Page 205 →Reviews

Roger C. Hartley, Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 280 pp., cloth $89.99, paperback $29.99, ebook $29.99.

Roger C. Hartley provides an accessible, informed, and important discussion of a timely question: What should municipalities do with Confederate monuments? In our post-Charlottesville era, there are many voices calling for their removal. But as South Carolinians discovered when officials finally removed the Confederate battle flag in 2015, there are also powerful forces demanding their preservation. Hartley establishes himself as a fair broker between these competing groups. He recognizes that there are “good faith claims to leave Confederate monuments undisturbed in order to preserve Southern heritage.” More important, he demonstrates that the monuments not only perpetuate “anti-Black racial stereotyping and systemic racism,” but also inflict “material harm on contemporary American life.” In the end, Hartley argues that officials should remove monuments from public areas, such as courthouse grounds, and place them in museums, memorial parks, or private property. His compromise will likely find little support among those who want to either destroy or celebrate the monuments. Within the context of his richly detailed historical analysis, however, it appears both reasonable and—perhaps—achievable.

The first five chapters explore whether state governments and their subdivisions should do anything about the monuments, which as Hartley notes, “virtually never mention race or slavery.” Using what he terms “a racial-reckoning approach,” Hartley challenges those who would leave the monuments in place. Specifically, he calls attention to communities’ “moral obligation” to remove structures that exalt “the twin goals of the Confederacy–destruction of the Union and perpetuation of slavery.” To support his claim, he traces the history of the monuments, the commissioning of which coincided with the horrific epidemic of lynchings at the turn of the twentieth century; the unsettling popularity of the film Birth of a Nation; Woodrow Wilson’s election to the presidency; and, later, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The monuments, Hartley contends, embody the same creeds of segregation and white supremacy that fueled the rise of Jim Crow. Page 206 →They were designed to subjugate African Americans and create an exclusionary white identity.

Moreover, the monuments present a false narrative. Calling attention to the differences between history (“what actually happened”) and memory (“how we think about what occurred”), Hartley connects the monuments and the associated Lost Cause mythology to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s idea of “invented tradition,” a sort of propaganda that uses an imagined past to promote an otherwise insupportable ideology. Hartley then dismantles the pillars of the Lost Cause mythology, particularly the noxious ideas that the Civil War was fought for states’ rights; that enslaved people were somehow better off in bondage; the idea that the South was overwhelmed, but never defeated, by the invading Northern forces; and the idea of a principled Confederacy nobly fighting against violent usurpers, like the fictional “plantation pastorale of racial harmony,” ignores “the irrefutable historical record.” To the degree that the monuments advance the Lost Cause mythology, their purpose is “to glorify, not elucidate.”

Hartley provides in-depth discussions of Richmond’s monuments to Stonewall Jackson (1875) and Robert E. Lee (1890). These imposing statues were constructed at a time when Confederate monuments were no longer being placed in cemeteries, where they served a memorial function, but rather in public places, such as statehouses, where they advanced a political message. Anyone attending the unveiling ceremonies for these monuments would have experienced an abject lesson in Lost Cause deception. The audience certainly “would not have known that the slaves had been emancipated, that the Constitution had been amended with the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had announced a ‘new birth of freedom.’” Rather, they would have participated in a ceremony designed “to legitimate Southern White supremacy in the national consciousness.” These efforts became even worse in the mid-1890s, when the United Daughters of the Confederacy took over Confederate memorialization and used mass-produced monuments to advance the unapologetic white supremacy associated with the “Cult of Anglo-Saxonism.”

For Hartley, the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy comprise a “warping of history,” a disingenuous enterprise through which bigots “commandeered soldiers’ valor” to “promote racial bias” and “secure their own political power and cultural authority.” In this way, the monuments completed the same corrosive work as the Second Mississippi Plan and other efforts to disenfranchise African-American voters. Hartley also Page 207 →connects the monuments to spectacle lynchings, prolonged public ceremonies of torture and killing that were memorialized with picture postcards. Drawing on Grace Elizabeth Hale’s historical analysis, Hartley argues that these lynchings not only enforced African-American submission but also allowed “Whites to maintain their own White identity.” To this degree, the lynchings and the monuments functioned as did the dirty, incommodious railway cars designated for African-American passengers. Those cars were not intended to discourage African-American travel (railroads needed Black ticket revenue) but rather to help white travelers imaginatively construct “the significance of their own Whiteness” and “the fact of their own superiority.” Perhaps the most egregious example of the warping of history can be found in the proposed “Mammy Monument,” designed by Ulric Stonewall Jackson Dunbar and almost constructed in Washington, DC, in 1923. Not only would the monument have reinforced the Lost Cause’s toxic “faithful slave” narrative, it would also have erased white sexual predation against African-American women and advanced an ideology of “Black ‘otherness.’”

Turning to education, Hartley traces the development of “Rutherford committees,” through which the United Daughters of the Confederacy ensured “a proper Jim Crow education … centered on racial hierarchy.” Hartley convincingly links these committees to the monuments, showing how each reinforced the message of the other. As harmful as these teaching materials were for white children, they were far worse for the African-American children subjected to the demoralizing, dehumanizing lessons contained in “hand-me-down racist textbooks.” Throughout this discussion, one hears the shrill cries of today’s populists, who find the fearful specter of critical race theory even in grade-school math books designed to do little more than acknowledge diversity. Still, Hartley’s analysis does not entirely capture the extent of pro-Confederate indoctrination, at least not as it existed in South Carolina. He states that “even today, many who were educated in the South prior to 1970 continue to harbor the view that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War.” It is worth noting that vestiges of the Lost Cause mythology persisted well beyond 1970. Lewis P. Jones’s textbook, South Carolina: One of Fifty States (last edition 1985) and Archie Vernon Huff, Jr.’s The History of South Carolina in the Building of the Nation (last edition, 1991) present modernized, somewhat sanitized, versions of that same false history. School districts used these texts into the twenty-first century, and some private schools continue to do so.¹

Turning from the history of Confederate monuments to their harmful impacts, Hartley notes that monuments helped obliterate “the history, Page 208 →values, and memories of the Southern African-American community” while projecting a false perception of “White unity.” In one of the book’s few hopeful moments, Hartley provides a compelling discussion of celebrations such as Richmond Evacuation Day, Emancipation Day, and Juneteenth, which preserved a “counternarrative to the White myth that the South’s secession from the Union had nothing to do with slavery and its defense.” He also considers the less well-known Black militias that flourished briefly during Jim Crow. However laudable, these efforts could not thwart the structural racism legitimized by the monuments and expressed in discriminatory practices related to employment, housing, loan lending, voting, and policing. Throughout this section, Hartley’s argument remains convincing. At brief moments, however, he leaves himself open for attack. For example, he states “biases and stereotypes of the Black male as inherently criminally inclined … arise directly form the libeling of Black males during the period of Jim Crow and Confederate monument mania.” His cogent historical and cultural interpretations amply support his claim, but the argument would be stronger if he addressed documents such as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which are often cited without context by those opposed to police reform. Making his point without counterargument, concession, or qualification, Hartley leaves an important idea vulnerable.

