chapter 4 Growing Up in Orangeburg

The primary shopping area where Black-owned businesses were located was called the Railroad Corner, or just “the Corner.” The one-block shopping area was defined by Boulevard Street, the intersecting Russell Street, and the intersecting Treadwell Street. The Boulevard Street businesses included Dash’s Taxi dispatcher, Webber Motor Sales, Brown’s Community Barber Shop, Lamar Liquor, Dr. Disher’s office (general practitioner), Varsity Soda Shop, Community Laundry and Cleaners, Webber College Soda Shop, People’s Barber Shop, Cecil Williams Colorama Photography, and the State Theater. I spent every Saturday morning at the “kiddie matinee” watching the featured cowboy movie. Running parallel along Boulevard Street was a railroad track. Across from the Boulevard Street businesses was the Southern Railroad Station. On the other side of the railroad station on Magnolia Street stood East End Motors, a Mercury and Lincoln dealership.

The contiguous Black businesses around the corner on Russell Street included Gordon’s Variety Store, Boyd’s Dinette, Wilson’s Pawn Shop, Rudy Jones’s Gulf station, and other Black establishments. Across Russell Street was the John Deer Tractor dealership. Around the corner on Treadwell Street were the offices of Dr. McTeer, a dentist, and Dr. Green, a general practitioner who served the entire Black community, including my family.

While the Corner has been deteriorating for decades and devoid of businesses, we are seeing a robust rebuilding effort after many buildings were demolished. Rising from ashes of the State Theater is the phoenix of the relocated Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. This is the leading South Carolina civil rights museum, which Cecil Williams has been curating for decades—archiving Page 52 →photographs and other memorabilia that document the evolution of the Orangeburg Freedom Movement. The new location is ideal because the origins of the movement were started by Black students at the adjacent Claflin College and South Carolina State College. In addition, two college dormitories are slated to be built along with a pedestrian bridge connecting the Corner to the two colleges.

Further down the block on Boulevard Street, proceeding northward, stands the historic Trinity United Methodist Church. Originally named Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, it was built over a sixteen-year period (1928–44) and is an excellent example of twentieth century Gothic Revival church architecture. The structure has more stained-glass windows than any other church in South Carolina. Although the church was built in the mid-twentieth century, the congregation was founded in 1866. The church was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1994.

I grew up in that church attending Sunday school and participating in many social and civil rights activities. I remember spending countless hours in the church basement playing table tennis. The church was the organizational center of the civil rights movement in South Carolina in the 1960s, led by its charismatic pastor, Reverend Matthew McCollom. The congregation hosted many civil rights luminaries, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP head Roy Wilkins, and civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall.⁶ Historically, the Methodist church, from its founding by John Wesley, took a strong anti-slavery position, so it’s little wonder that Trinity United Methodist Church would take the lead in civil rights activities.

Diagonally across Boulevard Street from Trinity was a train warehouse depot that supplied cargo to the freight trains that passed on tracks parallel to Boulevard Street. Further down Boulevard Street are two historic houses. The John Benjamin Taylor House, located on the corner of the intersecting Oak Street, was built in 1903 for Reverend Taylor. Across Oak Street from the Taylor House stands Page 53 →Major John Hammond Fordham House, designed by William Wilson Cooke, a prominent Black architect, and built in 1903 for a prominent Black lawyer. While growing up, I visited the Fordham House frequently to see Sadie Smith, daughter of Major Fordham, who was a close friend of my mother. Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, grew up in the Fordham House with his mother, Louisa Robinson, and grandmother, Sadie Smith.⁷

One of the leading Black citizens and an elder at Trinity was Thaddeus K. Bythewood, who owned a successful funeral home business in town on Amelia Street that he inherited from his father, Alton Bythewood Sr. He was a fair-skinned African American who could pass for white. He often attended events at the University of South Carolina in Columbia before it was desegregated because he blended in. Being financially independent of the Orangeburg white establishment, Mr. Bythewood actively supported civil rights causes. He supported my development. When I applied for a page position at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the summer of 1964, Mr. Bythewood agreed to finance that opportunity. However, because the student response was overwhelming, I was not selected. Further, Mr. Bythewood was an active supporter of my attendance at the University of South Carolina and Harvard Law School. He was trying to groom me to return to Orangeburg to continue the civil rights effort.

