Whatever wave of momentum the resolution might generate—however small—McDaniel intended to ride it. He immediately formed what he dubbed the Unity Ribbon Network and announced what was to be the first of many Unity Forums, invitation-only events meant to facilitate frank discussion about race relations. About twenty-five people, half of those invited, showed up for the first meeting, held in an auxiliary office complex about a mile northeast of the courthouse square. Each member of the group—which included the mayor, the sheriff, school district personnel, various religious leaders, and several members of the media—took his or her seat within a circle of chairs, and after a bit of prompting from McDaniel’s wife, the conversation turned deeply personal. Shannon Long, director of missions for the Laurens Baptist Association, remembered playing baseball as a child with kids from the neighborhood—black and white—until someone informed his mother, and that was the end of that. Gregory Fielder, the local business owner who’d phoned the police after Hunter plowed his van into the shop, shared his belief that America had always been a racist nation: “Ninety-nine percent of the history books are incorrect, and this is what we are teaching our children,” he said. McDaniel participated, too, reminding the attendees that “if you’re forty years old and honest, you’ll admit that there was at one time an unspoken rule that blacks didn’t look at a white man.” His focus, however, seemed to be more about finding common ground with the majority-white crowd than highlighting issues of systemic inequality. “Everybody’s been exposed to prejudice,” he said, rather charitably.
For one member of the group—Reverend Kennedy—McDaniel’s approach left much to be desired. David Prichard Hunter, after all, had resorted to violence because he believed the town wasn’t doing enough to root out racism; he claimed he was taking a stand against apathy. Having a closed-door, invitation-only chat, then, hardly seemed like the best way to demonstrate that Laurens was addressing its issues head-on. It also flew in the face of Rev. Kennedy’s personal message, which was that no one in Laurens could escape responsibility for the environment that had fostered the Redneck Shop. In the previous weeks, he had railed against religious leaders for being too passive, frequently telling the press that it would “take a lot more than prayer” to solve the town’s race problem. He distrusted most civil servants, who he claimed were “more concerned about economics than the devastating psychological impact the KKK has on an entire race of African Americans.” He had called on law enforcement to increase surveillance of the Redneck Shop—to “step up its pace”—a subtle jab at officers who had allowed the Klan to flourish under their noses.
After sitting in the meeting and listening to the first couple of speakers, he stormed out—only to return a few hours later and then storm out again. His second appearance, during which he claimed the group was not having a “true dialogue,” effectively and abruptly ended the event (a gossipy tidbit that didn’t escape mention by the local press). “There are a number of people who are in a rage because this could have been handled differently,” he said to reporters afterward.
Though both men were united in their opposition to Howard’s shop, the rift between McDaniel and Kennedy introduced into the larger controversy a question of ownership: Who owned the protests and marches, and the movement they produced? In the days immediately following Rev. Jesse Jackson’s appearance in Laurens, when press coverage focused more on Jackson’s celebrity status than the dark history of the Klan or the efforts of the community, Kennedy had been quick to reclaim the issue as a local one. “We don’t want to lose sight of whose fight this is,” he told the Clinton Chronicle. “We will ask [Jackson] to return when we’ve gotten some work done.”
When it came to local-level leadership, however, it wasn’t really clear who was in charge—McDaniel or Kennedy. Their styles could not have been more different. McDaniel was conservative and reserved, more interested in calming things down than riling people up. “He always had a passion for equality among the races,” said Jim Coleman, who served alongside McDaniel on the council for twenty years. “He would always bring that up, but he would do it in a very professional manner.” Kennedy, on the other hand, was the protest minister. He was loud, angry, unapologetic. He wanted people to look hard issues in the face. But even in the first weeks of the controversy, it must have felt as though whatever control he had of the situation was already being wrested away from him.
McDaniel’s Unity Ribbon campaign, for example, had received glowing press coverage. But while Kennedy’s initial rally had been largely praised, others were suggesting that the protests be moved away from the square, because Kennedy was generating undue attention for the Redneck Shop. “Some people in Laurens, they called it a disgrace,” he later recalled. “They blamed me for bringing top publicity to the place. You know, ‘The biggest problem in Laurens County is David Kennedy.’ ”
He knew it wasn’t uncommon for protesters to take more heat than the thing they were protesting. But Kennedy also believed that you generally had to make people uncomfortable to generate meaningful change. His version of the fight, then, would be the very opposite of a private meeting. It would have to be as public as possible.
With a small contingent of local ministers, Rev. Kennedy appeared before South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus and urged its members to condemn the Redneck Shop specifically—as opposed to racism in general—and stressed the importance of “militant nonviolence” as a strategy. It was a page out of Martin Luther King Jr.’s playbook. Time had already softened the sharpest edges of King’s most radical rhetoric, but the image of him as a crowd-pleasing pacifist—a “civil rights teddy bear,” as Rev. Jackson once observed—obscures the fact that he was polarizing and divisive in his time, and his methods deeply controversial. Ten days before his death, while speaking at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly in New York, he professed his belief in the power of disruption: “I can’t see the answer in riots. On the other hand, I can’t see the answer in tender supplications for justice. I see the answer in an alternative to both of these, and that is militant nonviolence that is massive enough, that is attention-getting enough, to dramatize the problems, that will be as attention-getting as a riot, that will not destroy life or property in the process.” In his own way, Kennedy’s style—the antagonism, the willingness to offend—had also, always, been about disruption as a means of subverting the status quo.