In the next section, Hartley offers three possible responses to Confederate monuments: destruction, contextualization, and relocation. Destroying monuments would, of course, provide visceral satisfaction for those harmed by the racist ideology they empower, but it would deepen social divides. It would be an act of cleansing, not reconciliation. Moreover, it would seem to attack “certain values” of Southern culture—such as a “mystical faith in agrarianism and an unabashed appreciation of home and family”—that have no connection to bigotry. Contextualization, the process of using signage or contrasting monuments to challenge Confederate mythology, becomes even more problematic. It would encourage the toxic moral relativism of “the dual heritage ideology,” which assigns honor to both African-American culture and the white culture that oppressed it. Contextualization could also prove to be politically impossible. Hartley notes that competing interests in Harpers Ferry fought for years over the contextualization of the “Faithful Slave Memorial” only to end up with a confusing set of contradictory signs that “satisfies no one.” Even worse, economic interests often use contextualization to elide African-American history. Fearful of showing “any racial conflict within the community,” business leaders insist that African-American monuments minimize the horrors of oppression and Page 209 →present the experience of enslavement within a heroic “narrative of endurance and overcoming.” Kehinde Wiley’s powerful “Rumors of War” (2019) serves as a notable exception.

Relocation offers a practical and ethically sound response. Placing the monuments within a memorial park, in a museum, or on private land does not erase Southern heritage or rewrite history, as critics might charge. It does, however, remove governmental imprimatur from installations that harm large segments of the population. It also allows observers to study the monuments as “artifacts of racial hostility” rather than extolments of a fictional past.

In the book’s last section, titled “Who Decides?” Hartley takes up the complicated legal questions concerning relocation, especially in states like South Carolina that have passed laws to protect Confederate monuments. At times, Hartley offers practical workarounds to restrictive legislation. A law, for example, that requires municipalities to “protect and preserve” monuments may provide an unintended argument for relocation if that monument is subject to vandalism. He also gives his reader a lucid, approachable discussion of applicable case law; notably, Pleasant City v. Summum. As instruments of expression, monuments raise First Amendment concerns, and Constitutional protections of free speech extend to what one chooses not to say. Municipalities, it would seem, have a right not to express hateful ideas. Local governments, however, are unlikely to be successful arguing for their own free speech rights, which are extremely limited. Instead, government subdivisions should challenge state statutes by arguing for “protecting the free speech rights of a municipality’s residents.” Individuals, Hartley contends, should not be forced “to support, and be associated with … pro-Confederate messages,” which is what effectively happens when the law prevents them from removing monuments from the public spaces of their communities.

Monumental Harm is a significant book. Its meticulous analyses show the concrete connections among Confederate monuments, Jim Crow, and the Lost Cause mythology. Moreover, it demonstrates that those monuments continue to harm the same citizens who pay for their preservation. Hartley’s proposals, informed by his experiences as a lawyer and professor of law, may not please those who long for the poetic justice of iconoclasm, but they provide a practical strategy for combatting a hateful ideology that continues to damage our nation and the African-American community. In this way, Monumental Harm offers a viable path forward.

Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University

Claudia Smith Brinson, Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 376 pp., cloth $44.99, paperback $22.99 (2023), ebook $22.99.

Long-time journalist Claudia Smith Brinson brings together five noteworthy events from the civil rights movement in South Carolina in Stories of Struggle. She explains in her introduction that this book introduces readers “to the pioneers…. they are remarkable, courageous, inventive, persevering people willing to give everything for first-class citizenship, and, in that regard, the nation’s savior.” However, in her conclusion, she argues that “South Carolina functioned as a crucible.” The stories she narrates highlight the significant role that the state’s Black activists played in bringing about change nationally, although South Carolina was one of the slowest states to embrace those changes locally. Using extensive interviews and newspapers, she explores stories from the 1930s through the 1960s in five chronological chapters.

The first chapter is a contextualized biography of James Myles Hinton Sr., the president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Advancement for the Association for Colored People (NAACP) from 1941 to 1958. Under his leadership, the state’s branches raised funds and filed lawsuits to ensure racially equal teachers’ salaries, to end voting restrictions such as poll taxes, and to desegregate the University of South Carolina law school. This was also a time of significant racial violence in South Carolina. For example, Brinson recounts the story of the lynching of Willie Earle by a white mob, none of whom were convicted for his brutal death. Furthermore, white supremacists kidnapped and beat Hinton. Because of his leadership position, there was a great search effort, including what he joked was “a whole posse of preachers.”

Brinson focuses on Briggs v. Elliott in her second chapter. Although most school textbooks discuss Brown v. Board of Education, few people learn that the first Supreme Court case to desegregate schools was from Clarendon Page 211 →County, South Carolina. The state’s segregated schools were far from equal, as the state spent eighty percent less per Black student than it did per white student. Furthermore, Black families struggled to get their children to school, as the state only provided buses for white children. As Black families signed onto NAACP lawsuits, they faced financial reprisals from the white community. Brinson explains, “White people hired and fired, rented or sold land, provided loans and mortgages, and sold farming supplies and equipment, fuel, groceries, and dry goods. So, punishment came quickly and easily.” The Ku Klux Klan also threatened physical harm. When it seemed that the petitioners might win, the state attempted to improve Black schools through sales taxes and selling bonds. Despite winning Briggs v. Elliott, South Carolina did not begin desegregating schools until 1970.

Chapters three and four delve into the student sit-in movement and its leadership in South Carolina. Cecil August Ivory was a pastor in Rock Hill and president of Rock Hill’s branch of the NAACP. He was also wheelchair bound for much of his adulthood because of a blood clot likely associated with a childhood injury. Nevertheless, he orchestrated a bus boycott and organized nonviolent demonstration training for students at Friendship College, a Black Baptist college in Rock Hill. Over one hundred students carried out sit-ins at Woolworth’s, McCrory’s, Phillip’s, and Good’s stores. Brinson states, “Rock Hill set the pace for other communities: students protested almost daily and remained nonviolent, in no small part because of Ivory’s guidance and—unlike unnerved or disapproving adults elsewhere—his participation.” Students from South Carolina State College, Morris College, Claflin University, Voorhees College, Allen University, and Benedict College also staged sit-ins, some of which were synchronized. Overall, they sought to desegregate public places, most memorably lunch counters.

Brinson’s fifth chapter covers the Charleston hospital strike in 1969. This story highlights the often-overlooked importance of Black women in the civil rights movement. Black women working in hospitals in Charleston worked harder than white women who received higher pay, and Black women did not have areas to take breaks or eat their meals. Although the NAACP did not get involved, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and New York City’s Local 1199 union assisted Charleston’s Black women in their strike, establishing a union, and fighting for their rights in the workplace. They also had the support of two local biracial organizations: the Concerned Clergy Committee, and the Community Relations Committee. The striking Page 212 →women faced state troopers and the National Guard. Despite national news coverage, journalists did not interview strikers or report on their injuries. In the aftermath, Charleston’s Black women lost all the support they had during the strike, and they were unable to effectively run their own union. Mary Moultrie, one of the strikers, remarked that the women were “forgotten.”

Although she chose some well-studied stories like the Briggs v. Elliott case and the Charleston hospital strike, Brinson does not provide any discussion of the existing literature.¹ However, with chapters meant to be read individually, this book will appeal to a popular audience and educators could assign one chapter or the entire book to undergraduate students. Unfortunately, the author does not provide a complete list of interviews in her bibliography, and she does not indicate where future researchers might access the interviews. She ends her book with what seems to be a call for other Black activists in South Carolina to share their stories. Scholars statewide should help with answering that call by making efforts to professionally obtain and preserve their valuable oral histories.

