The Proceedings Of The South Carolina Historical Association

An anthology of important scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras from the journal Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association. Since 1931, the South Carolina Historical Association has published an annual, peer-reviewed journal of historical scholarship. In this volume, past SCHA officers of Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer present twenty-three of the most enduring and significant essays from the archives, offering a treasure trove of scholarship on an impressive variety of subjects including race, politics, military events, and social issues. All articles published in the Proceedings after 2002 are available on the SCHA website, but this volume offers, for the first time, easy access to the journal’s best articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction up through 2001. Preeminent scholars such as Frank Vandiver, Dan T. Carter, and Orville Vernon Burton are among the contributors to this collection, an essential resource for historical synthesis of the Palmetto State’s experience during that era.

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title • A provocative look into civil rights progress in the Palmetto State from activists, statesmen, and historians Toward the Meeting of the Waters represents a watershed moment in civil rights history—bringing together voices of leading historians alongside recollections from central participants to provide the first comprehensive history of the civil rights movement as experienced by black and white South Carolinians. Edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton, this work originated with a highly publicized landmark conference on civil rights held at the Citadel in Charleston. The volume opens with an assessment of the transition of South Carolina leaders from defiance to moderate enforcement of federally mandated integration and includes commentary by former governor and U.S. senator Ernest F. Hollings and former governor John C. West. Subsequent chapters recall defining moments of white-on-black violence and aggression to set the context for understanding the efforts of reformers such as Levi G. Byrd and Septima Poinsette Clark and for interpreting key episodes of white resistance. Emerging from these essays is arresting evidence that, although South Carolina did not experience as much violence as many other southern states, the civil rights movement here was more fiercely embattled than previously acknowledged. The section of retrospectives serves as an oral history of the era as it was experienced by a mixture of locally and nationally recognized participants, including historians such as John Hope Franklin and Tony Badger as well as civil rights activists Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Beatrice Brown Rivers, Charles McDew, Constance Curry, Matthew J. Perry Jr., Harvey B. Gantt, and Cleveland Sellers Jr. The volume concludes with essays by historians Gavin Wright, Dan Carter, and Charles Joyner, who bring this story to the present day and examine the legacy of the civil rights movement in South Carolina from a modern perspective. Toward the Meeting of the Waters also includes thirty-seven photographs from the period, most of them by Cecil Williams and many published here for the first time.

JACK IRBY HAYES, JR., revisits the South Carolina of the 1930s to determine the impact of federal programs on the state's economy, politics, culture, and citizenry. He traces the waxing and waning of support for programs such as Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and concludes that the modernization of South Carolina would have been delayed without their intervention. Suggesting that the New Deal hastened the end of one-party political domination, Hayes proposes that it also initiated a new era of modernized agriculture and banking practices, rural electrical service, labor restrictions, relief programs, and cultural resurgence. Hayes finds that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's initiatives enjoyed widespread support among South Carolinians. He documents the welcoming of agricultural and erosion controls, welfare relief, child labor laws, minimum wage requirements, public construction, state parks, and massive hydroelectric projects. He also credits the New Deal with sparking an intellectual reawakening and a restoration of faith in capitalism, democracy, and progress. But Hayes demonstrates that