From the Charleston Mercury dated January 10th, 1861:
“...the two cadets, upon spying the steamship The Star of the West attempt to enter Charleston Harbor yesterday at dawn, fired a
barrage from their defensive position on Morris Island with a cry of ‘God is with us!’
June 1962, Columbia
It didn’t take much to convince the Citadel to start a summer internship program with a dozen junior and senior cadets signed up to work as volunteers for the Ridge campaign. The prospect of working closely with professional media consultants, speechwriters, political scientists, as well as the center of the entire endeavor, the young, dynamic philanthropist, Carter Ridge, was an enticing prospect for the students of the Citadel Military Academy.
Stan, scanning the final contract they had agreed with the Citadel, said “Cadet Major Adams, he’ll be your liaison. How many cadets did we say we wanted with Carter when he is out of the office, three?”
“Yes,” Margot said.
“Let’s start as soon as possible,” Carter said. “I want them front and center to provide a great visual when I’m out there meeting the ‘folks.’”
“They won’t be wearing their shakos, however,” Margot said.
“’Shakos’?” Carter asked.
“Their special plumed hats. Shakos,” she said with a grin.
“That’s fine, I wasn’t expecting them to wear their full regalia. Just the traditional dark grey jackets with black trim, the standard Citadel uniform,” he said. “By the way, when and where is my first event?”
“We have you out at Dreher High School here in town this afternoon” she said, referring to her agenda notebook. “Then tomorrow we have you going on the road, first stop is your favorite! Laurens County!”
Once the Citadel bus arrived on campus, Carter stepped down from the office in the old library to greet the cadets as they came off. The cadet major was a serious-looking young man, and Carter shook his hand.
“Gentlemen, welcome to the old library,” Carter began. “Each day three of you will rotate out of your sub-committee assignments and join me as I travel and campaign, at which time you may ask me questions, observe the campaign in action, and provide a cordon between me and the public a visual line to the observer of our shared bond as South Carolinians, since the Citadel is such a treasured institution amongst us all. Jimmy will show you to your dorms, and I’m sure y’all are hungry, so we took it upon ourselves to have a delicious barbeque buffet set up for you in the back garden. Welcome to all of y’all.
“Cadet Major Adams, will you do the honors?” Carter asked as the cadets approached.
“Sir, yes sir,” the cadet major began, introducing each of the new cadets.
“You are an integral part of my team, and I look forward to working with all of you,” Carter said after meeting them all. “Always maintain the traditions of your school, the values of honor and gentlemanly valor, while together we forge the future of the state as a beacon for justice and opportunity for all. Thank-you, gentlemen.”
As he and Margot stood apart from the others afterwards, talking about the day’s schedule, Carter saw that one of the cadets was still staring at them, at him. He had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes that met his glance as he drove slowly along Senate Street late at night, or walked along the moonlit banks of the Seine in Paris, or stood on the sunset terraces of Positano and Capri. They were the eyes that hungered for the muscular embrace of another man, which sought the complicity of a masculine intimacy few understood. The cadet stood with his comrades, while the others laughed and chatted, his gaze returned, sometimes as if by accident, other times overtly at Carter as he talked with Margot and Stan. Carter sensed that Margot noticed his distraction, and she paused talking for a moment, to let him catch up with what she was saying.
“I’m sorry,” Carter said, a bit flushed. “My mind was elsewhere, let’s take this back to our conference table.”
The rest of the day, each time Carter passed the cadet desk at the entrance to the old library, he sensed that he was being examined, evaluated and graded like a prize bull at a county fair. Since he had entered the public realm with his political career, he had grown accustomed to being looked at, it came with the territory. He also knew that his youth made him somewhat of a heartthrob for young women, even older women. But rarely had he felt the lusty gaze of a young man in a public setting, certainly not someone in the same office, as he did with this new cadet. If those dark eyes were the window to one’s soul, than this cadet’s soul was somewhere between Carter’s chest and knees.
