Wade Hampton Generals basketball eases Integration in SC Upstate Public Schools

   Friends We all meet folks in college who become to some fame in time and if you are from Gaffney you get to know a few in high school.

    In Gaffney it was Johnny Dawkins who was one of a handful of black athletes who stayed on the football team the first two year of full integration, won the praise of Wayne Whiteside and found himself in film school at Southern Cal a Few years later. He wrote early script for Denzel Washington and had very respectable career. He doesnt like for me to say too much about him but I did have a phone chat with him just a couple hours ago.

   In the interim from the miracles of Facebook it came to my attention Furman basketball great Clyde Mayes--had good career with the Milwaukee Bucks before charming Europe in their Italian League--was at a book signing a few hours ago.

   His High school team the Wade Hampton Generals of Greenville SC won the state championship two years in a row after five blacks joined the team in February of 1970,

    Clyde Came to Furman and was on a team there from 71-75 that set the woods on fire. His HS teammate Norm Macdonald played football and ran track at Furman and charmed the Ladies. Proud of both of them for their story in this book.

   I'm itchin to get my hands on a copy but thought I would put my illustrious blog to good use on the fly this afternoon at year's end.

    Proud to know both of them

   Quoting Mr Chibbaro on why he wrote the book

        
thanks for your question about what prompted me to document this story-As a graduate of Wade Hampton (class of 1977) and also a former basketball player at WH, I had a personal attachment to the story. When I saw Disney’s “Remember the Titans,” I thought to myself, “A basketball version of that story happened right here in Greenville and someone needed to document that story.” I became even more interested in telling it when a controversial effort began a couple years ago to try to rename Wade Hampton High School. With all the division and disunity occurring these days, I felt it was the right time to document an inspirational story of racial unity and the positive results that can happen when people of different backgrounds work together to accomplish a common goal. It’s a wonderful story that, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of public schools in Greenville County (2/17/2020), we should pause to remember and celebrate.

  end quote
   Here is an excerpt

  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535b9aebe4b0a78001c0bc29/t/5da763e14f4af712f3c3551e/1571251176368/TheMightyGenerals_Excerpt.pdf

Fundamentalism and the Country Club in the SC 4th Congressional District

      Fred Bernanke owned and operated a drugstore in Downton Gaffney South Carolina for many years ending in the early 70s. His nephew Ben Bernanke who would become Fed Chair during the financial crisis a few years ago often came up in the summers from Dillon.

    It was in the empty Bernanke store in the spring of 1976 that Yankees legend Bobby Richardson came to town for a brief intro in his run for US Congress in the SC 3rd. The Mantle, Whitey Ford, Billy Martin teammate had been talked into the run by President Ford and Billy Graham.

    I was a year out of Furman at the time and went into town out of curiousity to see how this intro tour played out in my hometownn. I remember a young Tommy Martin, still in the early stages of his local journalism career was there and some influential textile mill owners who were also influential Baptist lay people in the region.

    There was a brief Q and A and I went for it. I Said Bobby your reputation as a devout Christian is well known as is the reputation of the powerful and wealthy folks who are supporting you in this race. Recently there has been a series of front page investigative articles in the Charlottte Observer about  brown lung and cotton dust levels in the textile mills here in the Piedmont Carolinas. If you are elected and get to Congress and legislation comes your way forcing you to decide between the health of the lungs of textile mill workers, or the wishes of the main forces supporting your candidacy how will you decide?

    I am not boasting but it is fair to say Bobby was a mess and incapable of making a complete sentence in his reply. And I remember a few looks of some of the textile interests  there in the room of about 25 folks that weren't pleased with my question.

    So That was one Congressional district East in Upstate SC of the 4th District whose eastern boundary and the town of Spartanburg, home of Trey Gowdy and Billy Graham's last church membership until he died. And the SC fourth is now the spotlight of the new book Moral Congress by Marty Cohen. Along with the 3rd District of of Tn ( Chattanooga) and Kansas 4th (sw suburbs of Kansas City and wider vicinity) Cohen traces how conservative business elites have made peace over the last 49 years with abortion and gun rights crusades of the religious right. Cohen says the intent of his look at these three districts is the "Republican Party took advantage of the new polarization on the moral issues and leveraged it to flipping congressional seats ultimately taking and then keeping US House seats" and the majority in congress to the Midterm of 2018.   

    I will focus on the SC 4th in this review cause that is what I know best.