Erica Johnson Edwards, Francis Marion University

Page 213 →Stephen H. Lowe, The Slow Undoing: The Federal Courts and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 256 pp., cloth $89.99, paperback $29.99, ebook $29.99.

In 1954, the US Supreme Court declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The following year, the same Court ruled that desegregation of schools must proceed “with all deliberate speed” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1955). Nevertheless, most segregated South Carolina public schools resisted more than token attempts at integration (and many resisted even that) until the 1970–71 school year. By then, as one school official observed, “We’ve run out of courts, and we’ve run out of time.” Lowe’s project is to pierce the veil of that decade-plus period of resistance, grandstanding, and refusal. His nuanced, careful analysis begins with the fight to end the white primary in the 1940s and peaks by laying bare the virtuoso use of the Federal court system throughout the 1950s and 1960s by a united array of state, county, and local officials—virtuosity that, in many cases, was abetted by similarly minded jurists—that prevented meaningful integration in South Carolina schools for far longer than was the case in other segregated states. Lowe’s work is lucid and timely and should appeal to a wide audience.

Although the core of Lowe’s project concerns resistance to integration, his story begins with the struggle for voting rights for Black South Carolinians, centered on the struggle to abolish South Carolina’s whites-only Democratic primary. As the Democratic party invariably went on to win the general election, its primary served as the de facto general election for most South Carolina political offices at all levels of government. Voting rights are the heart of civil rights, but the relevant connections here appear to be political and strategic. On Lowe’s account, the involvement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, led to a strategy focused on federal lawsuits filed on behalf of individuals who had been denied voting rights. Given the wording and context of the Fifteenth Amendment, and supremacy of federal law over state law, this seemed to Marshall to be the most likely avenue for success. Indeed, compared with the coming fight over integration, Marshall’s strategy was both efficient and relatively effective. Marshall’s advocacy resulted in Texas’s white primary being struck down by Page 214 →the Supreme Court in 1944, and South Carolina’s in 1948, although the latter state’s significant Black participation in elections would not emerge until after the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. This strategy was duplicated when the struggle to integrate South Carolina schools began and played a major role in shaping the years of entrenched resistance that followed.

Politically, South Carolina’s response to early battles over voting rights anticipates and foreshadows the coming battle over school integration in one major way: unified, total resistance from one corner of the state to another. The tools that the South Carolina power structure used to resist changes to voting rights—widespread legal challenges, token adherence to court decisions, and the dismantling of public institutions—were deployed again and again throughout the 1950s and ’60s to resist school integration. Although the state was forced to abandon the white primary relatively quickly, constitutional and political differences between the issues of voting rights and education set the stage for a much more protracted war and much more success for defenders of the status quo.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly prohibits the denial of voting rights on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (US Const. amend. XV). There are no such protections regarding access to public education. Indeed, education had been and is still generally considered to be a state responsibility. Without explicit constitutional authority for the federal government to oversee public education, South Carolina was empowered to adopt a strategy of total resistance. This strategy encompassed a variety of elements, beginning early on with efforts (both token and more substantial) to bring the state’s Black schools more into parity with White schools, including the establishment of a law school for Black South Carolinians on the campus of South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. This would show efforts to comply with the “separate-but-equal” standard set in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case allowing segregated public institutions. Showing compliance with the older standard would, South Carolina officials believed, forestall further intervention by federal jurists sympathetic to segregation. Although the Court’s decrees in Brown and Brown II would undermine the merits of the state’s actions, the strategy of focusing the minimum required response to claims made by individual petitioners set the parameters for resistance in the post-Brown era.

Perhaps the most significant element of the resistance strategy was an overwhelming focus on claims made by individual defendants, as opposed to treating Black students as a group suffering discrimination collectively. Page 215 →Until the US Department of Justice became much more directly involved in supporting victims of segregation in the 1960s, federal jurists were generally inclined to hear cases limited to claims made by individual claimants and fashioned their remedies accordingly. For example, a particular school district might be sued by the parents of a student only after the student had been denied some opportunity, such as being allowed to transfer to an all-White school. Then, the case would make its way through the courts, eventually resulting in a decision in favor of the student. This piecemeal strategy, limiting remedies to individual students in particular decisions, had a remarkably effective, dilatory effect on the progress of desegregation.

The attack on segregated schools also allowed the state to cloak its actions rhetorically under the guises of “tradition,” “protecting children,” and “the desires of both races.” Lowe makes clear that violent reprisals against opponents of segregation were rare, unlike in famous battlegrounds such as Selma, Alabama, but professional and economic reprisals were more common. Lowe also leaves little doubt that maintaining white supremacy was a paramount political goal for South Carolina political elites. Governor Olin Johnson spoke publicly of the need to “maintain white supremacy” in state institutions. In 1951, the state established the School Segregation Commission, a body whose mission was to “ensure the perpetuation of segregation” and assist segregated school districts in defending themselves from attack. As the opponents of segregation continued to build a track record of gradual success, the state responded by closing public parks in 1963 and making plans to eliminate public education entirely, transferring funds instead to districts and families to empower White students to attend segregated private schools.

It is difficult not to read Lowe’s work in light of the present moment. The protracted, baseless fight against the results of the 2020 presidential election seems rooted in the strategy of total resistance adopted by segregationists throughout the 1940s and beyond. One of the book’s main contributions is to highlight the challenges inherent in relying on the courts to effect policy change—something that they are frequently poorly equipped to handle, even when judges are willing to be policymakers. When they are not, as Lowe’s project shows, the piecemeal, discrete nature of litigation can be obstacles to change, and even to justice.

The Slow Undoing is ultimately a well-executed legal history that answers many important questions about South Carolina’s place in the struggle for civil rights for Black Americans. The relative lack of violent repression of civil rights activists in South Carolina perhaps thrusts the state’s struggles Page 216 →somewhat out of the limelight, and Lowe has done something significant in turning the spotlight back onto the Palmetto State. His historiography is careful and meticulous, buttressed by careful editing to create a tightly written, highly focused, readable work of history. Indeed, the tight focus and editing have the effect of leaving the reader wanting more light shed on certain aspects of the struggle. What was it, for example, that led the state’s leaders to eschew most violence and focus instead on a protracted legal battle? Whether that choice was some sort of “happy accident” or part of a well-thought-out political strategy seems relevant, both to the project and to our understanding of the civil rights struggle as a whole. Also, although South Carolina civil rights activists perhaps faced less forceful opposition than that which occurred in other states, many economic and political reprisals are mentioned, but only in passing, and the Orangeburg Massacre is briefly mentioned only once. Despite these quibbles, The Slow Undoing: The Federal Courts and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights in South Carolina is a timely, well-executed work of history that fills a real gap in our understanding of the role of the courts in both promoting and frustrating the drive for political change. Recommended to students of South Carolina history at all levels, as well as the general public.

Richard A. Almeida, Francis Marion University

Sean Patrick O’Rourke and Lesli K. Pace (eds.), On Fire: Five Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the Rhetoric of Protest (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 138 pp., paperback $19.99, ebook $14.99.

On Fire: Five Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the Rhetoric of Protest is a slim companion to Sean Patrick O’Rourke and Lesli K. Pace’s fuller 2020 collection, Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins (also from the University of South Carolina Press). As with the first book, but in more concentrated fashion, On Fire brings needed attention to the rhetorical and political significance of sit-ins as a complex, varied, and effective form of protest during the civil rights era. Across both volumes, O’Rourke and Pace argue that sit-ins, involving more than seventy protests and seventy thousand youths in 1960 alone, have been overlooked by rhetoric and social movement scholars. This collection focuses on five lesser-known sit-ins 1959–1961: Greenville, Rock Hill, Charlotte, Louisville, and New Orleans.

