Press release from the NAACP National Office, as reported by the Associated Negro Press in the Pittsburgh Courier:
January 31, 1951
Baltimore, Maryland
For Immediate Release
The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is honored to have received a large donation of $200,000 from an anonymous philanthropist. The benefactor requested that a portion of the fund be reserved for the South Carolina Convention of the NAACP, to aid in the legal battles fought in support of full equality of the races.
This represents the largest single donation the NAACP has received and are confident that as America moves towards greater integration and social acceptance that we will one day live in a country that lives up to its original promise as a land of liberty for all.
April 1962, Columbia, South Carolina
“Jimmy, can you help me with this window, dear?” Margot asked one of her assistants arranging the conference table. A surprisingly fresh April breeze cooled the late morning air, and the still musty odor of the old library was present despite several months of cleaning, organizing, and working. The undergraduate from the university walked over and helped Margot unbolt the window lock, and swung open the century old window, allowing the room to come alive immediately.
Outside, ancient live oaks shaded the park-like area where the old library was located, at the base of the brick-paved Horseshoe on the campus of the University of South Carolina. The new library, McKissick, was at the cap of the shaded Horseshoe quadrangle, but the antebellum, Robert Mills-designed old library was now being repurposed as the headquarters for Carter Ridge’s coming election campaign for governor. The red-bricked building, with four wide Federalist-style columns at the entry, had been largely vacant for a number of years, and with its central location a block away from the State House, it was ideal for Carter’s nascent team to hold meetings and coordinate the logistics of his run. The interior of the old library was spacious with the main floor open to the thirty-foot ceiling, revealing a small dome in the center. Elegant white columns supported the structure, with smaller alcoves branching off from the long main room. In the center of the room was a large antique round table, which served as the campaign’s central nervous system, with three phone lines set up, two typewriters, and stacks of files organized by the team of four secretaries who sat around the table working.
“He should be here by now,” Margot said to no one in particular, peering down at the brick-paved paths crisscrossing the green lawn.
Jimmy walked back over to join her at the open window. Young men and women strolled below, coming and going from their classes on this sunny day. All of them were white, except for the Negro groundskeepers who were raking leaves and planting fresh spring flowers. He leaned a bit out of the window to get a better look at the street nearby, outside of the old gated fence.
“Is he coming up from Aiken or from elsewhere?” he asked.
“Shelby called over two hours ago, saying they were getting ready to leave Galanos,” she said more than a little perturbed. She turned back to the room, and made an exculpatory gesture shrugging to the three gentlemen setting up the table with reports, and a large blackboard had been rolled over to the table as well. One of the men came over, opening a pack of cigarettes, and offered her one.
“Well, I’m sure it was just traffic,” he said as he lit her cigarette. “We’re here for the week, so there’s no hurry.”
Carter had hired the middle-aged man, Lou Harris, days following John F. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon the previous election. The pollster had been able to provide pinpointed data for campaign manager Bobby Kennedy on where the electorate had needed shoring up. This gave vital information on the key precincts in the battleground states the young senator absolutely had to win, and even then, there was much speculation about what factor the polling data had versus the raw political muscle of the Democratic Party machine in Chicago and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Texas. Harris made the case that his work gave Bobby the roadmap to make the decision how to “augment” the votes for JFK in the final analysis.
Whatever the tool, whether the scalpel-like precision of Harris’ numbers, or the blunt hammer of LBJ, it was enough to get John F. Kennedy formally elected as president in one of the closest elections in American history; Carter and Margot both knew that his fight could be equally difficult.
“Oh, here he is,” Jimmy said from the window.
Carter stepped out of the blue Citroën sedan idling curbside on the street. Soon they heard the big wooden door of the main entry open beneath them on the ground floor, and muffled greetings between Carter and the two security aides posted in the lobby. The staccato clap of his shoes against the oak floor as he raced up the semi-circular stairway announced his arrival.