There were several other Black businessmen who, because of their economic independence from the white establishment, were significant supporters of the Orangeburg civil right movement. They and several ministers and teachers were prominent in leading protest marches and some financed bail bond requirements when student protestors were arrested and jailed. A few of the vocal leaders were the Reverends Matthew McCollom, I. DeQuincey Newman, Chappell Davis, Herbert Nelson, and J. W. Curry (ministers of various churches); Father Francis Donlan of the Catholic churches, James Page 54 →and Roy Sulton (owners of an Esso Service Station); John Brunson (barbershop manager); Nevin Austin (owner of an appliance store); Earl Middleton (owner of an insurance and real estate agency); Dr. Harlowe Caldwell (dentist); Gloria Rackley⁸ (teacher); and Charles Thomas (professor at South Carolina State College). In addition, many charitable organizations, including the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization, provided financial support to the Orangeburg movement, especially to meet bail bond requirements.⁹

Southern Black society had its Jack and Jill clubs, debutante cotillions, private beaches, and other trappings of middle-class success. I remember attending social activities at the Sub-Teen Club, a group formed by middle-class parents, under the leadership of Geraldyne Zimmerman, an educator and community leader, to provide their children with training in etiquettes and exposure to cultural experiences. The Sub-Teen Club met monthly at the community center on Treadwell Street, and I looked forward dancing to “Silhouettes on the Shade” at the mixers.¹⁰

I participated in a debutante cotillion at Columbia, South Carolina’s Township Auditorium (an historic auditorium built in 1930). I was one of seven escorts for Bertie Ruth Howard, the daughter of the principal of Wilkinson High School, Robert E. “Wag” Howard. In preparation for our role as escorts, the boys were required to take dancing lessons so that we were adept at dancing the waltz. Each debutante had the same number of escorts to ensure that she would have a dance partner throughout the evening. It was a white-tie formal ball, and all leading Black families of Orangeburg and Columbia participated. Escorts were screened to assure the right pedigree. In my case, I was a member of a highly respected family and had the reputation of a scholar attending the recently desegregated USC.

Page 55 →In this environment, the struggle for civil rights was an imperative for the Black community. Many families, like my own, felt that much was expected of them because much was given to them. We were fortunate to have received a good education. While we were hardly the living embodiment of Professor W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” it felt like we were in many ways. Professor Du Bois felt that the talented tenth would be leaders of thought and missionaries of culture who would pull the masses of Black people up to an economically sustainable and socially accepted condition.

My Wilkinson High School biology teacher, Napoleon “Nap” Ford, was the first instructor to raise our social consciousness. In 1960, he taught us the meaning of the civil rights struggle and was eventually fired because of his activities. After leaving Wilkinson, he returned to his birthplace of Orlando, Florida. There, he actively continued his civil rights activities as an educator and community leader, ultimately being elected the first Black person to represent his city district as Commissioner at Orlando City Hall. He served for nearly twenty years and was honored posthumously in 2001 with the naming of a new elementary school, The Nap Ford School, to recognize his bountiful service to the community.¹¹

My family was moderately comfortable, very much a part of the middle class. My parents owned a stately home, a two-story brick and frame structure with four bedrooms, a spacious living room, large family room with adjoining kitchen and dining area, three bathrooms, and two very noticeable verandas on the upper level, one screened in to protect against the mosquitoes at night. The house was situated in a former pecan grove. During my early childhood, we had a chicken coop in the backyard. Our yard was about an acre and a half in size and had four pecan trees, which always produced a plentiful supply of pecans. One of the trees had a beautiful wisteria vine that blossomed in the spring. Pecan trees are plentiful in Orangeburg County; many had been planted during the late 1880s Page 56 →and early 1890s. The yard had a mulberry tree, a Chinaberry tree, a Japanese plumb tree, and a pomegranate tree. Our house was located on the corner of Magnolia Street and Buckley Street, about a mile from Claflin University and South Carolina State College. We had free access to cultural events and facilities at the colleges. We attended the annual production of Handel’s Messiah at Claflin and played tennis and swam at State College.

The neighborhood was very stable and home to many Black professionals. The Hartzog family bordered us on the eastside; the Burgess, Summers, Hall, and Brownlee families on the southside; and the Waymer and Orr families on the westside. Two blocks south on Clark Street were the homes of Attorney Shadrack “Squire” Morgan and Dr. Harlowe Caldwell, a dentist, who headed the local NAACP and was very active in civil rights activities. Squire Morgan, a Howard Law School graduate, was local counsel for the NAACP and Page 57 →served as co-counsel with Thurgood Marshall in a successful South Carolina teacher pay equalization case.¹²

The neighbors were like family and kept a watchful eye over me and my brothers while we were growing up. One summer in the late 1950s, Mrs. Brownlee’s brother, Carl Sharperson, a professional photographer in Washington, DC, gave my brother Wally and me a car ride from Orangeburg to Washington to visit our Aunt Tommie Jane Bowers, one of my father’s sisters. I remember that summer well because Aunt Tommie introduced us to many historic sites in Washington, including the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and Washington Monument. She took us to a Washington Senators baseball game and a jazz matinee featuring James Moody, the great jazz saxophonist, and let us experience a trolley car ride on Capitol Hill.