Page 217 →Together, the essays in On Fire make four key contributions to understanding these particular sit-ins and to approaching research on this topic. First, each chapter elucidates the highly localized issues that shaped different sit-ins. Each community’s unique historical, cultural, economic, religious and legal contexts created distinct rhetorical situations that protesters leveraged in various ways. This insight is perhaps the collection’s most valuable, as readers who are less familiar with sit-ins will have their assumptions challenged: These were not simply the exact same kind of protest happening in different cities. These chapters tell a very different and more interesting story. Second, the essays make clear that, despite the important local iterations, sit-ins did share similar philosophies and practices to provide a collective “accelerant” to the civil rights movement. In 1960, the South was, indeed, “on fire” with these related protests. Third, the research in each essay draws on a range of useful sources, including archives, interviews, oral histories, mainstream and Black media accounts, police reports, and photographic evidence. Considering that one primary aim of On Fire is to spur more research into the many sit-ins not yet analyzed, this diversity of materials charts new methodological and historiographical paths for future scholars to follow and take inspiration from. Finally, each author uses a different rhetorical framework for analysis; not only does this yield new understanding about the significance of specific sit-ins, but also, taken together, the applications of somatic, constitutive, Christian, and visual rhetorics as interpretive frames offer highly original analyses of this critical form of African-American protest.

Readers of this volume may be most interested in Chapters One and Three, as they focus on South Carolina sit-ins. In the first, “Reading Bodies, Reading Books,” O’Rourke provides a rhetorical history of the many sit-ins that took place in Greenville in 1960. Unlike those in other locations, the Greenville sit-ins involved a “multigenerational effort” among different groups in the community beyond students, and protests occurred at the airport, library, churches, swimming pools, and skating rinks in addition to lunch counters. O’Rourke establishes the local context for these sit-ins by describing Greenville’s distinct “culture of segregation” and the unique set of challenges activists faced there. O’Rourke’s analysis focuses on the somatic rhetoric of the protesters’ bodies “sitting, reading, walking, and surrendering themselves to the law.” In Chapter Three, Richard W. Leeman contrasts the sit-ins in Rock Hill, SC, with those in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina. He finds that the different outcomes were largely the result of differences in media representations of the protests. Charlotte’s newspapers, Page 218 →the white-owned Observer and the Black-owned Post, generally offered more even-handed coverage of the sit-ins and emphasized themes of “fairness and basic human dignity.” Leeman demonstrates how the papers’ rhetorical strategies of portraying broad support among African Americans and whites for the sit-ins created sympathetic audiences and responses. Leeman suggests this constitutive rhetoric led to the desegregation of Charlotte’s lunch counters six months after the sit-ins began. Thirty miles away, Rock Hill presented a different situation. The Rock Hill Herald, followed by local law enforcement, politicians, and citizen groups, represented the sit-ins as extreme activism by outsider agitators and Communists, who threatened the peace of their community. Whites’ opposition to desegregation, Blacks’ divided reactions, and warnings of civil unrest were consistently highlighted over the democratic, humanitarian, and Christian principles motivating the protests. The media sowed animus, division, and fear, creating a politically fractured and stagnated public. Rock Hill erupted into violence in 1961, and lunch counters were closed rather than integrated.

The two other chapters will be of interest as well. In “Nothing New for Easter,” Stephen Schneider examines Louisville’s sit-in movement during 1959–1961. Louisville is another unique setting for these protests because the city was long considered among the most racially progressive in the South. Schneider recounts Louisville’s history of desegregation to establish that the sit-ins were a recognized form of protest, which shifted from a specific civil rights strategy to an “important movement in their own right.” Schneider illustrates how the Louisville sit-ins functioned as a “rhetoric of human action” to dramatize injustice, foster collective identity, and engender Black agency. In the final chapter, Pace highlights the significance of New Orleans’s Woolworth’s sit-in by contrasting photos of the protests from The Times Picayune, which emphasized calm and righteous integration of the city through Christian symbolism and appeals, with personal accounts of the protesters themselves, who told a different story of a city racially charged and resistant to integration. Ultimately, these protesters moved beyond the typical claims of injustice to embodied demonstrations of a divinely inspired ethos and purpose, which were rhetorical strategies well suited to the city’s deeply religious culture.

On Fire offers general readers and specialized scholars alike a thought-provoking peek into the rich array of sit-ins as localized strategies within the larger civil rights movement. This smaller collection provides a highly readable and digestible version of their much longer and denser volume, Like Wildfire. As such, On Fire will either inform audiences about the rhetorical Page 219 →significance of lesser known sit-ins or inspire readers to delve into sit-ins as an area ripe for further research. Either way, the book is an important and timely spark itself.

Shevaun E. Watson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Robert Alston Jones, Charleston’s Germans: An Enduring Legacy (Mt. Pleasant, SC: Bublish, Inc., 2022), 296 pp., cloth $24.99, paperback $16.99.

For today’s visitors, the impact of Charleston’s German community can be discerned in prominent structures, such as St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church (405 King Street). Those paying close attention might also notice the German inscription on the cornerstone of St. Johannes Lutheran Church (48 Hasell Street) and the many German headstones in Bethany Cemetery (10 Cunnington Avenue). The truly inquisitive will discover that the beautiful two-story Gothic Revival building on the corner of Meeting and George Streets, now home to the Washington Light Infantry, was once the Deutsche Freundschaftbund Hall. For most visitors, however, the contributions of German-Americans remain hidden behind the attractions of Fort Sumter, City Market, and Rainbow Row. Robert Alston Jones’s rich, detailed, peer-reviewed study seeks to correct these oversights. Charleston’s Germans, he demonstrates, helped create the state’s most vibrant and influential port city, and their influence remains appreciable. Jones presents the story of a people who struggled for prosperity, fought to maintain their heritage, and were both resistant to and complicit with the most tragic aspects of South Carolina’s past.

Early on, Jones introduces several important individuals, including Franz Adolph Melchers, who published the German-language newspaper, Deutsche Zeitung, from 1853 until 1917, and Captain Heinrich Wieting, whose vessels brought approximately six hundred German immigrants to Charleston each year. Although the German community was well established by the mid-nineteenth century, it never achieved the prominence of similar communities in the North and Midwest. Rather, Germans acclimated to their new culture, blending in more than standing out. They did so, in part, because their numbers were relatively modest, accounting for less than twelve percent of the free white population in 1850, and because their Low German dialect, Plattsdeutsch, melded easily with English. Still, Jones pushes back Page 220 →against the assumption, expounded by Michael Everette Bell and others, that Charleston’s Germans became “unconditionally loyal to” antebellum culture. The relationship between German immigrants and the host community, Jones insists, cannot be “tied into such a relatively uncomplicated package.” Charleston’s Germans not only preserved native traditions; they also challenged the bedrock mores of white Southern culture by cohabitating with, and sometimes marrying, African Americans.

