African-Americans emerge from long struggle
History marked by slavery and Reconstruction,
segregation and the fight for civil rights
By Steven Edwards
"We can build a more hopeful America and that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America."
– Barack Obama: announcing his entrance into the 2008 U.S. presidential race
BEAUFORT, S.C. - A picture of Barack and Michelle Obama hangs over Robert (Ralph) Middleton's living room hearth as the 82-year-old African-American recounts his family history back to his oldest known ancestor, a slave named Richard who died in about 1830.
The stories they tell attest to the historic nature of Obama's election as the first African-American U.S. president -- even if the two men happen to disagree politically about the country's decision.
Indeed, the collective narrative of this region in and around South Carolina's sea islands is at the heart of the evolving story of the African-American's lot through slavery, Reconstruction, migration, segregation, the civil rights struggle and (now) the presidency.
"Here we are voting to make an African-American president and my great-great-great-grandfather Richard would have been kept so ignorant that he likely didn't know what a president was," said Middleton, a father of six.
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| Robert (Ralph) Middleton: recounts family history back to 1830 |
Elliott, a staunch proponent of small government, agrees an Obama victory marks an important political milestone for the United States, but remains as much focused on the Democrat's platform, which he considers "too liberal."
"We're asking what will the changes be that he promises?" said the former U.S. marine and father of three.
The thousands of hectares the Elliotts once owned throughout of the sea islands and mainland are long gone from the family ledger -- confiscated most likely for lapsed taxes after the Union army occupied the Beaufort area in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out.
Middleton's family bought 4.5 hectares of former plantation land on the sea island of St. Helena, where Middleton grew up and is now retired. They'd earned the $55 purchase price working for the Union army on the same plantation where they'd toiled as slaves before its owner fled.
"You had this total reversal of fortune to the extent that slaves who had been living in servants' quarters in the back yard became, in some cases, owners of the houses in town," said Evan Thompson, executive director of the Historic Beaufort Foundation.
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| Obama's 2009 inauguration |
"We've got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country. We've got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding . . . This country wants to move beyond these kinds of things."
– Barack Obama: speech on race
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Beaufort's role in African-American history was significant.
It was here, for example, that northern philanthropists took advantage of the early Union occupation to establish the first schools for blacks as part of the wider Port Royal Experiment aimed at making them self-sufficient. Also showing up at that time was Harriet Tubman, the "Scarlet Pimpernel" of the Underground Railroad escape route for slaves, which delivered many runaways to Canada.
From Beaufort emerged Robert Smalls, who famously freed himself and his family from slavery by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, the Planter, and delivering it to the Union navy. He went on to become a politician at both state and federal levels.
And while the major civil rights marches and associated clashes of the 1960s took place elsewhere in the South, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. regularly used the first of the early schools -- named Penn for the Quaker activist William Penn, and co-founded by Canadian Ellen Murray -- as a planning "retreat."
"Whether Richard came from Africa is unknown, but it's been handed down he was lame, possibly from having been shot while trying to escape," recounted Middleton. "We also know his son John had several boys who all spoke of winning freedom."
For his vote in favour of Obama, Middleton took advantage of early voting procedures in his area, casting it more than a week ago.
"I just didn't want anything to go wrong, no last-minute hitches that would prevent me from having my say at this historic time," he said.
The Elliotts moved to Beaufort in about 1780, arriving from Charleston, where Thomas had put down roots two generations earlier.
By the early 1800s, they had hundreds of slaves on several plantations that were, by then, mainly planted with the region's unique sea island cotton.
Today a maritime pilot guiding ships through Charleston harbour, Elliott, 68, said there were no family anecdotes of how his ancestors might have treated the slaves. But his great-great-great grandfather William (1831-84) was for preserving the union, and wrote under a pen name to local newspapers ahead of the Civil War arguing the differences with the North could be worked out.
When that didn't happen, William and his sons fought for the Confederacy.
Like Middleton, Elliott also cast his ballot early, confiding it was more of a vote against Obama than for John McCain. As a conservative, Elliott said he hasn't always agreed with McCain's maverick approach within the Republican Party
"If Obama were conservative enough, I would vote for him over McCain. But he's not, so it wouldn't make a difference if he were my brother," Elliott said. "I wouldn't feel as bad if it weren't that we may also get a liberal Democrat Congress that might little restrain an Obama administration."