“Hello, girls,” he said to the secretaries at the center desk. He made his way over to the conference table on the far end of the hall where Margot was waiting with the team, reflexively sweeping back a stray lick of hair as he approached.
“Margot, thanks for holding down the fort,” he said as he kissed her on the cheek. “Lou, sorry for the delay. There was a train derailment outside of Wagener, so we had to circle back and come up a different route.”
As they arranged themselves around the table, one of the secretaries came over with a cart of coffee, iced tea, and sandwiches. Carter sat next to Margot, who had her notebook the size of an accountant’s general ledger already open.
“Carter, we have the results of the preliminary public opinion surveys we conducted over the month of March. Of the three counties we did, I want to draw your attention to Laurens County,” Lou said as he pointed to a large display on the easel next to the blackboard. “Laurens County is the perfect microcosm of the state, with the same sixty/forty split between urban and rural, and seventy/thirty split between white and Negro. Additionally, it has roughly the same economic profile, with some industry in textile manufacturing but also tenant farming and sharecropping. Income levels on average similar to the state as a whole. This, my friends, is where we are going to focus our polling from now until the election in November.”
“We’re still going to conduct polls in Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston, though, correct?” Carter asked.
“Absolutely. We will have a continuous thread of data from those three cities to give us the trends we need to gauge how we are doing statewide,” Lou answered. “But to really drill down on what people are thinking, and how they respond to our different messages and media, I’ll use Laurens County as our incubator.”
He turned to one of his associates, and said, “Wilbur, my senior analyst, will take it from here.”
Clearing his throat a bit, he began, “Thank-you. As Mr. Harris has indicated, we have four months of data from the three major cities of the state. Let me turn your attention to page seven of the report in front of you.”
The details of the prior months’ labors were discussed for the next hour, and the results were not promising. While Carter’s name recognition was rising, thanks to an increase in his public appearances across the state in support of local liberals and moderates who ran for office in 1960, his approval rating was a lowly twenty-two percent.
“Can we take a quick break, say fifteen minutes?” Carter asked as Wilbur had finished going through the polling numbers for Charleston. He turned to Margot and said quietly, “See if you can get Bradford
to come over tomorrow when we talk about messaging with the Negro churches.”
“We called him this morning and he’ll be here at 3:00,” she replied.
“Great,” he said as he got up, buttoning his suit coat. “I need to walk and get some fresh air for a bit.”
All of this talking about him in the abstract, the third person, as if he were some sort of consumer product was still off-putting for him. He understood it needed to be done, to build an image and create a story about himself that he could then sell successfully to a skeptical public, but it didn’t make it any easier for him to sit there and to hear that only thirteen percent of registered voters in Charleston had a favorable opinion of him (but remember, only forty-one percent of registered voters know who you are, Margot hastened to add). Each time he made an appearance at the seemingly endless luncheons and meet-‘n-greets that she had scheduled for him, he pictured these nameless, faceless, registered voters and tried to appeal to these amorphous creatures, evidently without much success.
He walked down the graceful wide curving staircase to the main entrance and stepped outside onto the Horseshoe. The university had planted some spring flowers, yellow jasmine, which was in full bloom in beds around the azalea bushes. Although he was barely ten years older than they were, to the dozens of young college students he passed on his walk he was seemingly anonymous. Perhaps they thought he was a young professor, but no one seemed to recognize Carter Ridge, philanthropist, as he drank in the sunshine and cool air. When he reached DeSaussure, the architectural twin to Rutledge chapel across the green, two co-ed girls smiled at him, and he saw one of them whisper into the other’s ear.
“You’re Carter Ridge, aren’t you?” the whisperer said as he smiled back at them.
Surprised that they recognized him, he said, “Yes! How did you know?”
“Everyone on campus is trying to figure out what y’all are doing at the old library.”
“Oh really? What have you heard?”
“Some are saying you’re going to run for elected office,” the other girl said. “Others said you’re building the new dormitories on the far side of campus.”