My family was very prominent in the community. We were better off financially than most Black families. There were good books in the household, a Mira music box, and a piano with an abundance of classical and popular sheet music. A few of my favorite songs were “I’m in the Mood for Love” (McHugh and Fields), “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Richard Rodgers), “My Blue Heaven” (Whiting and Donaldson), and “Carolina in the Morning” (Kahn and Donaldson). My mother played the piano at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, in Jamison, and my two brothers and I grew up playing music, singing, and dancing. There was an ample lawn on the Magnolia Street side of the house, we often used to play croquet and catch with a football or baseball.

I had an enjoyable childhood. My two brothers, Walter “Wally” Thomas Bowers and Andrew Leroy “Roy” Bowers, and I attended elementary school at Christ the King. The school was established in 1942 for the education of Black children, and it was located on Amelia Street around the corner from Trinity United Methodist Church. It was a Catholic school taught by nuns from the Oblate Sisters of Providence—the first permanent order of Black Roman Catholic Page 58 →sisters headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. The mission of the school was to develop discipline and build self-esteem among Black children. During the 1950s, television was filled with shows that were demeaning to Black people. The nuns excoriated us for watching programs like Amos and Andy, Little Rascals, Stepin Fetchit, and Tarzan that depicted Black people as ignorant and shiftless. It is little wonder that the children of Clarendon County interviewed during the Briggs litigation selected the white doll as the racial model they preferred.

The presiding priest at Christ the King was Father McGonagle, who pastored at both Holy Trinity, a predominantly white church, and Christ the King chapel. The interesting structural feature of the school was that the presiding priest was white, while the teachers were Black. However, this structure helped the school navigate the white power structure during the early years of its existence. Between 1952 and ’57, Father Francis Donlan was especially vocal on behalf of equal educational opportunities for Black students.

Although we were Methodist by faith, my parents sent us to Catholic school because, as a private school, we could get more individualized attention from the teachers. It was a struggle for my parents to pay the monthly tuition for the three of us to attend Christ the King. I recall overhearing a conversation between my mother and Mother Damian, the principal, about the tuition being delinquent, which might have resulted in our being unable to continue attending school. However, my mother, who was always a resourceful and determined person, found a way to pay the tuition.

I enjoyed attending Christ the King, where I made many lifelong friendships. I remember the three-mile walk to school from home, the routine of Monday morning mass, May Day activities, where each class performed a special folk dance, and playing in the school band. I played snare drum, and my brother, Wally, played tenor saxophone. We were inspired by our young band director, Dave Moore, who was a music major at Claflin University. Dave Moore Page 59 →loved playing jazz music and planted an appreciation for that art form, which I have nurtured over the years.

I was not a good student during my early educational years. All I wanted to do was play with my best friend, James Fogle. I was assessed academically deficient by Sister David in the second grade with a recommendation that I repeat that grade. My mother disagreed with the assessment, and, after a conference, I was promoted to third grade. I don’t know what my mother said to Sister David to make that happen, but I suspect she said that I was a bright lad who lacked motivation and that she would work on that. My academic performance changed dramatically in the sixth grade. I surged to the top of the class and have known only academic success throughout the remainder of my educational career. I attribute my success in sixth grade to the inspiration provided by Sister Cyprian. She had a wonderful smile and knew how to make learning exciting for her students.

I enjoyed creative play while growing up. One year, I was Superman and Batman, often jumping off the second-floor porch of our house with my cape to demonstrate flying, to the everlasting terror of my mother. I especially enjoyed playing with my pluffer pop gun. The pluffer is made from a six-inch section of a bamboo reed with a hollow center, which serves as a gun barrel. A chinaberry is inserted in the barrel and forced forward a couple of inches down the bore with a snugly carved cypress branch contoured in a round shape to slide down the barrel. Then a second chinaberry is inserted into the barrel. The pressure exerted on the second chinaberry when quickly pushed by the cypress dowel down the bore compresses the air and forces the first chinaberry to exit the barrel with great force and speed, creating a pop sound. The pluffer was commonly made in Cajun Louisiana. Chinaberries were plentiful because we had a Chinaberry tree in our yard; the tree is of the mahogany family and indigenous to the South, where it is widely planted as a shade or ornamental tree.

Page 60 →My enjoyment of the pluffer gun morphed into an obsession for shooting a BB gun and a pellet gun. I had a passion for marksmanship, occasionally hunting birds. However, my primary pursuit was target shooting. At 4-H summer camp in Dublin, Georgia, I was awarded a prize for my prowess for target shooting.