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"The anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."
-- Barack Obama: speech on race
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Many slaves -- since they were legally considered property -- may have been better treated than indentured servants in the north, although the sheer indignity of being owned remained regardless of conditions.
"We have wills from the 1700s and 1800s where the slaves were handed over, and house slaves were the most important because they were the mammies, the ones that cooked your food, the ones who had more contact with your family," said Mary Ellen Millhouse, 65, descendant of Chaplin, Fripp and other prominent families who arrived from 1670 with royal land grants.
"My mother and her three siblings were raised by nigra mammies-- this was not a negative term-- and these women were freed slaves who had stayed on with the family."
Millhouse, a retired photographer active in arts promotion, still lives in the 18-room family house in Beaufort her great-great-grandfather John Fripp Chaplin managed to buy back in 1869 for $3,000.
Despite her near-aristocratic heritage, she declared herself an Obama supporter.
"If I can split a ticket I do, and that's the option we have in South Carolina," she said. "Interestingly, I am voting for more Republicans, mainly for quirky reasons -- some of the people I know; some are bigger arts supporters. But there is no way I would vote for McCain."
Historians agree the American Civil War was never centrally about the emancipation of the slaves, and president Abraham Lincoln once declared as much. Not least were competing interests in the expansion westward as both homesteaders and southern planters cast their eyes in that direction.
Following the Union victory in 1865, the Constitution's 13th Amendment finally banned slavery -- still legal in a few states that had not seceded.
Sharecropping came to replace slavery for many blacks left without land, leading large numbers from across the South to later migrate north and west.
The Beaufort area was known as a Rehearsal for Reconstruction during the Union occupation. Like other Union camps, it served as a magnet for slaves seeking freedom and to help the northern cause.
Smalls used his prize money from delivering the Planter to buy his former master's house, in which he lived until he died in 1915.
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| Robert Smalls: Bought his master's house |
Besides his well-documented legislative achievements, a descendant of his daughter Elizabeth's marriage to Samuel J. Bampfield, a "free issue" lawyer, recounts a family dinnertime anecdote.
"He would always begin eating before grace was complete, so the family would thank the Lord for what they were about to receive, and what Grandpapa had already received," said Ethel Denmark, nee Bampfield, adding the tale is told by his great-granddaughter Helen Moore.
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, dampened the wartime president's Reconstruction plans to help the 3.5 million blacks throughout the South, but a Reconstruction Act emerged by 1867.
The succeeding optimistic period for African-Americans saw blacks elected or appointed to office: Louisiana alone counted 113 black legislators while in the South Carolina legislature, 50 members were black, and 13 white.
However, a white backlash included lynching, tar-and-feathering and whipping of blacks as terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan rose up. By 1898, poll taxes and literacy tests led to widespread disenfranchisement.
Middleton remembers how even his father, Owen, who ran his own house-painting business through the Depression years and could meet the registration requirements, still shied from claiming his right to vote.
"They didn't want us to vote and folks had jobs they wanted to keep," he said. "... It was a matter of doing what you thought you had to do to survive."
But Middleton recalls the segregated waiting rooms at Beaufort train station as he headed for Washington to attend the prestigious Howard University, an all-black school. He'd recently completed military service, serving at the end of the Second World War, and was taking advantage of the GI Bill's education funding, which crossed racial lines.
Like many of his generation, he says segregation didn't especially upset him at that time.
"You couldn't sit down and eat with whites, but how many people could afford to get a sandwich back then? If you did, you bought it from a window," he said.
In Beaufort in the 1960s, Charlie Simmons Jr., now 79, found himself in the relatively rare position as an African-American -- he was promoted over whites.
Three immediately quit on him following his appointment as the first black director of a local jobs promotion program. "I knew they would go; I knew their backgrounds. It was no big thing to me," he recalled.
Simmons's father, also Charlie, had been perhaps the most successful black businessman on the then predominantly black sea island of Hilton Head, running a bus and ferry service among other enterprises he'd built from a gift of just two acres from his uncle.
