The Struggle On Johns Island

February is Black History Month and a time to mark the important role Johns Island played during the Civil Rights era. Important figures such as Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins lived and centered their activities on the island, with their legacy carried forward by others today.

Septima Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark (1891 - 1987), born and raised in Charleston during the Reconstruction era, is still honored as the "Grandmother" of the Civil Rights movement and came to Johns Island in 1916 when, as an African-American, she was barred from teaching in white schools in the city. She not only taught children at the old Promised Land school on what is now Betsy Kerrison Parkway, but taught still-illiterate adults to read and write, sometimes using the Sears Roebuck catalog as a teaching tool. By the late 1920's, she had joined the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, which led to her dismissal by the all-white Charleston County school board. Undaunted, Clark undertook a variety of NAACP initiatives throughout the Southeast to improve literacy rates for Blacks. By the late 1940's, Clark had become a major figure in the establishment of Citizenship Schools teaching reading, writing and basic business skills to Black children and adults.

Esau Jenkins

One such school was here on Johns Island, founded with the help of Johns Island native Esau Jenkins (1910 - 1972) as The Progressive Club on River Road. Jenkins and fellow Johns Island native Joe Williams had raised money for the legal defense of a Black neighbor who, in 1948, had been shot while defending himself against an attack by a white farmer's dog. When a judge dismissed the case that had been filed against the farmer, Jenkins and Williams raised enough money for a successful appeal of the ruling, and the eventual conviction of the farmer for aggravated assault.

Shopping at The Progressive Club

Soon, Jenkins and Williams organized the Progressive Club to help build a permanent legal defense fund, as well as to serve as a food cooperative and social center for Johns Island Blacks. In 1954, Jenkins attended a workshop at the socially progressive Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee, where he met Clark and others involved with the Citizenship School movement, and was inspired to adapt The Progressive Club as one such school teaching the literacy skills necessary to vote.

The Progressive Club site

The Club's site is now a National Historic Landmark, although all that remains of the original building are its crumbling cinderblock walls, the only survivors of the uninsured structure after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. But the Progressive Club as an organization is still active on Johns Island, carrying on the work of Clark and Jenkins for social justice.

Shifting Ground

The devastating earthquake that struck Charleston in 1886 remains, at 7.4 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake to ever occur on the East Coast, but it wasn't the last by any means. Smaller tremors have since been felt once or twice a decade, most recently in 2014, when a magnitude 4.1 rattled the Lowcountry. In fact, South Carolina is the most seismically active state east of the Rocky Mountains. Summerville, for example, was shaken by two quakes, in 1912 and 1914, felt not only in Charleston but as far south as Savannah and Macon, Georgia. Charleston itself experienced a series of minor tremors in 1959, 1960 (two of them that year) and 1967.

courtesy USGS

Geologists have long identified fault lines criss-crossing the midland and upstate regions of South Carolina. They're the buried but readily located remnants of ancient plate tectonics some 500-million years ago, when colliding prehistoric landmasses raised the Appalachians. The gathering pressures along such known faults that may result in earthquakes can usually be detected well in advance, but Charleston lies hundreds of miles from the nearest fault-prone plate boundary, under the Caribbean.

Here on the coast, geologists can only estimate where fault lines may lie within underlying bedrock, since the bedrock is buried under up to 3 miles of layers of sand, silt, clay and sedimentary rock, making it difficult for even modern technology to perceive early warnings of a pending tremor.

King Street post-quake

The 1886 quake began as a barely felt tremor before the main earthquake rocked the city. Aftershocks were felt for another 24 hours. Sixty people were killed amid estimated damages of $160 million in modern dollars. In rebuilding, the city mandated "quake bolts" for new construction and for retrofitting on the few structures that remained standing.

The good news is that most geologists think such major quakes occur only every five hundred years or so, allowing some breathing room before the Lowcountry once again is all shook up.

On The Record

courtesy Post and Courier

Charleston can claim quite a few firsts in its three-hundred years as the anchor of the Lowcountry, and this month marks two of them - the founding of the Museum of Charleston as "America's First Museum", and The Post & Courier, the South's oldest daily newspaper (shown above after the 1886 earthquake).

Thompson Hall, the Museum's home in 1910

The Museum claims the older heritage, tracing its roots to January of 1773, when the 19 men who had established the Charleston Library Society thirty years earlier voted to expand their collection of books and manuscripts imported from Britain to focus on the natural history of the Carolinas. Despite the lack of a permanent home and a disastrous 1778 fire, the museum eventually found its first home in 1852 in the College of Charleston's Randolph Hall. By then, renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz visited the city and declared the Museum's collections to be among the best in the country. Surviving the destruction of the Civil War (much of the collection was moved to the Midlands), the Museum was officially incorporated in 1915 and marked another first when, in 1920, it named Laura Bragg as the country's first woman to lead a publicly supported museum. Many of the items from the Museum's early years can be seen today at the Museum's permanent home since 1980, on Meeting Street.

The Museum's peripatetic history was recorded by an upstart newspaper, The Charleston Courier, which published its first edition in January of 1803 under the leadership of editor Aaron Willington, a newspaperman who had moved to the city from Massachusetts. Determined to make The Charleston Courier the newspaper of record for the city, Willington was known to row out to ships arriving in Charleston Harbor from all over the world to scoop the latest international news, and was the first to hire a translator to comb Spanish language newspapers from the Caribbean. Just after the Civil War, Willington's newspaper merged with The Charleston Daily News to become The News and Courier. It continued under that name until 1991, when it merged with the city's only other paper, The Evening Post, to become The Post and Courier, now South Carolina's largest newspaper.