As Carter rode home back to Galanos that night, with Shelby at the wheel of the Citroën, his mind kept drifting back to that young dark-haired cadet. He had managed to solicit a grin from Carter as he walked towards the stairs to leave for his afternoon appointment at Dreher. The cadet had a slight gap between his two front teeth, which for whatever reason Carter found adorable. Whereas others might try to hide this imperfection, this young man instead embraced it and flashed a wide smile when he saw Carter stealing a quick glance his way. Carter felt his cheeks blush as he passed by, responding to the youth with his own furtive smile.
White voters were obsessed with the implications of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, and what that might mean for their white-only schools. While Carter knew that the few remarks he made during his impromptu walk on the Horseshoe were just political boilerplate, the first real question that he was asked came down to segregation, what did you think of Brown, Mr. Ridge?
The tension of the growing civil rights movement was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and starting to boil over in South Carolina. In Rock Hill near the North Carolina border with Charlotte, a prolonged sit-in at the segregated McCrory’s drugstore lunch counter following a similar one launched in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, resulted in the arrest of nine protesters. The downtown lunch counter was the easiest, cheapest way for workers to have a quick lunch during their mid-day break. A typical lunch at a counter cost around fifty or sixty cents, and in the segregated, Jim Crow South, only whites could sit and eat at a counter. Negroes, and their money, were tolerated in the stores, but they weren’t allowed to try on clothes in the dressing room, or to return clothes for an exchange, or to sit and eat at the diner counter.
Conversely, this rigid enforcement of segregation was not left to the whims of store management or business owners; it was codified by city and state law. A sympathetic white waitress, or a liberal-minded white business owner, or even a tolerant, Christian white store manager could be arrested for repudiating Jim Crow. The burgeoning White Citizens Councils springing up throughout the South, which acted as a kind of secret police by reporting violations to the authorities, were the enforcement vehicle for keeping the white population in line during this phase of “Massive Resistance” following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
The Rock Hill protest had begun on Tuesday, January 31st, 1961, when eight students from nearby Friendship Junior College along with other activists began picketing in front of the McCrory’s drug store on Main Street, demanding an end to segregated lunch counters. Nine of them walked in and sat down, ordering hamburgers and soft drinks, but were refused service and told to leave. The police came and arrested them, and instead of posting bond and being released, they chose instead to do their sentence — thirty days hard labor at the York County Prison Farm.
Upon learning of their fate and wanting to help, Carter immediately called his old friend from the lynching trial, Bradford, offering to pay their bail.
“No, we’re taking this movement across the entire South, making ‘jail, no bail’ a rallying cry,” he informed Carter. Bradford was now a civil rights attorney and activist, and he and Carter had become close friends in the decade since the lynching trial.
The idea was to force the local authorities to pay for the jail cost of housing and feeding a growing influx of protesters, arrested in subsequent days as the sit-ins and boycotts continued, overwhelming the penal infrastructure and budgets. The civil rights leadership rightly surmised that continuously paying bail from cash-strapped Negro activists was in fact subsidizing the on-going repressive apparatus of the local authorities; “jail, no bail” was a radical departure with the aim of starving the white beast.
By March the city of Rock Hill had arrested upwards of seventy people performing sit-ins at the lunch counters, and the reaction from the white power structure was to double-down on enforcement and resistance. Over three hundred and fifty local business owners joined the White Citizens Council, and Governor Fritz Hollings supported them, claiming that the protests of the Negro activists were ‘purely to create violence and not to promote anyone’s rights.’
A year earlier in the Low Country, an even bigger rejection of Jim Crow had been organized in the majority black town of Orangeburg. The home of the state’s only public college for Negroes, South Carolina State College, Orangeburg was over sixty percent black but under the firm control of white, reactionary conservatives determined to maintain their grip on power. In February of 1960 Negro student activists from South Carolina State and from neighboring Claflin College, the oldest historically black college in the state, quietly approached the store management of the Kress department store to negotiate whether the lunch counter could be de-segregated, but were brusquely rebuffed.