As it turned out, the members of the Black Caucus were likewise interested in disruption, in part because fighting the Redneck Shop could be turned into something of a referendum on the governor of South Carolina, David Beasley.
Only sixteen months into office, Beasley’s relationship with the caucus had already turned rocky. Not long after his inauguration, assembly members had voiced concerns that he was failing to appoint enough African Americans to key posts and positions. Then, in the summer of 1995, black lawmakers alleged that Beasley had threatened to veto their entire legislative agenda—some $7.2 million earmarked for welfare reform, programs at South Carolina State University, and African American studies at the University of South Carolina—if they didn’t vote with Republicans on issues coming before the General Assembly (a charge Beasley did not deny). By fall, the only African American woman on the governor’s staff, a legislative liaison named Wilma Neal, had resigned, citing ostracism and exclusion from even the most routine of meetings. Beasley needed to rehabilitate his image—and fast. In December, he announced the formation of a Race Relations Commission to “tear down [the] wall” of racial division, only to anger everyone all over again by declaring two weeks later, at a summit organized by the Palmetto Project, that race relations in South Carolina were “good.”
“Race relations…today are more tense, more filled with fear, frustration, and anger than they have been at any time in a generation,” Representative Ralph Canty, a Democrat from Sumter, said at a press conference. As he and other members of the caucus well knew, Beas
ley’s image problems and the arrival of the Redneck Shop were far from the only signs of trouble. Something was brewing. In the month of April alone, a white man had been arrested for spray-painting KKK on an African American couple’s property outside Charleston; the FBI had launched an investigation into a cross-burning in Canterbury, a mostly black neighborhood in southern Greenville County; and national condemnation poured on the state following the release of dashcam video depicting a white state trooper assaulting a black motorist. There were concerns, too, about a racially motivated wave of church burnings. In the previous eighteen months, fires had been reported at more than sixty predominantly black churches across the South, triggering widespread press coverage and a massive federal investigation.
After Rev. Kennedy’s appearance before the Caucus, state senator Maggie Glover called on the governor and both houses of the General Assembly to “loudly and unequivocally” condemn the Redneck Shop. Representative Joe Neal went after Governor Beasley more personally, calling him out for his silence: “Today there is no message from our governor that he understands how injurious the presence of the Redneck Shop is to racial harmony, and thereby to both the human and economic development of our people.” Rev. Kennedy, meanwhile, vowed to keep up the momentum at home. He announced plans for a second rally in the courthouse square, and invited the former pastor of Mount Zion Baptist, allegedly burned by the Klan in 1971, to speak. A new sense of urgency had been injected into his speeches and sermons. At a Wednesday-night community meeting, for example, he explained that Howard was using the shop “to recruit members to the KKK and his goal is to create a race war.”
It was around this time that Kennedy started bringing reporters down to the old trestle over on River Street. For weeks, he had been sharing the story of his great-uncle’s death with his parishioners and members of the community. Back in March, he had tacked a poster-size photo of the Puckett lynching to the front of his pulpit—the same photo that had circulated through town in the 1950s as a deterrent to integration. He had carried it with him at the first major rally against the Redneck Shop in an attempt to shock people out of complacency. “In order to understand why black churches are burning,” he explained to a reporter from the Associated Press, “you have to understand how racism happens. America would love to put all the blame on the Ku Klux Klan. But what creates this atmosphere that allows the Klan to become bold?”
For Kennedy, this fight was about more than a store, and the Redneck Shop was more than merely crass or distasteful. The Klan was recruiting. Without some kind of check against it, without a prolonged and continued fight, the shop’s presence, and its message, would be normalized. “As long as the Redneck Shop is there,” he told reporters, “violence is inevitable.”
* * *
—
Suzanne Coe was a thirty-one-year-old Greenville-based attorney who had risen to national prominence in 1995 after winning Shannon Faulkner admission to the prestigious—and previously all-male—Citadel military college in Charleston. Her law practice had an emphasis on individual rights cases with a mostly progressive bent. Locally, however, she was best known for a willingness to represent even the least savory of characters. Her client roster included a Lexington County hitman and a former state senator charged with tax evasion. A prominent anti-abortion activist had labeled her “a crusader for the weird and perverse.” Coe’s ex-husband, fellow attorney Rob Hoskins, once joked: “I honestly believe that she would defend the head of the Ku Klux Klan.”
When the head of the Klan came calling, however, she had no interest in taking his case.
