Will the culture of democratically governed public education survive in Charleston, SC?
In 1976, I participated in a day long Bicentennial workshop at the Hagood Ave. National Guard Armory devoted to envisioning Charleston's future. I was 16 at the time and enthusiastically participated in our effort to create a “New You Community.” It was the first really political/community planning effort I participated in. I helped draft the vision statement. Since then I have expended thousands of hours in similar efforts in the SC Lowcountry. It appears that process is drawing to an end. We will all know, quite soon, what we have to show for our years and sometimes decades of efforts here as citizens.
The 1970s were a heady time in South Carolina. Desegregation blasted loose the stratified bedrock of Charleston's rigid class structure. Increased mobility and now options for communication (At that time being able to quickly photocopy a newsletter was pretty revolutionary) empowered change. The Women's rights movement and civil rights movement were still living legacies. The Bicentennial brought funding for all sorts of community activities like that workshop and the arrival of the Spoleto Art Festival, a year later, revolutionized public life here. Art, creativity, public participation blossomed in the confidence that the end of rigid segregation and Watergate demanded the emergence of a creative, citizen driven democracy that would reach our nagging social and economic problems.
Money Forces a Critical Fight
The coming decision on Jan. 10 to turn over control of a large part of our public school system to an organization controlled by a collection of multimillionaires and their paid functionaries represents the last opportunity for a turnoff from two generations of local retreat from the ideal that informed citizens here could and would create a rewarding, unique community in which to build their lives.
Most of the people in this group know the value of their privacy in public matters. They financed a near takeover of the school board through a dark money organization which kept it's donors secret in 2020.
They're well versed in using LLCs and non profit groups to deploy their money while keeping their identity out of awareness. There are somewhere between ten and twenty of them, allied with many more paid staff. They may not be formally organized into a single, integrated group which holds regular formal meetings. They probably leave going to meetings to the people on the payroll, looking in on zoom and vetoing what they don't like. They fire anyone who doesn't understand how the new public private nonprofit partnership governance model works. You don't hear about that because the people fired will be looking for another job or grant and all of that comes from organizations funded by these people.
You could even be the school superintendent, be forced into resignation and ride off into the sunset confident that you'll find you a job.
If this group of closely allied people and their money were only focused on our poorly performing minority schools (They're making no effort to tinker with the schools in Mt. Pleasant.) many of us could dismiss this as just another round in Charleston County's dysfunctional and unending school wars fought in a community divided by race and class where the political process is dominated by people who send their children to private school. If your children or grandchildren aren't going to be attending these privately controlled public schools, you may not believe you have a dog in this fight.
However, these same people and the people they pay, are also well into a take over of Charleston's large and well funded non profit sector, which they've been actively consolidating through the distribution of grants, holding conferences and funding the generation of studies and reports which free our often unmotivated elected officials from having to listen or understand anything regarding our community's growing economic, social, environmental, cultural, transportation and planning problems.
Transit Goes Under the Bus
They've inserted themselves into the design of our long delayed and now truncated rapid transit line, which has shrunk from a trans-formative project promised to voters to link Summerville, Ladson, Lincolnville, N. Charleston, the neck and Charleston. It now starts at the Fairgrounds and ends at Renyolds Ave. in N. Charleston with the rest being just buses in what will be snarled traffic and flooding. Downtown, the smart money coalition cut off our dedicated transit line at Mt. Pleasant street to accommodate their socially favored Lowline parkway, and then for good measure discarded three more miles of dedicated transit line North of That. On the North, they accommodated the racists of Summerville, leaving that town 4.2 miles away from the residents of Brownsville, the African American part of Summerville that is really on the other side of the tracks.
The endless studies and projects to address our ever worsening problems with insufficient affordable housing and homelessness are under their control as well. Every year hundreds of affordable housing units are gentrified out of existence while a handful of replacements, branded work force housing, get constructed. The effort to help our homeless has morphed into a jobs program focused on controlling people, with huge budgets and more, endless meetings. An exhausted group of harried volunteers now chases a nomadic, but growing homeless community kept in hiding, with dry clothes and food.
Any effort to make sure Charleston's working people are paid an amount sufficient to allow them to live here with security and dignity are quietly diverted into nothingness by more conferences, ineffective recruitment efforts and training programs which often teach locals enough to allow them to leave Charleston and escape our dead end working class economy. Again, this is facilitated by the non profit groups they control, augmented by the government grants they harvest, and local government support from their political partners.
They’ve also invested heavily into control of local higher education, purchasing veto power over hiring and department head appointments at the College of Charleston and the Citadel departmetns of Education and Business, and possibly other parts of the institutions.
They've purchased influence with local media through advertising expenditures, joint subsidized projects and maintaining spin shops local grass roots efforts can't compete with. If you're not part of their system, you will be ignored.
Their control isn't yet perfect. The explosion which was the riots in downtown Charleston in June 2020 and the peaceful protests of that time demonstrated the failure of their mechanisms of control. A lot of frustration and rage, directed by local grass roots leaders who hadn't yet sold out, could still be supported. Only people with real power and money, could afford to tear down the John C. Calhoun statue and enrage the Lowcountry's fading aristocracy and rising Trumpist rednecks.