Equally important, whereas resettled Germans in other southern cities displaced African Americans, Charleston’s Germans encountered “employers who refused to give up their preference for free Black employees.” As a result, newly arrived Germans had to find “niches in the social order where they could operate without displacing and antagonizing those who were already in place.” One such immigrant, Johann Rosenbohm, who arrived in the early nineteenth century, became a grocer. His efforts helped establish an occupation for subsequent settlers. By 1870, eighty percent of Charleston’s grocery stores were German-owned. Another family, the Fehrenbachs, was less fortunate. The patriarch, Nicholas, a watchmaker from Baden, could not find secure employment and abandoned his family, forcing his wife, Anna Maria, to petition the Charleston Orphan House to take custody of her son. Eventually, the son became a successful businessman who capitalized on the growing temperance movement by establishing his Teetotal Restaurant in 1859. Peter Weber, another German immigrant, chose a different path, opening a traditional tavern that would have infuriated both the nascent prohibitionists and the followers of the emerging Know-Nothing movement.

Race and enslavement, of course, affected all aspects of nineteenth-century Charleston life. Jones examines these issues with precision and nuance. He questions claims that German immigrants “approved slavery and were enthusiastic supporters of succession,” noting that their earlier experiences in “landlord dominated societies” would have made them unsympathetic to “the planter class.” Still, Charleston’s German community, in contrast to those in the hill country of Texas and the Mid-Atlantic states, never became strongly abolitionist. To have done so would have invited marginalization. Instead, the German immigrants, few of whom ever became enslavers, lived in tension, recognizing “the fact of slavery” while aspiring to “the ideal of freedom.” The Banishment Act of 1861 forced the German community to declare loyalty to the Confederacy, and many members became blockade runners. But even these actions, Jones argues, were guided more by necessity than ideology.

Page 221 →The decades after the Civil War put more pressure on the German community to acclimate to white Southern culture. Before the war, the Deutsche Schützengesellschraft, America’s oldest rifle club, welcomed enslaved and free Blacks at its annual festival, which served as a “jovial, well-behaved civic picnic.” After the war, the Schützenfests became something closer to “a white show of force.” Jones narrates these developments largely through the biographies of individuals and families. Behind the personal stories of achievement and hardship, there is a continual struggle to balance the practical and idealistic as well as German and American identities.

As Charleston’s economy deteriorated in the 1880s and 90s, the once tolerant community became less charitable and more closely aligned with the conservative Democrats who took power in the wake of Reconstruction. Editorials in the Deutsche Zeitung became hostile to Blacks, who were said to be taking jobs previously held by whites. The process of German acculturation to white Southern culture became particularly fervent in the early decades of the twentieth century as many families, now third- and fourth-generation Americans, lost the German language. Even more important, Teddy Roosevelt’s admonitions against “hyphenated Americans” and America’s eventual involvement in WWI forced many German-Americans to all but abandon their heritage. Opposing the views of the National German-American Alliance, the Deutsche Zeitung took a strongly pro-American stance, telling its readers, “… we know only the Stars and Stripes as our flag and resent the very idea that we could ever be disloyal to it.” In 1915, the paper began publishing an English-language edition not only in response to a diminishing German readership but also in an effort to appear more firmly American.

The German-Americans of Charleston, Jones concludes, were “treading especially difficult waters amidst the rising tide of anti-German sentiment.” Jones animates these dynamics through an insightful analysis of the Liebenfels, a German steamer that sank in Charleston’s harbor in February 1917. The crewmen were criminally charged not only with scuttling the vessel but also with conspiracy against the United States. At the same time, the Evening Post ratcheted anti-German sentiment by accusing the Deutsche Zeitung’s editor, Paul Wierse, of collaborating with Charleston’s former mayor, John P. Grace, to promote “the German point of view.” In spite of these developments, Jones claims that Charleston’s “culture was too uniquely well-mannered to carry out an overt anti-German campaign.” Still, there were persistent xenophobic attacks to anything that “could be ascribed to a Page 222 →German origin.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these events caused some German-Americans to embrace the host culture even more tenaciously. In a particularly telling incident, the newly formed Friends of German Democracy claimed that its paramilitary uniforms were “copies of Swiss design and, in fact, were closely akin to the uniform of the Confederacy.” In making this statement, the Friends at once distanced themselves from their German origins and aligned themselves with the ideology of Jim Crow.

Jones provides an important, highly readable study of Charleston’s German community. He substantiates his claims with abundant evidence from primary sources and effectively confronts many scholarly assumptions. He also shows the challenges of acculturation and how that process can strengthen a society’s most toxic and dangerous tendencies.

Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University

Lance Weldy (ed.), BJU and Me: Queer Voices from the World’s Most Christian University (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 368 pp., cloth $114.95, paperback $26.95.

Lance Weldy makes a vital and unprecedented contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, plus other (LGBTQ+) population studies with BJU and Me: Queer Voices from the World’s Most Christian University. In this remarkable collection, former students from Bob Jones University (BJU), a fundamentalist Christian institution founded in 1927, speak their truths about the oppressive institution that shamed and traumatized them. Spanning several generations of students, the stories collected here provide a testimony to queer identity, survival, and triumph in the face of enormous oppression, surveillance, and mind control.

Although a collection representing a population as narrowly defined as this one risks myopic scope and homogenous narratives, that is not the case with Weldy’s book. Recognizing this risk, Weldy points out that BJU’s brand recognition has attracted mainstream media attention and makes a strong case that the queer experience at BJU merits book-length analysis. Indeed, each voice is as fresh and unique as the individual writers themselves. Their stories reveal trajectories from struggles with shame and fear to resolutions of healing and self-acceptance. Some students remained Christian in more Page 223 →welcoming denominations and institutions; others took up professions supporting LGBTQ+ youths and adults; others became atheist or agnostic as they learned to accept the truth about themselves; some found fulfilling relationships with queer partners, and others came out while staying in traditional marriages. Each writer conveys a story of remarkable struggle, liberation, and self-acceptance. As with the best literary memoirs, the reader shares this healing journey with them.

Weldy opens with an introduction that provides a comprehensive historical overview of Bob Jones University as an extremist, eccentric religious institution, whose policies and practices have changed minimally over nearly a century. As part of the indoctrination process, students are taught the university creed, which they are required to recite weekly as a student body. Foregrounding the institution’s punitive practice of separation from sinners, he points out that queer students are in especial danger of this disciplinary action: “One kind of student susceptible to extreme discipline—expulsion—is one who secretly identifies or unintentionally presents as LGBTQ+.” In particular, he details the anti-LGBTQ+ indoctrination process, which emphasizes a collection of six specific biblical verses, colloquially named the Clobber Passages, that provide fundamentalist “proof” that the Bible condemns queer identity. By showing how the Clobber Passages are implicated into the university creed, Weldy effectively establishes how ubiquitously queer students struggle in this hostile, traumatizing environment in which they are forced to exist: “For an LGBT+ BJU student from any decade, this repeated statement of believing in a text that condemns who they are is a recipe for religious and psychological crisis. All the contributors to this collection have been at least indirectly affected by these passages.” By guiding the reader to understand that these narratives sit at the nexus of auto-ethnography, vulnerability narrative, and testimony of religious trauma, the audience is made aware of the potentially far-reaching and relevant impact of their publication. As Weldy puts it, these stories “explain how vulnerable we were to a controlling regime that has left an indelible mark on us psychologically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.” Instead of remaining silent, BJU students share their stories in this exemplary performance of speaking truth to power.

