Furman Seeking Abraham; The Infidel Trump and South Carolina

    Furman's year long study Seeking Abraham on pages 42 and 43 in the appendix takes a look at the founder Richard Furman's son James Clement and his race demagoguery of the Civil War era and early Reconstruction. JC, the Baptist minister and President of Furman when it moved from Winnsboro SC to Destination City Greenville SC and the brow of the Reedy River than now overlooks the Suspension Bridge said things that woulda later made Pitchfork Been Tillman and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond proud.

    He dismissed his Theology classes in the 1860s to take his students to witness lynchings in downtown Greenville.

     The last lynching in Greenville, lynching of Willie Earle, got international attention in the late 40s. The Judson Bookstore downtown now affiliated with Furman whose campus moved five miles north in early 1960s used to be the courthouse. And Duke Chaplain Will Willimon, a product of Wofford had a day long event on that basketball campus a year ago to commemorate the lynching of Willie Earle.

    So the appendix of Seeking Abraham speaks with near apoplexy about the behavior of the son of the founder  a century and a half ago.

   But as Baptist historian Bill Leonard alluded recently, where is the prophetic voice at Furman when it comes to the politics of Trump and his complicitors in the Upstate, Senator Richard Lindsay and Congressman William Timmons.

    Leonard was a key figure in the development process of the Seeking ABraham document.

    Folks at Furman know well the history of race baiting of SC 's Lee Atwater that as late as the 80s was targeting the great friend of Former Furman president Blackwell, the mayor of Greenville Max Heller, a Jew. But Atwater before he died said you can't race bait like you used to so now time to play the politics of abortion and guns.

     Click on dyingofwhiteness.com .

     But now Trump is tweeting in the worst way about Congresswoman Omar. Where is the 17 member Seeking Abraham Committee  and the Provost office on this one, when it counts, in our time, with the strategic South Carolina Presidential Primary on the horizon.

       Are they as struck mute as Richard Shelby was in Alabama two years ago when Trump implied two of Nick Saban's Heisman trophy winners Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram were sons a bitches cause they had reservatioons about the way Trump spun Kaepernick?

     Congressman Timmons is a product of Christ Church Prep School in Greenville. His father was the money behind the Basketball arena at Furman which bears his Family name. The Christ Church community in Greenville is hardwired to Upstate funding of Furman.

    The slaveholding of Furman's founders is a significant investigation. Let's see comparable energy devoted now to comparable participation and complicity in the outrage of the moment.

    For context also see the Chapter Battle Lines in Jill Lepore's new history of America, These Truths.

   Also google the New Yorker piece on Bullying Omar