Soon two others, then four others, stopped and started listening to their conversation. He heard “that’s him, Carter Ridge” from another nearby.
“Well, I’m not building any dormitories on the campus, sorry.” Carter said.
“You’re going to run against Thurmond, aren’t you Mr. Ridge?” one of the boys said.
“No, no, I have tremendous respect for Senator Thurmond,” Carter said smiling.
“So you’re running for governor!” another exclaimed.
A murmur went up in the crowd, now approaching twenty students, with not a few professors from the nearby faculty house joining the group. Someone produced a camera and began taking photos.
“What do you think of Brown, Mr. Ridge?” someone called out.
“Mr. Ridge!” he heard from the periphery of the expanding group.
“Thank-you all for your interest. I promise you that if I make a decision regarding my political future, you will be among the first to know. I have an immense love for this state, this special corner of the South, where we take a great deal of pride in our past,” he said, and then smiled at this impromptu audience. “I hope that we can have even more pride in where we are going with our future. You, all of you, represent that future, and I want to encourage you all to take seriously the challenges we are facing. Ask questions, demand to know the truth, think critically. We are part of a new generation, living in the shadow of terrible conflict and ignorance. Let’s lead a new path forward —”
Someone began clapping, and soon the small throng was clapping, cheering, and reaching out to shake his hand. He smiled again, and tried to return to his walk, but realized the futility of it, as there were now even more students and faculty walking, some running, towards them. One of his security aides must have wondered what the commotion was up on the Horseshoe, and was wading his way into the crowd, and then moved Carter forward as if he were in a rugby scrum. By the time they returned to the old library, the horde numbered in the scores, and Carter gave a final wave as he re-entered the building.
“My word!” Margot laughed as she walked towards him once he rejoined the meeting. “What happened out there?”
“I happened,” Carter said, blushing a bit.
He recounted what had occurred, and then added, “I guess we need to redo Columbia’s numbers.”
They all laughed, and then Lou Harris said, “You remind me of JFK when he was running for re-election to his Senate seat in ’58.”
“I don’t want to be JFK. I want to be me. I want this campaign to be about South Carolina. Transformational.”
“You need to be accompanied by someone from security at all times,” Margot said. “Remember what happened to Dr. King being nearly stabbed to death in Harlem last year. I’m concerned about you; something horrible could happen when you go out there and start talking to these people. Folks are really enflamed and passionate these days.”
Nobody said anything for a moment, and Carter paused contemplating what she said.
“I can take care of myself, Margot.”
She shook her head, and turned away.
“Margot...”
The room remained awkwardly silent, and then Jimmy said, “I can go out with Mr. Ridge on campus, it might make sense to have someone, a student, accompany you.”
Carter gave a weak smile but didn’t like the idea of having Jimmy put himself in harm’s way, which was the whole point of having somebody join him.
“If I may,” Lou Harris said. “From a human psychology perspective, might I suggest the following: if there is a security threat to Mr. Ridge, it would most likely come from conservative whites. From a symbolic and messaging point of view, if you do decide to have some sort of informal added security, you might want to consider having an iconic presence perform that role.” He paused and rubbed his chin, then added, “I seem to remember that in Charleston there is the state military college, the Citadel. They’re the ones who fired the first shots on Fort Sumter weren’t they? Surely nothing is a better point of pride for white conservatives than that? Perhaps you could enlist a dozen or so of the cadets to be at your side, create a kind of leadership corps or internship program for them to get course credit?”
Carter nodded slowly, thinking it over. From an aesthetic perspective, it did make sense to project a traditional, white-friendly visual to the casual observer, to balance the pro-integration and pro-civil rights appeal he was going to be clearly enunciating once he launched his campaign.
“That’s all well and good, Lou,” Margot said, “but if there is someone out there with a gun or a knife?”
“Margot, please,” Carter interrupted.
She sat at the conference table and shook her head, re-opening her notebook.