South Carolina

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.