    Cohen devotes about 30 pages to the SC 4th that includes Greenville, Spartanburg and Union Counties; and as such Furman and Wofford and Converse Colleges and Bob Jones University. Cohen goes back to the election of 1976 when John Conlan and Campus Crusade forces with encouragement from a network of right wing groups and money encouraged fundamentalists to get more involved in politics. At Bob Jones a Mr. Adams who was influenced by the John Birch Society and legal abortion ran an ill fated campaign that never took traction with country club republicans.
     But as others tried and as the Republican candidate for President always carried the district easily by 1992 the religious right candidate took office and holds it to this day. One hiccup was Carroll Campbell who ran in 78 as a Republican who did not carry the religious right mantle. But he was backed by Lee Atwater who ran ads vote for one of us, a very blue eyed, blonde Campbell. Campbell defeated a Jew, Max Heller, the Mayor of Greenville who was endorsed by Furman President and Baptist minister's son Gordon Blackwell.
     Campbell served in congress for a while then became a two term Governor. He was replaced by Democrat Liz Patterson who defeated Bill Workman a force from the business circles in Greenville who didn't play well with the rural vote nor in Spartanburg and about which the Bob Jones vote was complacent. It was an interesting contest in 86 as their fathers had run against each other in 1962 when Liz father Olin D Johnston ran a race inflected campaign as a champion of the  white working class textile mill labhorer.
    But in 92 as a foreshadowing of Newt Gingrich contract with America of 94, religion came inn full force in Upstate politics as Bob Inglis upset Patterson. His narrow win pundits say was most likely caused by a blanketing of church parking lots the Sunday before the election with religious right "scorecards".
      Carroll Campbell saw how effective the religion card could be and with Lee Atwater already whispering in his ear for at least a decade they needed a wedge issue to replace race, reconciliation was in order for the GOP in SC between the Bob Jones/Falwell/SBC takeover crowd and the country club. From 92 you had Inglis, then Jim Demint, then Inglis again for six years to be upset by Trey Gowdy in a runaway in the tea party election of 2010.
    Now the district like the other two Cohen reviews is safely in the Trump Republican base.

    Presciently novelist Joseph Oneill in a stark review |Dec 19 New York Review of Books gets to the tribal force that has become the religious right in Upstate SC and its "understanding" with the business elites. The hypocrisy of blue blood Episcopalian politicians like the SC 4th's replacement of Gowdy, William Timmons, Governor Bryan Kemp in Georgia, and Duke Grad Bradley Byrne in Alabama on the social issues is ripped by Oneill on the two key issues that are the edifice of the religious right tribe: 


Contrary to popular belief, the attachment of many Americans to the Second Amendment isn’t natural. It is the product of an innovative and disciplined nationwide campaign started by the NRA in the late 1970s. The success of the anti-abortion movement is rooted in institutional grassroots work by the National Right to Life Committee, an organization founded and financed by the Catholic Church in the 1960s. You don’t get people singing from the same hymn sheet unless someone is writing the hymns, printing and distributing them, and building choirs everywhere.. end quote

      One thing  missing from Cohen's book as he ends his exploration with the onset of Gowdy is the Truth for a New Generation conferences at FBC Spartanburg annually from 2012 to 2016. Annually in those years the church that had Billy Graham on the membership rolls the last couple decades of his life brought to town a marquee roll of religious right celebrities including Ben Carson, David Barton and Eric Metaxas. Clearly FBC Spartanburg was in Oneill's words "writing hymns and building choirs."

    Richard Cuo's December New Yorker piece on Evangelicals and Trump is a strong followup to the world Cohen has investigated in his book. In tandem with Cohen it is must reading for the leadership of progressive Baptist life and its ecumenical network to call out the mounting noise and distortions on the right from Franklin Graham and Bob Jeffress to Fox News and the White House.

    One place to show resolve is in the conversations to come from a lecture series in January sponsored by Mercer University. Republican Governor Nathan Deal will talk about governing. As a product of CBF's FBC Gainesville Ga, same town as Doug Collins the US House Super Trumper and ordained SBC chaplain; that lecture series will be a test of at least one Baptist politician of influence in the deep south to see if has the ingredients to distinguish himself not only as a Republican politician but also as a Baptist to see if he can bring anything to the table to stand against the Gowdy/Collins/Lindsay Graham Baptist tribe complicit and buttressing the corrosion of Donald Trump.