"Too-La-Loo"

"A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation's four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out."

In a 2018 Atlantic article, Ethan J. Kytle and Brian write about "When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday."

"How a Textile Magnate Turned the Party of Lincoln Into the Party of Trump

"If you've ever wondered how the GOP can be both the party of Lincoln and defenders of the Confederate flag, a refuge for protectionists and the disaffected working class and protector of the most powerful multinational corporations, a party of Pauls and Bushes, Kochs and Tea Partiers, and, yes, Donald Trump—it helps to take a closer look at a man who helped start it all."

In a 2015 Politico article, Jonathan M. Katz profiles conservative capo Roger Milliken.

"Overwhelming Evidence Showing the Central Role Racial Politics Played in the Republican Party's Rise to Power After the Civil Rights Movement"

"Buoyed by the surprising strength of Workman's campaign, South Carolina’s junior senator, Strom Thurmond, abandoned the Democratic Party in 1964 and joined the Republicans. Sixteen years earlier, Thurmond had left the Democrats briefly to run for president as a 'Dixiecrat' on the States’ Rights ticket. His surprise announcement in 1964 signaled the start of what political scientists call the 'great white switch.'"

Sid Bedingfield at The Conversation discusses the rise of the Republican Party in 1960s South Carolina. 

"A Party That Will Need to Significantly Change Its Ideological Direction—or One on the Verge of Breaking Apart"

"The white working-class base of the party has been devastated by stagnating wages, globalization and de-industrialization, and various forms of social and cultural breakdown. And through it all the Republican Party has offered little beyond tax cuts for the wealthy and stern, moralistic reprimands ('Stop whining and get a job!'). That's hardly a strategy inclined to generate long-term loyalty and enthusiasm for the party.
"But that's just the beginning."

Damon Linker at The Week looks at Donald Trump and the Republican primary in South Carolina.

And Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Trump's South Carolina victory.

As does Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week.

And Robert P. Jones at The Atlantic calls Trump supporters "nostalgia voters," while Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate issues a warning about what making "America great again" means.

"They've Now Passed It onto Us"

"That—that history can't be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But more importantly, an open heart."That's what I felt this week—an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what's called upon right now, I think. It's what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'
"That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible."


The Washington Post provides a transcript of President Obama's eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.


James Fallows at The Atlantic reacts to the speech.


And David Remnick at The New Yorker discusses Obama's previous ten days.

"South Carolina Has a Very Unique and Deplorable History When It Comes to Slavery and Race"

"It goes way back to the American Revolution. South Carolina had delegates who insisted that Thomas Jefferson take out a clause that condemned slavery from the Declaration of Independence. It was South Carolina delegates who got the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause into the Constitution. It was South Carolina who was the leader in nullification, the leader in secession. The first shot of the Civil War was shot there. South Carolina was the only Southern state in which the majority of white families owned slaves."


Elias Isquith in Salon interviews Eric Foner.

"Death Squads Suppressed the Black Vote and Killed Some 150 People"

"In a way, the memorialization of Wade Hampton might be even more insulting than the flying of the Confederate flag. The flag's defenders have convinced many people that they're not commemorating slavery, just Southern history as a whole. (I don't believe that argument has merit; I'm just saying others do.) But what else are Wade Hampton's statue and the Wade Hampton Building besides tributes to his anti-democratic seizure of power? What else could the celebration of a political figure know only for his connection to white supremacist violence possibly be, except an endorsement of white supremacist violence?"


Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate discusses how South Carolina "honors white supremacists."

"He Identified Their Situation with That of the Israelites"

"In 1817, following a dispute over burial ground with white members of Charleston's Methodist Episcopal church (reportedly, white congregants built a 'hearse house' on black burial ground), some 1,400 black Christians formed a separate congregation, according to the National Park Service website on Charleston. A year earlier, the African Methodist Episcopal church denomination had been formally established in Philadelphia, and the church community in Charleston set up their church in that denomination in 1818. Free black man and church leader Morris Brown is widely credited as the founder of Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal church, but many cite Denmark Vesey as a co-founder, including the church’s website. Even before Vesey and his associates began discussing plans for an uprising, the church was seen as a threat to the white domination of Charleston. Within months of the church’s establishment, the Charleston city guard arrested 140 free men and slaves for worshipping in violation of city ordinances. Egerton theorized that Vesey might have been among them. In early 1821, Charleston's city council warned against church leaders allowing African Church classes to become 'schools for slaves.' By December of 1821, Vesey was plotting the slave uprising that would make him famous."


On the day after the Charleston shootings, Naomi Shavin in The New Republic remembers Denmark Vesey.

"A High-Pitched Voice that Merged the Grievance of Dixie with the Paranoia of Joseph McCarthy"

"Like some malevolent Forrest Gump, Thurmond was there at all the major choke points of modern conservative history: the 1948 breakaway from the Democrats of the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic (or Dixiecrat) Party, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, and Ronald Reagan’s ascendance in 1980. A Democrat until 1964, Thurmond was the fulcrum on which the parties traded places on race issues. His trademark use of nasty populism dressed up in constitutional principle has echoes today on the far right—the territory of Rush Limbaugh and the shrillest of the Tea Partiers. Yet he also helped cement the association between conservatives on the one hand and big business, the Christian right, and anticommunism on the other."

In The Washington Monthly, Michael O'Donnell reviews Joseph Crespino's Strom Thurmond's America.

"Among Freedpeople"

"On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day--a day set aside 'for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land.'"

Jim Downs at History News Network discusses the origins of Memorial Day.

"Look at the Honest Words of the Secessionists"

"I’ve heard it from women and from men, from sober people and from people liquored up on anti-Washington talk. The North wouldn’t let us govern ourselves, they say, and Congress laid on tariffs that hurt the South. So we rebelled. Secession and the Civil War, in other words, were about small government, limited federal powers and states’ rights.
"But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union—which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy—reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery."

Edward Ball in The New York Times explains the origins of the Civil War.

Routes

"In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House."

In The New York Times, Rachel L. Swans and Jodi Kantor trace Michelle Obama's family tree.

And a variety of writers and professors offer their opinions.

African or American?

"What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents -- including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship's muster, both of which list Equiano's place of birth as South Carolina -- came as a shock. 'I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,' Mr. Carretta says. 'The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he's free, he's an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, "What's your name? Where are you from?"'"

Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the dispute over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace.