Mike Couick
In is best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey offers this sound advice: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” It’s a pursuit writers and philosophers have encouraged for thousands of years—from the Stoics, to Francis of Assisi, to influential theologian Paul Tillich who said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”
Over the last century, there have been powerful voices from within our state echoing this call for understanding. These writers and activists provide perspectives, characters and experiences that put us in another’s shoes for a walk beyond our fences.
Two of the most prominent South Carolina storytellers of the early 20th century wrote about the black experience in America, even though they were white and from privileged classes. Julia
Peterkin’s husband owned a cotton plantation near St. Matthews. She based the characters in her 1928 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Scarlet Sister Mary on the Gullah people working her family’s land. Dubose Heyward, best known for co-writing the renowned opera Porgy and Bess, offered a new perspective on race and class. His 1929 novel Mamba’s Daughters focuses on Charleston’s black aristocracy.
Mind of the South, written by Gaffney-born journalist W.J. Cash in 1941, held a harsh light on our region. The book’s frank critique of the South’s class hatred, racism and cruelty wasn’t fully appreciated until its analysis proved prophetic during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Pat Conroy’s canon is as deep as the Atlantic waters by which he sets his stories, but the one I’m choosing is The Water is Wide. It’s a memoir about his experience as a teacher trying to connect with the people of Daufuskie Island, most of whom were direct descendants of slaves and had little contact with the mainland.
Dori Sanders, who still runs a roadside peach stand in York County, set her award-winning 1990 novel Clover on a farm in her hometown. It takes on race, culture and family from the perspective of a black teen. Following her father’s sudden death, she and her family must forge a relationship with the white woman he had just married.
I asked Mrs. Sanders to make recommendations to this list of South Carolina voices. She enthusiastically put forth poet and Conway native Nikky Finney, whom she said writes “with raw emotion” of the African American experience. Finney’s Head Off & Split won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011.
I also asked my friend Dr. Bobby Donaldson, a scholar of African American life and culture, for suggestions. He directed me to three more distinct voices: Benjamin Mays, Marian Wright Edelman and Eugene Robinson.
Mays, a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is considered the father of the civil rights movement. His autobiography Born to Rebel tells us about his upbringing in Greenwood County where he was exposed to turn of the century riots and tense racial relations.
Dr. King mentored Marian Wright Edelman, who wrote about the experience in her book Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors. The trailblazing activist, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund, also celebrated the lives of her parents and the Bennettsville women who gave her love and guidance.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Robinson was a teenager in 1968 when the Orangeburg Massacre occurred near his home. The event, in which South Carolina Highway Patrol officers fired into a crowd of protesters and killed three African Americans, is part of a personal exploration of race and identity in his memoir Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.
These voices can help us understand the evolution and challenges of race relations in our state. We also need fresh voices, not just about race relations but about where we are as South Carolinians.
Last month, teenagers from across the state participated in our Virtual Youth Experience, a digital program in which high school students engaged with state and national leaders. They are currently producing podcasts and videocasts about their experiences in our changing times.
In a future column, I’ll highlight those voices as they seek to understand and envision a brighter future for the Palmetto State.