Undeterred, the following day almost forty students from the two colleges arrived to order lunches, but the service counter had been closed and the stools removed pre-emptively by the store management. So the students began to picket, and by March over four hundred students were marching against segregation, in two rows down the sidewalk, so as not to block traffic or trigger any “disturbing the peace” citations, and when ordered by the police, they dispersed peacefully. Immediately, the town fathers passed an emergency ordinance prohibiting picketing.
By mid-March Kress re-opened their lunch counter, and almost one thousand students marched in downtown Orangeburg to protest segregation and to support other sit-ins across the South. As a cold rain chilled the march, the police ordered the protesters to return to campus. This time they refused. In response, the police began clubbing the young men and women, and fired tear gas into the crowd, creating chaos and fear. A stampede of helmeted white police men wielding their batons charged into the marchers, followed by freezing jets of water from fire hoses. Yet the students persisted, holding their ground, and eventually four hundred were arrested in the largest mass arrest yet in the Southern civil rights movement. The students were rounded up and detained in a former slave auction corral, huddled together and soaking wet in the wintery 40-degree sleet and rain. Any sympathetic bystanders or supporters who approached the stockyard to give them food or blankets were also summarily arrested.
Bradford and Carter had been meeting monthly at Smokin’ Joe’s, a local barbeque joint in the Negro section of Columbia, and one of their mutual friends from these regular luncheons, Matthew Perry, was enlisted to represent the prisoners. He, too, was soon thrown in jail for what the judge said was “pursuing his case [too] vigorously.” The Orangeburg detentions became a detonation point for not only these students, stirring many to leave their studies and devote themselves full-time to the movement, but also had become a kind of shorthand across the South for a call to action.
With both Orangeburg and Rock Hill fresh in everyone’s minds, many of the whites in the state were looking for leadership to bring back calm, a return to the normalcy of the 1950s when everyone knew their place. But for the Negro, there was no turning back; and for the racists of the White Citizens Councils, there was no negotiation, only resistance, and terror. The possibility of finding any middle ground was rapidly disappearing.
When Bradford arrived at the old library to meet with the Ridge campaign staff, Carter made the introductions to everyone from the Harris team. Bradford and Margot had met many times over the years, since Bradford and his wife, Sandra, were frequent guests at Carter’s manor, Galanos.
“Bradford, I wanted you to join us this afternoon, for you to tell all of us what you told me last Wednesday over lunch,” Carter said, motioning for everyone to sit back down. One of the secretaries placed a large platter of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in the center of the table, with a large cold milk pitcher and another one of iced tea.
“Well, I was frustrated last week, actually, I still am, and I probably came across as not very diplomatic,” Bradford began.
Carter reached over, grabbed a cookie, and passed the platter to Bradford, saying “you said, correct me if I’m wrong, that you wanted me to be your son of a bitch.”
Everyone laughed and Bradford raised his hands up, “to be fair, I think I said guard dog.”
Carter, teasing him slightly, interrupted, “No, I believe you said son of a bitch, but go ahead. Explain.”
“What I told Carter over lunch was that I was tired of the Kennedy administration trying to appease the Southern Democrats, and especially angry with Bobby as Attorney General not enforcing the law and the rulings of the Supreme Court, as it pertains to not just segregation in public education, but all aspects of Jim Crow. There are instances daily — just this afternoon, before I left the office we received a phone call from a woman, hysterical, in tears, because she was scared. What was she scared about? She was terrified that her son, a college sophomore at South Carolina State down in Orangeburg, was going to be shot because he got in a scuffle with a few crackers... sorry, Miss Margot... from the local White Citizens Council while handing out flyers in front of the movie house.”
He took a sip of his iced tea and then continued.