Coe, a petite woman with bushy brown hair and what the Greenville News once described as “can’t-sit-still” energy, had come to John Howard’s attention for her defense of a gentlemen’s club, Diamonds, which opened outside Greenville in the fall of 1994, to the great consternation of local residents. In response, the Greenville County Council adopted a zoning ordinance regulating the locations of adult entertainment businesses, and then went on to pass an outright ban on public nudity. The fight generated enough press that the Laurens County Council, one month before the Redneck Shop opened its doors, briefly debated adopting a similar ordinance.
Coe, however, had sided with Diamonds—as well as a local exotic dancer, Melissa Wolf—arguing that the ban on nudity was a violation of free speech. “I see it as, once again, the Baptists come out against dancing,” Coe said at the time. “[The club] is going to be there. They might as well get over it and grow up.” The case wound up going all the way to the State Supreme Court, where Coe won.
“She’s not afraid of controversy,” a former colleague once explained to reporters. Though the cases she took often exposed her to negative press and a fair amount of harassment, she had never been one to back down. Still, it took a bit of prodding before she agreed to meet with John Howard. “I was discussing it with my partner,” she later told the New York Times, “and he said: ‘Oh, I see. You only stand up for civil rights you believe in.’ ”
While Coe tried to wrap her head around the implications of representing a Klansman, John Howard got busy attempting to soften his public image. The boarded-up windows at the shop were replaced with glass, and the words JESUS LOVES EVERYBODY were painted beneath the name of the business. He pledged that the museum would be moved “out of sight”—that is, to the old screening room at the rear of the theater, which had always been his plan—and that the store would soon sell only Confederate-themed trinkets. He also commissioned a large Confederate flag, some five or six feet across, printed with the words HERITTAGE [sic] NOT HATE.
The slogan—a way of claiming southern pride without owning the legacy of slavery—had only recently been popularized, thanks to a man named Charles Lunsford, a leader of the largest Confederate heritage group in the States, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). The group’s original mission was to preserve history—specifically, a Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. Its aim, according to its 1896 constitution, was “not to create or foster, in any manner, any feeling against the North, but to hand down to posterity the story of the glory of the men who wore the gray.” By the 1990s, however, there was division in the ranks. At issue: a shift from traditional pursuits, such as Civil War reenactments and the maintenance of Confederate gravesites, to a more militant focus on “heritage defense”—in particular, the right to display Confederate flags and symbols in public spaces. Traditionalists in the SCV felt as though the organization was being radicalized and politicized; more activist members, meanwhile, wanted to aggressively prosecute alleged “heritage violations” in court.
The flash point came in 1992, when Georgia’s governor, Zell Miller, proposed removing the “southern cross” from the official state flag. Lunsford, in his capacity as “chief of heritage defense” for the SCV, was invited to debate Miller on a radio broadcast of Larry King Live, where he expressed concerns that flag removal was the beginning of a slippery slope.
LUNSFORD: In 1986, the NAACP began passing resolutions in their national convention to bring about the eradication of everything Confederate….We began to see our street names change….We saw the clamoring to remove Confederate monuments….What I’m getting at here is this is seen by the vast majority of southern people as nothing more than widespread oppression against our culture….The vast majority of Georgians do not…see [the Confederate flag] as a racist symbol.
GOV. MILLER: Well, first of all, let’s get the difference between the official symbol of a state—which the flag is—and memorials. Georgia has got many, many memorials to the Confederacy. We’ve got over 1,100 historical markers all along our highways. We’ve got 400 monuments on our county and city squares. We’ve got three battlefields that are run by the federal parks system, and one battlefield by the state. I am not talking about doing anything with these memorials, because that is history. They are memorials. The flag is the official symbol of what a state is, and a flag should not be offe
nsive to forty percent of its people.
LUNSFORD: Well, Mr. Miller, bear in mind that you may not be talking about those monuments, but somebody is….You may only be talking about the flag, but each of these monuments you go to throughout the country has their own little set of arguments, and when you look at them in their totality, we are under oppression, and people are beginning to resent that.
Lunsford went on to lament the way in which hate groups, including the Klan, had “co-opted” the flag for nefarious use: “The racists have always carried…the Confederate flag, because they are trying to win influence with the southern people, because the southern people love that flag,” he said. The slogan “Heritage Not Hate” (which Lunsford coined around the same time as the interview) became a way of reclaiming something lost, of restoring some “stolen” honor. But the slogan masks some uncomfortable truths.
For one thing, the SCV has long done business with white supremacists. Its leader during the civil rights era, William McCain, was an avowed segregationist. While president of Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi), he worked to block the admission of Clyde Kennard, a black Korean War veteran, in 1956, 1957, and 1959—two, three, and five years, respectively, after passage of Brown v. Board of Education. A year later he made a speech in Chicago, sponsored by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, in which he claimed that southerners “insisted” on living in a segregated society and did not support the rights of black men and women to vote. “The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands,” he said.
As for Charles Lunsford, he was ousted from the SCV in 1994 after giving a speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist outfit classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. He later joined the Atlanta-based Heritage Preservation Association, which has its own troubled history with issues of race. (In 2003, the president of the HPA’s Atlanta branch, Linda Sewell, personally accepted a “certificate of appreciation” from the Klan.)
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