However they brilliantly calculated that the Aristocrats and the Rednecks would blame Charleston's small progressive community, while they could continue to fly under the radar working on their long term plan for the Holy City. Since John C. Calhoun didn't own a national scale corporate investment portfolio, he wasn't invited to whatever meeting where Charleston's new elite decided to tear him down and ship him off to California.
What do these Rich Want for Charleston?
What is their long term plan for the rest of us? Despite their funding endless studies and conferences, we don't know for a certainty. It's clear they want a cleaner, more orderly Charleston dedicated to their aesthetic and cultural priorities. It's something more complex and sophisticated than what the bourbon swilling grandchildren of the slave owners wanted. It will be the desired backdrop for their lifestyle. When they demanded the transit line be moved into traffic from beneath I26 to accommodate their Lowline greenway, they are reputed to have said there were afraid the occasional bus full of working people would, “degrade the user experience.”
They want to train a workforce so that they'll be more economically productive and politically impotent. For these wealthy people, work is something someone else does . They intend to place them out of sight and out of mind, except for when and where they are needed.
While Charleston has always been racially, social and economically divided, it has never been rigidly segregated. Life was made tolerable here because everyone had come contact with those different from themselves. It allowed the city to avoid the most degrading and violent elements of racism and class hatred. Porgy knew Mr. Archdale.
Why does Charleston matter to these people? They can afford New York or Paris. One can only have so many yachts, planes and mistresses before boredom becomes a challenge. Charleston can be boring. It's likely they want a Lowcountry stage managed for their high maintenance leisure and social activities. They can create a place where controlling how people live, what they learn and who they are allowed to be is a sort of hobby with human pets who exist, as nearly everything which surrounds the rich does, for their needs. They're rich, but not take over and play with New York or Chicago rich. Here, they can control their world.
A Hard Job
Without a solid culture of participatory democracy, local resistance to this process has a hard job.
These wealthy people are quietly replacing the area's disintegrating historical aristocracy without a remote chance of democracy, human dignity or real creative culture emerging. They will use their money, our government's money and the power that money maintains to get what they want. They'll front the effort with the dozens, soon to be hundreds of people on their payroll to make sure the government's meeting rooms and local ballot boxes are well managed. In the case of the school takeover, they plan to do it without a real public hearing. After all, they've already paid for a managed study and plan where the public input they deem valid has been filtered and collected.
Taking over this many public schools, with their physical plants, budgets and cultural space is a staggering step which may make their local takeover irreversible. While Charleston's schools have struggled and the politics has been frustrating, it does produce participation. Community meetings take place in these buildings. In many areas, the school is the only public space and institution standing. They can make sure opposition has no opportunity to organize at a PTA meeting or a booster club. Dissident community groups will have to meet outside in the rain. They'll dispatch someone they control to divert and channel any community effort which might become problematic with as many paid reinforcements as needed.
Charleston's bizarre confidence that nothing will ever change will hide the reality that the people who support the corrective democratic and dissident impulse, never very strong here, will simply leave, quit or die of old age. The students educated in these schools will be taught that you create change by filing a grant request and the sort of change you are entitled to is limited to the type rich people approve of. If this school takeover succeeds, it will be the keystone in consolidating control. It is more than enough to make sure that Charleston's new aristocracy lasts as long as it's money does.
I have devoted a lifetime, actually two of them, to the attempt to make Charleston an inclusive, rewarding and democratic community of empowered citizens. My wife's life in music, politics and art came to an end in the darkness of the pandemic as she struggled with a deep sadness. She saw King Street burn. The day John C. Calhoun came down, she died. Her violin now rests quietly, except for when Marlena Davis plays it for me at Christmas.
I'm 62 and I'm both alarmed and disappointed to understand that only a few more years of meetings and 2 minute public comments lie ahead of me.
I now recognize that there were far better places than South Carolina and Charleston to spend my efforts and the life of my dear Julia. The realization that I merely maintained the old city to become a plaything for the rich horrifies me. All of the silly, hopeful things we were singing our made up songs about in 1976 in the armory appear likely to vanish beyond the event horizon if this massively funded black hole of community and politics consolidates.
We Should Fight
We should fight this war until it's lost. If that happens, the ambitious young should leave for somewhere better. There is not enough money to buy the whole world. Just try to figure out how to build a community these people can't buy. Those of us too old to leave should do what makes us happy. This weary idol, the holy city, and the millionaires who have purchased it, are not entitled to more of our time. However, given the blood and sweat already poured into the ground here, Charleston is worth at least one more fight.
William J. Hamilton, III, (843-870-5299, wjhamilton29464@gmail.com) is an attorney, writer and activist. He was born in Charleston in 1959 and is a graduate of Wando High School, the Governor's School, the University of South Carolina Honors College and the USC School of Law. He is the founder of Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit, which delivered the margin of victory for a transit plan in the 2016 half penny sales tax referendum and Lowcountry Up is Good, a Political Acton Committee devoted to Better Transit, Affordable Housing and a living wage in the SC Lowcountry. He has published over a million words, over 30 years on Lowcountry politics, history, community and culture. His family have been residents of SC since 1695, having fought in the Revolution, Civil War, WWI & WWII. Unless your family got here on an earlier boat and has faced more combat, you may keep your suggestion that he should leave or shut up to yourself.