After the Introduction, the book is organized thematically. Part One, “Surveillance, Control, and Rumors,” shares former students’ anxieties of being watched, scrutinized, outed, interrogated, humiliated, and expelled, exposing the contradiction of the BJU brand image as a safe spiritual haven. Page 224 →In Part Two, “Other Institutions,” the contributors share comparisons of their experiences at BJU with the institutions they joined after their expulsion or decision to leave. Part Three, “Intersections,” explores the experiences of students writing from trans, international, and nonwhite perspectives. In Part Four, “Family, Guilt, and Shame,” two writers share their transformation from entrapment in shame to liberation and self-love, learning to live their lives as gay men on their own terms. Finally, Part Five, “Identifying as Religious and Spiritual,” challenges the idea that queer students must choose between God and their own self-evident truths.

What is most striking about this collection is the degree to which these accounts of lived experiences at BCU echo the first-person narrator’s account in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s 1985 novel portrays a dystopian society in which a male ruling elite establishes a fundamentalist Christian theocracy that strips women of childbearing age of their most basic rights and forces them into sexual slavery to produce children as “handmaids” to powerful Commanders. In Atwood’s Gilead, social roles are extremely rigid and violently surveilled; women’s bodies and reproductive abilities are intensively regulated; atheists, gays, and abortion doctors are persecuted; and handmaids who step out of line are brutally executed by their own sisters. Barring execution, BJU is eerily similar to Gilead in its guiding principles and disciplinary procedures.

In her writing of the novel, Atwood declares that “one of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history.”¹ She could have sourced her material from BJU and Me, because the stories very much reveal the ongoing “nightmare” of the queer experience at BJU. All modes of control portrayed in Atwood’s dystopia (with the sole exception of execution) are foregrounded in Weldy’s collection: surveillance, mind control, spying, shaming, interrogation, punishment, and “shipping” (expulsion from the university). But BJU and Me is not a dystopian novel. It is a collection of autobiographical accounts of the lived experiences of queer people in an enormously oppressive institution that continues to operate today. More disturbingly, instances of surveillance, mind control, interrogation, and expulsion are repeatedly recounted in these autoethnograpies, evidence that harassment of LGBTQ+ students is systematic. As one current student puts it, “We all live in fear of being caught, of being outed, of being expelled, of facing discipline for just existing.”

Ultimately, however, this book features stories of triumph. In one notable account, Rachel Oblak and her husband go through a period of questioning Page 225 →before eventually leaving BJU. She recalls a moment when she shares with her husband that she is bisexual: “My marriage didn’t fall apart as I (and others) had feared it would with my coming out. Honesty and self-acceptance actually enhanced my relationship rather than damaging it, bringing us closer together.” Honesty with himself is powerful for David Diachenko as well. By breaking the cycle of sex acts followed by guilt and shame, he finally relaxes into his identity: “I suddenly realized, this feels right. Not just good, but absolutely and completely right.” Jeff Mullinix, on the other hand, embraces his sexuality as integral to his spirituality and his role as a minister: “There is absolutely no conflict with accepting who I am and following Jesus, for I know God wants me to be happy, healthy, authentic, whole, integrated and my truest self.” These are just a few examples of the many profound expressions of authenticity. Although it is natural for the reader to expect story after story of trauma and compromised mental health, each voice concludes on a note of liberation and self-love.

The jubilant tone of these essays is due, in no small part, to the pivotal role played by BJUnity, a support group of queer BJU students turned activists whose narratives make up this book. Through their communication on social media and in-person at Pride events, this support group made possible the healing, social connection, and self-determination that led to the creation of the book itself. Many of the contributors now work in LGBTQ+-affirming roles. The book’s greatest achievement is in its visionary portrayal of an optimistic queer future for Christians and non-Christians alike, even those caught in the grips of fundamentalism. These stories open up space for everyone who is queer and has experienced religious trauma, each essay an incantatory refrain of the life-saving affirmation, “You belong, just as you are.”

Right now in the United States, as many Christian institutions become more aligned with and energized by an extremist political base, as the divide between conservatives and progressives deepens and intensifies, and with a reigning Supreme Court that seems poised to strip hard-won rights from LGBTQ+ people, the voices of the survivors represented here are more urgent than ever. BJU and Me is essential reading for our historical moment.

M. Beth Keefauver, University of South Carolina Upstate

Page 226 →Eric Crawford, Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 248 pp., cloth $89.99, paperback $29.99, ebook $29.99.

Eric Crawford’s book, Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands, is informative, insightful, and full of inspirational history that still resides off the coast of South Carolina. The author beautifully folds the inception of the Gullah spiritual into Western culture and shows how it transformed into an instrument for advancing civil rights. Crawford describes how these unique forms of song and praise provided entertainment for white listeners as well as cherished moments of respite for the enslaved. He inspires the reader to know more about Gullah–Geechee music and solicits solace through equality by expressing that “these songs are not exclusive to a specific nationality but are universal in their reach.” Last, Crawford includes a Gullah songbook, in which he discusses melody, context, and rhythm. This book is a gift of music, culture, and history to all who have the opportunity to read it.

Fran Coleman, Francis Marion University

Daniel M. Harrison, Live at Jackson Station: Music, Community, and Tragedy in a Southern Blues Bar (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 256 pp., cloth $74.99, paperback $24.99, ebook $24.99.

Long before music and culture were disseminated worldwide at the speed of byte, through titans such as YouTube and TikTok, people would gather expectedly at bars and nightclubs excitedly awaiting the fresh new sounds to take the stage. The development of rock and roll and the culture that surrounds it has been well documented. Venues and clubs such as the Apollo, CBGB, and Whiskey a Go Go all stand as hallowed halls of musical expression and freedom. The many juke joints of Memphis and Mississippi have been canonized in numerous books and films. These geographic hubs are well established as the incubators of American music, but the reality is that this format was replicating itself all over the country. In Live at Jackson Station, Daniel Harrison takes a journey through the life cycle of one of these Page 227 →unique venues. Through numerous interviews and painstaking research, Harrison tells the story of a special bar and what it meant to a community, its patrons, the musicians who cut their teeth there, and the tragedy that brought it all to an end.

The introduction and first three chapters effectively present the time and place, as well as the primary characters. Hodges, South Carolina, in the mid-1980s, was an unlikely place for an openly gay bar owner to run a successful music venue. Gerald Jackson, a music-loving veteran, and his partner Steven Bryant purchased a decommissioned train station for one dollar and had it moved to a plot of family land. From here they launched “Jackson Station.” From a parental standpoint, Jackson Station was decidedly off limits. Yet for its patrons and the musicians who frequented the stage, it was a sanctuary for expression and free from judgment. Through extensive interviews and quotations, Harrison paints the picture of a bar that stood against convention. The overall sentiment from all involved was that Jackson Station was a place where everyone was welcome, regardless of age, race, or sexual identity. Harrison also makes the point that, from the outside looking in, this was not always the case. For nonpatrons, Jackson Station was often referred to as a “gay bar,” and parents always cautioned their children not to be caught there. Gerald and Steve ran the bar and booked the shows while Gerald’s mother, Elizabeth, controlled the door like an all-seeing matriarch.

Harrison makes the case that perhaps the unlikely success of such a venue within the heart of the Bible Belt lies within the diversity of the clientele and the musicians who performed there. Located about eighty miles due east of Athens, Georgia, Jackson Station could draw on numerous colleges from the surrounding areas. An average night would also see a large contingent of local blue-collar workers of various racial backgrounds. Local and state politicians were also known to frequent the venue. Before the sun went down, one would often find entire families sitting down for a meal. Another draw for the bar was the fact that it stayed open long after all the others had closed. Here, again, Harrison draws on numerous accounts that overwhelmingly show Jackson Station to be an inviting and safe space for an eclectic slice of southeastern society.

