South
Carolina– The Most Racist State?
We
all know that South Carolina has a dismal history when it comes to how
it’s treated African-Americans, but few are aware just how racist
South Carolina’s history really is.
There are
few places in America that have treated Native Americans as brutally.
South Carolinians were the largest slave traders of Native Americans in
the Americas. The peaceful Cherokee were either enslaved, driven out of
the state, or murdered.
South Carolina
became the wealthiest of the thirteen colonies because of the African
slave trade. Charleston Harbor was the main entry point for bringing slaves
into the country. No other colony relied on slaves more, and soon blacks
outnumbered whites. By 1760 Charleston was the richest town in America.
Despite its wealth, residents lived in constant fear of slave revolts
and resorted to draconian measures to keep their slaves in submission.
After the
Stono Rebellion occurred in 1740, one of the deadliest slave revolts in
the nation’s history, South Carolina reacted with the slave codes.
Because the rebellion was led by educated blacks, laws were put into place
that prohibited blacks from meeting and mandated that their children wouldn’t
be allowed schooling. In the Twentieth Century, South Carolina would have
the largest percentage of its people in America who couldn’t read
or write, mainly due to its determination to keep blacks uneducated.
The Scottish
Rite was created in direct response to the successful slave revolution
in Haiti. Its original location is at Shepherd’s Tavern in Charleston.
The Scottish Rite led the anti-Catholic, anti-immigration Americanism
movement that revived the KKK. They became enormously powerful. In 1928
for example, 59 United States Senators and 317 members of the House of
Representatives were 33 degree members of the Scottish Rite. Later, the
exclusive club fought against integration and the Civil Rights movement.
The first
Baptist church in the South was formed in Charleston, South Carolina.
Southern Baptists supported slavery and believed that biblical scripture
supported it. It wasn’t until recently, that the church moved away
from this position.
On April
12th, 1861 cadets from The Citadel fired the first shots against the United
States at Ft. Sumter, South Carolina. That was when South Carolina became
the first state to commit treason and leave the nation due to its absolute
support of slavery.
Walk through
Charleston and you’ll run into the Confederate Museum run by the
Daughters of the Confederacy. It’s disturbing how many Confederate
memorials there are, but since the Confederate flag flies over the state’s
capital, it is not really surprising.
You’ll
also see people flying a blue flag with a crescent moon and a Palmetto
tree on it. That’s the flag for the Palmetto Republic. People who
fly it are calling for the independence of South Carolina.
Organizations
like The League of the South call for the independence of the old South,
along with the repeal of affirmative action, attacks on immigration, the
revitalization of Anglo-Celtic culture, and the return to a white Christian
state.
There’s
no doubt why Bush went to the race card in 2000 and the Clinton’s
did this year. It’s a mistake, however, to think that Americans are
racist because of a few voters in South Carolina. Obama won’t get
white voters in South Carolina for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t
mean the rest of the country feels the same way.
It is difficult to imagine a state with a worse record on how they’ve
treated their fellow human beings than South Carolina. To think that the
South Carolina primary is one of the big ones that determine our president
is hard to believe.
Aaron
Dahl
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