By Charlie Smith, Charleston, SC
A distant relative of mine on both my mother’s and father’s sides of the family (yes, I am a native South Carolinian) was once elected to the office now held by Governor Mark Sanford. One of the sayings that got him elected and kept him in office as a noted 20th century…yes 20th Century…Governor and later U.S. Senator was his declaration that “To educate a nigger is to ruin a good field hand.” Sayings like this and equally offensive daily rants during his tenure as Governor and later as US Senator were designed to pit poor white upstate millworkers and sharecroppers against African Americans and against the evil politically dominant Charleston “aristocrats” and “dandies”; the kind of man he described as “…some fellow who does nothing, lives on his daddy’s name and doesn’t pay his debts.”; and more colorfully as those who “fiddled away their nights watching decadent theater shows, yelling with delight at a foul mouth Yankee woman and a man dressed as “The Pink Lady.”
As governor, Coleman Livingston Blease fought with all his might against a law that would require all children under the age of fourteen in South Carolina to attend school. He preached against this legislation to poor whites ranting that “The Bible says a great deal about obedience to parents and reverence for parents and believing in the Book and its teachings, as I do. I say to the parents, and for the sake of their children, our country and for their future, keep within your own control the rearing and education of your own children.”