Gerald Jackson was a lover of music, and this was most evident in the acts that he booked and the treatment that they received. In a business rife with bad actors, getting paid as a working musician was always a dubious prospect. Gerald Jackson was just the opposite. Through numerous interviews, Page 228 →Harrison shows that artists liked playing at Jackson Station. Gerald would always feed the bands and pay them on time. The hours could, indeed, be grueling. Sometimes bands would take the stage at eleven o’clock at night and still be making sounds when the sun came up. Regardless of these challenges, musicians relished the chance to win over always diverse, and sometimes disinterested, crowds. Traditional rhythm and blues was the driving genre, but Gerald was always open to booking any act that interested him. Classic blues legends, such as Tinsley Ellis and Nappy Brown, performed there numerous times, but so did the New Wave band the Swimming Pool Q’s. Most notable, perhaps, are the many performances by the now-famous jam band Widespread Panic. Harrison shows that each of these artists saw Jackson Station as a bit of an oasis that called out to musicians and patrons alike.

Where changing musical tastes and demographics often led to the demise of once popular destinations, Jackson Station was instead closed down by tragedy. As welcoming as Jackson Station was, disputes did, indeed, occur. In the early morning hours of April 7, 1990, Gerald Jackson followed a patron out to the parking lot to collect on a debt. Like all such incendiary situations, what happened next is a fog. Here, Harrison presents as much primary evidence as possible, but the reluctance of numerous parties to speak with him leaves a lot to court records and fading memories. Harrison does a good job presenting statements and recollections without interjecting too much of his opinion in this section. Once the smoke had cleared, Gerald Jackson was left with a debilitating wound from which he would never fully heal. It would be easy to infer bigotry or hate with regard to the attack on Gerald Jackson, but here again, Harrison leaves it to the known facts. The incapacitation of Gerald Jackson showed just how entwined he and the venue were, as it spelled the end for Jackson Station as well.

Daniel Harrison has presented a compelling story with excellent primary research. Although the details of Jackson’s story are unique to him, the role that the venue and owner played in the surrounding community likely is not. The fact that there is a “Jackson Station” in countless rural communities across the United States makes the story all the more important, not less. The story is engaging, well researched, elegantly presented, and well worth the read.

Brandon Goff, Francis Marion University

Page 229 →Kevin Mitchell and David S. Shields, Taste the State: South Carolina’s Signature Foods, Recipes, and Their Stories (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 248 pp. cloth $34.99, ebook $34.99.

Part encyclopedia, part cookbook, Taste the State is an entertaining compendium of eighty-two foods indelibly linked to the culinary history of South Carolina. Not a study of Southern foods, generally—no Moon Pies or R. C. Colas here—authors Kevin Mitchell and David S. Shields have researched and assembled the stories of foods ranging, appropriately enough, from “Asparagus: The Palmetto” to “Yaupon Tea.” Mitchell, the first African-American chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Charleston, who was named a South Carolina Chef Ambassador for 2020–21 by the state’s Department of Agriculture, and Shields, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina and chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, combine their unique perspectives of food and folkways to create a cultural study that covers the entire state and includes items such as the Porgy of the Lowcountry to Upcountry blackberries. Many of the entries tell the stories of food items, such as Palmetto asparagus, that although once popular, faded almost to the point of extinction only to see a resurgence in recent years. It recounts the tales of food companies tied to the state producing products such as Duke’s Mayonnaise and Blenheim Ginger Ale. And it is the story of people—Native Americans, Africans and African Americans, and other cultures—who contributed their unique plants, spices, and tastes to the mélange of South Carolina cooking. It introduces cooks, planters, plant breeders, agronomists, and seedmen who, working in their unique positions, shaped agriculture and trade in the state over the course of four centuries.

Although this is not a traditional cookbook by any means, Mitchell and Shields add historical recipes from a variety of sources for each food. Intrepid cooks can attempt to interpret the instructions for rice bread from a recipe that appeared in the Charleston Courier on January 7, 1812; chicken pilau from the November 1892 issue of the Ladies Home Journal; or more contemporary recipes, such as the one for Colony House conch fritters in South Carolina’s Historic Restaurants and Their Recipes of 1984. Interspersed throughout the book, the authors include nine new recipes, most produced by Mitchell himself, that represent a modern take on traditional South Carolina fare.

It is not a traditional academic study, but Taste the State is thoroughly researched. Each entry has a corresponding list of sources provided in a Page 230 →separate section after the text. The book is informational and written in a style to appeal to general readers, but it is also useful to academics. Mitchell and Shields stray beyond state lines occasionally when they discuss the arrival of new plants to South Carolina or recognize the importance of the style of fried fish developed just across the state line in Calabash, North Carolina. And they are not beyond waxing poetic or showing pride for their state’s food. They describe Guinea Squash (eggplant) as “the most sensuous plant on one’s kitchen counter”; reveal that “1874 was the year when a southerner theorized that sipping iced tea from a straw was morally, physiologically, and gastronomically more satisfying than drinking it from a glass”; and declare in no uncertain terms that “In 1954, breeder C. F. Andrus released the greatest American watermelon produced in the mid-twentieth century, the Charleston Gray.” Taste of the State will provide hours of entertainment to people interested in South Carolina and Southern foodways, or who simply enjoying eating.

Christopher E. Hendricks, Georgia Southern University

Edwin Breeden, A Guidebook to South Carolina Historical Markers (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 448 pp., cloth $74.99, paperback $24.99, ebook $24.99.

This guidebook, as noted in the acknowledgments, is the product of more than twenty years of work by several different individuals working with the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and it includes the text of over seventeen hundred different historical markers in the state.

Like many families in the 1970s and 1980s, we took road trips during the summer that were planned using folded paper maps and thick guidebooks. I loved going to the regional AAA office with my dad to pick up those guidebooks and watch the travel agents compile our TripTik, small spiral-bound booklets that held the maps of the interstates we’d travel. I was the map-keeper in the back seat of the car. My dad was the one who kept his eye out for the highway markers that provided us insight into the areas we traveled through, and that told us not only where we were but why we should care about the place. We would fly by most of them, but when we were traversing a particularly historical area, we’d pull over, get out of the car, and get our little history lesson.

Page 231 →Historical markers are self-contained stories. Sitting on sites of battlefields, birthplaces, schools, churches, libraries—both extant and long gone—markers recount events, explain significance, present biographies, and mourn losses. While traveling down the road, we miss out on many of them. However, this guidebook allows those traveling through South Carolina to read all of the historical markers from the living room recliner or the backseat of the car.

The very helpful Introduction provides a history of the SC Historical Marker Program, the process for localities to apply for markers, and recent efforts to include markers that educate the public about events and locations important for Native American and African-American histories. The book is organized by county, with markers listed in the order in which they were approved. Each listing includes the title of the marker, location, a transcript of the marker’s text, name of the sponsor, date, and the GPS coordinates.

