10/30/2017
We have received a request or two for the Timeline portion of our performance! Check it out here. The text was created by Zach Ellis. It was updated by Anna Abhau Elliott, Crystal Irby and Connor Vetter. Let us know if you have any questions about our sources.
TIMELINE
1652 Pedro Farnandis is born in Spain. He is an indentured servant of Captain James Neale, who brings Pedro to America.
1856 South Carolina House Representative Preston Brooks attacks Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Brooks beats Sumner over the head with a metal-tipped cane, in dispute over whether or not Kanas will be a slave-state.
1860 Pedro Farnandis’ grandsons, James and Lemuel, appear in the census as residents of Spartanburg County. They were both slaveholders. Their last name was now spelled Fernandes. The census also contains a slave schedule, but only records age, gender, and a check mark to denote an enslaved person.
1861 Civil War erupts. 1863, President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves only in rebellious southern states.
1865 The 13th Amendment passes, abolishing slavery—except for those convicted of a crime.
1870 Reconstruction. Black men are granted the vote, leading to the election of Joseph Rainey, a former slave and the first African American to serve in the United States House of Representatives. He is followed by several more southern African-American representatives, including seven from South Carolina. Jonathan Jasper Wright becomes the first African American to serve on the South Carolina Supreme Court. He serves as Supreme Court Justice until 1877.
1870 Harriet and Charles Fernanders, and their daughter Lucie, are listed in the census with their names, ages, races, and occupations.
1872 The testimony that you have heard here is published in Washington. It misspells Harriet’s last name as “Hernandes.”
1876 End of Reconstruction approaches. The Ku Klux Klan, Redshirts, and rifle clubs continue to terrorize black citizens.
1876 Hamburg Massacre, Aiken, South Carolina. Redshirts, a white militia group associated with Wade Hampton’s Democratic Campaign, clash with a black militia who were part of the National Guard. One white man and six black men were murdered. Although a jury found 94 white members of the mob guilty, none were punished. The Hamburg Massacre, as it came to be known, was the first of numerous incidents of racial violence that year.
1876 Former Confederate General Wade Hampton is elected Governor of South Carolina. He helps raise funds to defend white citizens accused of violence against African Americans.
1880 Charles and Harriet Fernanders have extended their family to include three sons, William, John, and Bruce. They are listed in the census. Lucie is not mentioned; perhaps she got married.
The Black Codes enacted in South Carolina at the end of the Civil War evolve into what we’ve come to know as Jim Crow Laws.
1890 Pitchfork Ben Tillman is elected Governor of South Carolina. He openly supports the persecution and lynching of African Americans.
1897 Willie Fernanders, Jr., Harriet’s first grandson, is born.
1910 Coleman Livingston Blease, who runs on a pro-lynching platform, is elected Governor of South Carolina. He is a protégé of Ben Tillman.
1915 “The Birth of a Nation” is released. The film romanticizes the Ku Klux Klan and demonizes the Reconstruction Era’s black politicians. President Woodrow Wilson shows the film at the White House. The film remains a mainstay of cinema studies today. The film is based on a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr., whose papers are housed at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina.
September 12, 1918 Bruce Fernanders, Harriet’s son, registers for the draft in World War I.
1924 Blease is elected to the US Senate. During his term, he proposes federal legislation banning miscegenation, and reads a poem on the senate floor called “Niggers in the White House.” It was so offensive, other senators had it struck from the record.
1930 Bruce Fernanders is now a married farmer living in North Carolina.
1938 William Fernanders, Sr., Harriet’s son, passes away at 66. He is buried at Lower Shady Grove Baptist Church Cemetary in Woodruff. His mother’s maiden name was Lipcomb.
1957 William Fernanders, Jr., Harriet’s grandson, passes away at 60. His grave is located in Spartanburg, in the cemetery on Cemetery St.
1960’s Spartanburg is home to several important figures in the Civil Rights movement. Robert E. Scoggins, a Spartanburg resident and millworker, is the Grand Wizard of the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan from 1962-1969.
During this time, Matthew J. Perry works as Spartanburg’s only African-American attorney in his office across from Carver High School. Although Mr. Perry was forced to wait for his cases to be called in the courthouse balcony, along with all the other African-American citizens, he helped lead the fight to desegregate both Clemson University and the University of South Carolina in 1963, and he integrated numerous hospitals, parks, restaurants, golf courses, and beaches as well. Also during this time, a young Carver High School social studies teacher, James Clyburn, meets with Mr. Perry to discuss the social issues and climate of the day.
1961 The South Carolina State Legislature, under Democratic Governor Ernest Fritz Hollings, votes to raise the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina State House to protest the desegregation happening throughout the country.
1964 Wofford College becomes officially desegregated when Carver High School student Albert Gray enrolls. Douglas Jones becomes the first African American to graduate from Wofford College in 1969. As the Civil rights movement progressed, Jim Crow laws are finally banned in 1965.
1979 Matthew Perry becomes South Carolina’s first African American federal district court judge. The federal courthouse in Columbia is named for him.
1985 African American attorney Ernest A. Finney, who fought several notable Civil Rights cases including the defense of the Friendship 9’s efforts to integrate a lunch counter at McCrory’s in Rock Hill, ascends to the South Carolina Supreme Court. In 1994, Justice Finney becomes the first African American citizen to ever serve in the role of Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, and he held that seat until his retirement in 2000.
Former Carver High School teacher James Clyburn becomes the first African-American from South Carolina in almost a century to serve in the United States House of Representatives when he is elected in 1998. He still serves in Congress today.
2007 Spartanburg native and resident Donald W. Beatty becomes the third African American to serve on our state’s highest court, and on May 25th, 2016, Justice Beatty became the second African American elected Chief Justice in history of the South Carolina Supreme Court.
Clearly, tremendous progress has been made and we have cause to celebrate. However, we cannot rest on our laurels or assume that all is now well. Neither the examples discussed earlier, nor the election of South Carolina’s first African American senator Tim Scott, nor even the election of our nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama in 2008, can cure the systemic prejudicial issues in our society.
June 17th, 2015 Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, attended a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. He opened fire, killing 9 people, including Clementa C. Pinckney, a member of the South Carolina Senate.
June 27th, 2015 Bree Newsome scales the flagpole on the South Carolina State House grounds and forcibly removes the Confederate flag. She is arrested for her actions. The flag is officially taken down two weeks later.
August 12th, 2017 White Supremacists rally around a statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. Anti-protestors arrived and violence erupted. James Alex Field, Jr. drove a car into the crowd in an act of domestic terrorism, killing activist Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
We must not forget that positive gains made by African-American citizens following the Civil War were quickly erased when society’s pendulum swung back in the other direction. What will happen if we forget our history?
Photo by Zach Parks
