smaller one-story cottage next to Uncle Leroy’s house. These three houses served as a compound of social life for the Brown family on the island for years. My two brothers, Charlie, and I grew up with Dr. McDew’s daughters, Frieda and Stephanie. Dr. McDew also built a beachfront pavilion, which served many Black patrons from Savannah on day trips to the beach.

Dr. McDew, Uncle Leroy, and Dr. Collier, who developed the contiguous Collier Beach on the island, were part of Savannah’s Page 98 →Black elite. Drs. McDew and Collier, graduates of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, were very successful physicians. Dr. McDew was a resident physician at Charity Hospital, which evolved from the 1896 McKane Hospital. It was the first hospital in Savannah to train African American doctors and nurses. Dr. McDew removed my appendix during the summer of 1957 at Charity Hospital. My only memories of the experience were that the hospital was very clean, all nurses wore white uniforms, and I was served lots of ice cream.

After Uncle Leroy’s death, I acquired the beach house from his widow and siblings in 1981. I kept the house for sixteen years while my sons, Neville and Oliver, were growing up. I eventually sold the house after my neighbors, the Lawtons, passed away and their estate sold the house to an insufferable person. The beach experience was not what it had been with a new, less-cultured class of white residents moving in.

I am chagrined at the loss of a way of life that was so meaningful to me while I was growing up. During the 1950s, the Black middle class built and sustained many institutions that provided intellectual and social opportunities at a time when the white society excluded them. That generation provided the next with the one thing that earlier generations did not have: choices. Many hard-won battles on the economic and political front opened many opportunities. The decision for my generation was to either sustain the traditions that our parents fought for and preserved or to carve out a different path. Should our parent’s generation have done more to keep their offspring connected to the traditions that were established? Probably not. They wanted us to make that decision, rather than guilting us into following in their footsteps. This was the conundrum for the boomer generation: do I stay with the known or venture out to find anew.