“If we truly had a White House, a president, who believed in civil rights, and wanted to end the daily threat of violence that we face as Negroes in this country, he would act. He would have the Department of Justice’s U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina act, enforcing the law, bringing charges against the Orangeburg mayor, the chief of police, and the members of the White Citizens Council for inciting violence. He could federalize the National Guard. He could send in federal troops if needed. Instead we have the Kennedys wringing their hands, all worried, feeling very concerned, but at the end of the day, just allowing the status quo to continue.
“I love this man,” Bradford said pointing at Carter. “He is the real deal. I know that his heart is in the right place, and he has shown me and others, time and time again, that he will do something to push our agenda forward.”
“But,” Carter said, egging him on. “There’s always a but involved.”
Bradford and the others laughed.
“Yes, but, once you are elected, and I hope and pray that you will be, we need you to be our son of a bitch. To fight for us.”
“Okay, okay, and I want to be that fighter for you and everyone,” Carter said nodding. “So let’s role-play. If I were governor today, what would you like me to do?”
“For starters,” Bradford said, after taking a bite of his cookie, “you should be front and center in the fight, visible and engaging with the picketers, joining in the marches, making sure that we are secure against the white mob, against the police.”
Lou Harris shook his head, and before he could speak, Bradford raised his finger and said, “Let me finish. With all due respect, before you tell me what can’t be done, let me tell what has been done.”
Bradford talked about his friend, Matthew Perry, who had just finished his law degree at the Negro law school in Orangeburg, and opened his own law office in Spartanburg as the only Negro attorney in the county. He said, “Matthew was moved to become active in the fight for racial equality after serving in an all-Negro division in World War Two, when he returned to South Carolina on leave and witnessed Italian former prisoners of war being served their meals in a diner, but he had been forced to order and take his meal at the window outside. He had decided that it was time for change.”
After a respectful pause, Lou Harris said, “You can’t expect the governor to be put into a position like that. He can’t be put in a combustible situation like Rock Hill or Orangeburg. His presence there would only make things worse.” Then he turned towards Carter and said, “But what you could do, as Bradford said, is make sure that there is overwhelming force present, to ensure there is not mob violence. Asking Kennedy to federalize the National Guard, now that would force his hand to get involved. I agree with Bradford as well on applying pressure, legal action, against the mayors, police chiefs, and anyone involved in terroristic actions that might be carried out by these citizens’ councils. As governor you could petition the U.S. Attorney to formally indict such persons.”
Harris lit a cigarette and then said, “But the reality of the situation is that the state of South Carolina, indeed, like most places and the country as a whole, is roughly divided into thirds. One third is irredeemably racist, reactionary, and will never change. The second third is liberal, modern, and wants civil rights and equality for everyone. And the final third is that mushy center, which can be swayed either way, and will either tip the election to Mr. Ridge, or tip the election to the right. We can’t alienate that middle third too much, but at the same time we have to remain true to our values as part of the liberal third.”
Margot reached into a large satchel bag next to her chair and pulled out a copy of Life magazine. She laid it on the table.
“Do you remember this?” Margot said to Carter. He grinned and blushed. He knew where she was going with this.
“June 2nd, 1947, with actress Jane Greer on the cover, but on page thirty-two — ” she said, turning the pages, “we find a big beautiful photo of Carter Ridge, aged eighteen, fists clenched and yelling, looking ready for a fight with some local whites, just moments after the acquittal of the lynch mob that killed Willie Earle.”
Bradford reached for the magazine, and smiled.
“That’s right before we got arrested. I didn’t know that there were photographs that made it to Life magazine!”
He passed it over to Lou Harris and the others.
“The power of the image, whether photographic or moving, is lasting. It is what people remember,” Margot said. “I want us to find another opportunity for Carter to show his fighting side, and have Life magazine continue their story, letting people know that he will be their S.O.B.”
“...Or guard dog,” Carter said wryly.
Lou Harris exhaled some smoke, and said, “Ideally what we need is to find a target for Mr. Ridge that isn’t going to alienate that middle third of impressionable whites.”
Carter asked, “Just who is this group of malleable middle-
of-the-roaders?”