My creative play later found expression in sports—shooting marbles, roller skating, basketball, football, and baseball. We had a basketball hoop in the backyard and a baseball diamond on our extensive acre and a half yard. I was a well-coordinated athlete and pretty good at all sports—except for boxing. Mr. Fouche, the custodian at Christ the King, organized boxing matches among the eighth graders. He paired me against my fiercest competitor, Ernest McClinton. Shortly after the match began, I got knocked down and to assuage my wounded pride, I claimed that I had slipped. Ernest and I were good friends; he was a very good trumpet player.

After graduating from Christ the King, I hit the ground running as I entered Wilkinson High School. Foremost, I was part of a group of high achieving students who started high school during the summer before our freshman year. Under a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, we took two courses, algebra and science. The two credits received from those courses contributed heavily to my leaving high school after three years. Because of the academic head start, I exhausted the curriculum by the end of my third year. I had taken most of the advanced courses, including trigonometry, physics, chemistry, and advanced French. My mathematics teacher, Mr. Henry Brown (affectionately called “Pop” Brown because of his protruding eyes), was an inspiration to me and I took all his math courses: algebra II, plane geometry, solid geometry, and trigonometry.

High school was fun. In addition to exciting courses, I played on the varsity football and junior varsity basketball teams. I was a student school bus driver and enjoyed my bus route and the money that came with driving. The process to obtain a school bus driver’s license Page 61 →almost ended without success. Our instructors was a young white highway patrolman who felt compelled to show that he was superior to the Black student applicants. I was not in the habit of addressing white people as “sir” so in my responses to him I merely answered “yes” rather than “yes, sir.” My fellow students took me aside and warned that unless I addressed the officer as “sir,” I was not going to pass the course and receive a bus license. Through that experience, I learned yet again that Jim Crow manifested itself in every endeavor that Black people pursued.

I was selected to drive the high school marching band on trips to other schools. The band traditionally travelled with the football team. By then I had left the football team because my skills at quarterback did not warrant steady playing time. There were two excellent quarterbacks ahead of me, and I was not adept at throwing the long pass. I was more talented at the end position because I could catch almost anything thrown. However, I wanted to play the quarterback position because it required intelligence and leadership attributes. From an early age, I wanted to lead.

My school bus driving skills were good but not excellent. I had a habit of getting distracted while driving. Because of my inattentiveness, I nearly drove the bus into a ditch twice and once backed the bus into the wing of the high school building. Admittedly, there were no building lights to guide my driving when I backed into the building at night. Those three scares convinced me that I should give up driving school bus. The responsibility was too great.

As a kid, driving a car was my greatest passion. When I was 10, Sam Summers, the father of my mother’s best friend, who lived across the street from us, taught me how to drive on a dirt country road. Uncle Sam Summers was a farmer, and I often accompanied him on trips to his farm, where he would let me drive his car. Since I grew up in a rural community, it was not uncommon for young children to drive farm equipment to help on the farm. If the truth be told, Uncle Sam Summers was the father figure in my life during Page 62 →my father’s prolonged absences because of his work. He satisfied one of my childhood dreams by taking me opossum hunting one night.

Having learned to drive, my mother would allow me to drive our 1948 Dodge, with running board, in the yard. Our house was situated on an acre and a half lot that permitted ample space to maneuver a car. One evening, when I was 12 and not licensed to drive, I drove the car to the Peasley Street playground, about three miles away to attend a dance at the community center located on the playground property. Community center dances were a staple while growing up and I can vividly recall dancing to James Brown’s popular tune, “Think.” That juvenile act occurred while my mother was away attending a church conference in St. Augustine, Florida. My mother’s best friend, Mary Julia Orr, who lived across the street and cared for us during my mother’s absence, saw me driving the car. I had a lot of fun with Aunt Mary while growing up. Her house was a second home for me and my brothers. She often cooked for us and taught us how to cook. I vividly remember her telling me to run and get a pot when my older brother, Wally, started to cry because he did not get his way. (The pot was to capture his tears.) I don’t know whether Aunt Mary ever told my mother about the driving incident. Knowing my mother, she would likely not have reprimanded me. My mother always had a lot of faith in her children and allowed us to experiment. After my third year of high school, she allowed me to attend Fisk University on an early admission program 500 miles from home. I sprung the decision on her late during my third year of high school.

I was devoted to my mother. I always wanted to make life better for her. I felt she got a raw deal in so many ways and had not been able to reach her full potential. When I was in grammar school, I had both a newspaper and TV Guide route. I also worked at Earl Cummings Bicycle Shop, located at the lower end of Russell Street, where I learned to repair bicycles. I was a very enterprising lad and developed the TV Guide route from scratch through my salesmanship. I Page 63 →made good money from those jobs. In fact, I made enough money to buy my mother a waffle iron for Christmas, which delighted her. After I became a lawyer, I financed the remodeling of the kitchen and other rooms, which she enjoyed to no end. Unfortunately, she died at the early age of sixty-nine; I wish I had done more for her.