Segregation in other parts of the South meant blacks had to sit in the backs of buses, but no such rule applied on the Simmons line.
"People sat wherever they could find space," said Simmons, who had driven one of the buses after attending university.
"But of course we were in the majority," he quipped, "so I don't know what it would have been like it had been the other way around."
Schools of course were segregated.
The flashpoints in the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were far from the sea islands, but it was because of their relative calm and isolation that King chose Penn, by then a community centre, as one of two main planning centres.
"The aftermath of the Civil War had been a hopeful period, as had 1960s when Penn Center became one of the most important civil rights sites in the South," said Emory Campbell, former centre director in its present form as a museum and cultural centre, and himself a Hilton Head Gullah.
"This period too with the rise of Barack Obama has everyone standing straight and tall. It is a kind of renaissance of the 1960s period. Having an African-American president is new scenery for African-Americans. No matter what the government does, they will inspire many to take more initiative."
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"America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before."
-- Barack Obama
© 2008 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration:
• Colour Photo: Sue Jarrett, For Canwest News Service / Robert Middleton walks in his yard on St. Helena Island, S.C., on land his ancestors, formerly slaves, bought during the Civil War. Photo: Phoebe Waight Elliott, a Southern belle and the great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of Bill Elliott II, of Beaufort, South Carolina.
Edition: Final
Story Type: News
Length: 2063 words
The succeeding optimistic period for African-Americans saw blacks elected or appointed to office: Louisiana alone counted 113 black legislators while in the South Carolina legislature, 50 members were black, and 13 white.
However, a white backlash included lynching, tar-and-feathering and whipping of blacks as terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan rose up. By 1898, poll taxes and literacy tests led to widespread disenfranchisement.
Middleton remembers how even his father, Owen, who ran his own house-painting business through the Depression years and could meet the registration requirements, still shied from claiming his right to vote.
"They didn't want us to vote and folks had jobs they wanted to keep," he said. "... It was a matter of doing what you thought you had to do to survive."
But Middleton recalls the segregated waiting rooms at Beaufort train station as he headed for Washington to attend the prestigious Howard University, an all-black school. He'd recently completed military service, serving at the end of the Second World War, and was taking advantage of the GI Bill's education funding, which crossed racial lines.
Like many of his generation, he says segregation didn't especially upset him at that time.
"You couldn't sit down and eat with whites, but how many people could afford to get a sandwich back then? If you did, you bought it from a window," he said.
In Beaufort in the 1960s, Charlie Simmons Jr., now 79, found himself in the relatively rare position as an African-American -- he was promoted over whites.
Three immediately quit on him following his appointment as the first black director of a local jobs promotion program. "I knew they would go; I knew their backgrounds. It was no big thing to me," he recalled.
Simmons's father, also Charlie, had been perhaps the most successful black businessman on the then predominantly black sea island of Hilton Head, running a bus and ferry service among other enterprises he'd built from a gift of just two acres from his uncle.
Segregation in other parts of the South meant blacks had to sit in the backs of buses, but no such rule applied on the Simmons line.
"People sat wherever they could find space," said Simmons, who had driven one of the buses after attending university.
"But of course we were in the majority," he quipped, "so I don't know what it would have been like it had been the other way around."
Schools of course were segregated.
The flashpoints in the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were far from the sea islands, but it was because of their relative calm and isolation that King chose Penn, by then a community centre, as one of two main planning centres.
 |
| Emory Campbell: Obama's election "kind of renaissance." |
"This period too with the rise of Barack Obama has everyone standing straight and tall. It is a kind of renaissance of the 1960s period. Having an African-American president is new scenery for African-Americans. No matter what the government does, they will inspire many to take more initiative."
- - -
"America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before."
-- Barack Obama
© 2008 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.
Illustration:
• Colour Photo: Sue Jarrett, For Canwest News Service / Robert Middleton walks in his yard on St. Helena Island, S.C., on land his ancestors, formerly slaves, bought during the Civil War. Photo: Phoebe Waight Elliott, a Southern belle and the great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of Bill Elliott II, of Beaufort, South Carolina.
Edition: Final
Story Type: News
Length: 2063 words
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