On a recent trip to Hunting Island, South Carolina, I decided to user-test the guide, regaling my family with stories of the world champion butter-fat-producing Jersey cow raised at Young Farm (Florence County, 21–26; 178); the Combahee River Raid of 1863, which resulted in “more than 700 enslaved men, women, and children” being “taken to freedom” (Beaufort County, 7–39; 60); and the history of Parris Island, which dates back to the 1500s (Beaufort County, 7–56; 64). I was able to sort out what counties we were traveling through, as I have lived in South Carolina for nearly twenty years, but a state map marking the counties would help anyone attempting to use the guide on the road.

It was a joy to keep up with the history as we quickly passed the historical markers on our travels, although I am not sure my children would agree—they hid the guidebook from me on our return trip.

Meredith A. Love, Francis Marion University

Lydia Mattice Brandt, The South Carolina State House Grounds: A Guidebook (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021), 192 pp., paperback $19.99, ebook $19.99.

The South Carolina State House Grounds: A Guidebook provides a superb chronological and topical history of one of South Carolina’s most monumental and controversial achievements. Lydia Mattice Brandt’s book is a Page 232 →well-researched and easily understandable guide to the State House monuments, its layout, and its building development since the post-Revolutionary War period. Her analysis exposes how power and identity played an inordinate role in its creation. Furthermore, Brandt’s work details the complex interplay of past and present while the State House grounds took shape. This was especially pertinent to the monument selection timing and decisions, which reflected the state’s sponsorship of white supremacy symbolism. As Brandt observed, “The monuments, building, and relationships between them reveal stories of what people wanted to remember at certain times and for certain reasons, not objective narratives.”

Brandt’s book discloses the state-centric motives of South Carolina’s legislators when they expanded the grounds. Despite ongoing wrangling over various economic disputes and times of deprivation, the intentions of the legislators were clear. Even the statue of George Washington served to perpetuate an “attractive symbol of planter-politicians claiming sovereignty from the federal government in South Carolina,” although the Washington statue’s broken cane had been reportedly destroyed by malicious federal troops, disorderly Blacks, or both when Columbia received the brunt of General William T. Sherman’s destructive 1865 march through the state’s capital city.

Similarly, Brandt indicates the commemoration of the stars marking Sherman’s bombardment of the exterior State House walls connoted southern heroism for each “honorable scar.” Revealing the “Lost Cause” mythology’s durability among white South Carolinians and their political leaders, Brandt indicates that observers “likened [the bombardment strikes to] the State House to a human body” while the markings “testified to the emotions still attached to the event more than sixty years after the end of the war.” The Spanish-American War monument also displays nationalistic imagery that conforms to state-centric and white supremacy tendencies. It depicts an “idealized white soldier for the monument,” Brandt emphasizes, while ignoring the pivotal “participation of African-American servicemen in the Spanish-American War.” Rather, its creator, Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson, the only female sculptor on the State House grounds, constructed the monument to summon the spirit of reconciliation between the North and the South.

The State House grounds enable visitors to view monuments of controversial political figures. Brandt summarizes the intriguing history of these constructions, detailing their meanings once completed and afterward, and how the structures and the “understandings” about them comported with Page 233 →actual historical evidence. She describes the stories behind the statues honoring white South Carolina political patriarchs Wade Hampton, Benjamin Tillman, James F. Byrnes, and Strom Thurmond. Her descriptions not only notate the polemical aspects associated with each structure but also reveal that the legislators selected them to meld with the expansive, intricate pathways and ongoing office building construction.

Brandt describes how the individual political monuments provide physical portrayals of patriarchal white supremacy. Their heightened prominence symbolically counters the post-Civil War period of Black freedom struggles. For example, when it was unveiled in 1906, the essentially state-funded statue of Wade Hampton extolled him as the virtuous white elite who had redeemed the state from so-called Black Reconstruction dominance, depicting Hampton’s face as it looked when he served as governor and as a US Senator about a decade after the Civil War. The body of the statue showed Hampton in Confederate uniform atop a horse. Combined, the dual heroic actions of his civic and military opposition to federal intrusion over state and white dominion came to define his legacy and, thus, his statue.

The grounds also offer an oversized statue of Hampton’s archrival, Tillman. The monument to the so-called indomitable strongman of poor white South Carolina farmers and the state’s “first New Dealer,” as Byrnes commemorated Tillman upon its unveiling in 1940, serves as the ground’s most blatant representation of white supremacy. The statue’s overbearing, hovering depiction of Tillman stands as an exalted exemplification of Tillman’s endorsement of the Jim Crow system, his advocacy for lynching and disenfranchisement, and his public effrontery to Black freedom rights after his sponsorship of the South Carolina State Constitution of 1895. The latter stripped away most of the rights previously granted to African Americans during Reconstruction.

The more contemporary monuments to Byrnes and Thurmond offer additional concrete examples of the tilted nature of the State House grounds. Each politician staunchly endorsed Jim Crow segregation and encouraged formidable acts of white resistance to integration. However, as Brandt affirms, a promising development emerged when Thurmond’s daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whom Thurmond had fathered with a much younger African-American woman, got her name etched into the side of his statue, listed alongside Thurmond’s four other children.

Recently, the State House grounds have become more inclusive, nationalistic, and public servant oriented. Sculptor Ed Dwight’s 2001 African Page 234 →American History Monument epitomizes the most glaring but refreshing aberration from the earlier trend. It depicts the horrors and long, uplifting progression toward racial justice since 1670. It reveals chronological graphic portrayals of key events, developments, and personalities, and it defines the collective forms of struggle through a “series of words,” as Brandt put it, to describe the period of enslavement to freedom. “While it celebrates the very people that many of the people memorialized elsewhere on the grounds spent their lives oppressing,” Brandt astutely notes, “it does not directly confront these other monuments in its design or narrative.”

Even though the monument broke the mold, sculptor Dwight sanitized it to appease anxious state legislators. They feared a public controversy might erupt if it displayed too starkly the history of racial bigotry and violence. As Brandt revealed, “Dwight had imagined ‘hooded Klansmen burning crosses and the bodies of Blacks hanging from trees’” but refrained from sculpting them. He did the same when it came to the early nineteenth-century Denmark Vesey slave revolt plot. He submitted to the state commission’s desires, despite the fact that the budget for the monument comprised only private donations.

Further contemporary monuments focus on the civic sacrifices of South Carolinians and the nation and commemorate a hidden treasure for future generations. In 2005–06, the state legislature overrode Governor Mark Sanford’s veto to utilize taxpayer funds to memorialize the law enforcement officers killed while on duty since 1797, and they funded a separate monument to honor armed forces personnel. Additionally, the 1986 Columbia Bicentennial Time Capsule generates intrigue because of its “Looking Back—Reaching Forward” granite marker that stores letters and other primary sources from 1936. In 2036, South Carolinians will open the secret treasure on the state’s two hundred fiftieth birthday.

The South Carolina State House Grounds is a monumental achievement. Now that the grounds, according to a 2007 law restricting additional monuments, are essentially fixed, Brandt’s work is the definitive book on the contested history of its progression into a beautiful landscape indicative of South Carolina’s rich but tragic history. The 2015 removal of the Confederate battle flag after the horrific murder of nine African-American parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church is among the many invaluable topics in Brandt’s seminal work. Whether one aspires to use its contents as a guide, as a selective visitor’s manual, or as a resource to understand the state’s overall history, Brandt’s Page 235 →book is an excellent analysis of the grounds and its fragmentary but colossal development. After reading this book, perhaps modern visitors will aim for a future that diverges from the themes that most State House grounds monuments propagate.

Jason R. Kirby, Francis Marion University