Lou turned to the third member of his team, “Betty, you have done some demographic slicing of the data, isn’t that correct?”
Prior to that moment she hadn’t said anything in previous meetings, but the young woman with the glasses cleared her throat and sprang to action.
“We will focus more on this demographic third when we do our drill-down in Laurens County, absolutely. But in the interim, we do have some interesting hints at the profiles of these white, what did you call them, malleable middle-of-the-roaders, from our surveys in Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston. Also, from anecdotal evidence, it seems clear that this target group is primarily small town and aspirational middle class.”
“Well,” Carter said, raising his eyebrows. “I look forward to what you and your team can dig up in Laurens County.”
“Betty, what do you mean by ‘aspirational middle class’, exactly?” Margot asked.
“That these people are working class but struggling to make ends meet. They have a high school education, and are hoping for a better life, but they don’t feel as if they are participating in the prosperity they see around them.” She adjusted her glasses slightly and continued, “As for the Negro, they have no great animosity, and do not view racial equality as a threat to their own self-esteem. They work hard and try to adhere to middle class norms and values — marriage, education, and going to church are all important for them — and they avoid vices such as alcohol and gambling. So in that sense they are traditional, but in other ways, they exhibit more modern behavior with their openness to racial equality. They won’t be joining the protests, however, and won’t be there on the front lines fighting for justice. They are too busy trying to move ahead. Does that help?”
Margot smiled broadly, and said, “I like this lady.”
Everyone laughed. Betty smiled back.
Lou Harris turned to Carter and said, “So let’s look at some bogeymen that we can use as a foil for Mr. Ridge to appeal to this group. Someone who is a natural fit for both you,” turning to Carter, “and the malleable middle.”
Everyone sat thinking for a few moments, and then Harris’ assistant Wilbur pulled out a list from his briefcase. “I have a listing from a survey we conduct on occasion to gauge how favorable or unfavorable a certain category is.” He looked down at it, and then started reading. “Let’s see. Communists?”
Carter said, “I don’t think there are any in South Carolina, sorry, next.”
“Homosexuals?”
Margot arched her eyebrow.
“Next.” she said.
“Labor unions?”
Carter said, “I’m for labor unions, so that wouldn’t be applicable as a target for me.”
“You touched on something that you just said there, Betty,” Lou said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “‘Struggling economically.’ Let’s tease that out a bit...”
“Well, I can certainly understand that,” Bradford said. “When the first of the month comes around and you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to pay rent.”
“Yes, continue,” Lou said.
“Nobody likes their landlord,” Margot said. “And nobody likes their dentist.”
“My brother-in-law is a dentist!” Lou said. “Let’s keep going with this.”
“I know that the cotton industry is shedding jobs. Unskilled labor is being replaced by big combine machines,” Carter said. “Tenant farmers and sharecroppers are losing their livelihood and homes across the cotton belt.”
Margot made a note in her notebook, “We need to have someone look up the eviction process, the legal steps a landlord must take in order to forcibly evict a tenant farmer. I have a feeling it’s pretty loosey-goosey in most cases, and landlords aren’t following the letter of the law.”
Bradford said, “I’ll look into that.”
“We also need to formalize a media strategy. From now on, anytime Carter is out in public, we need to have a team filming and taking photographs. The Life photograph from the lynching trial was impromptu, and we need to capture any other impromptu moments to build our narrative,” Margot said as she wrote in her notebook.
Later that night, after their meeting adjourned and he had escorted Margot to the sidewalk, Carter said, “I think I’m going to go see a movie, and I’ll drive myself home afterwards,” he said, and then kissed Margot on the cheek. “Have Shelby take you home, I’ll take your car.”
She looked at him, not with worry but with a stern glare bordering on reproach. “Okay, but —”
“Don’t worry.”
She got into the backseat of the Citroën, and Carter closed the door behind her. He stood on the curb along Sumter Street as they pulled away, feeling the tension in him retreat as well, as if the red glow of the trailing taillights was the embers of the stress he had been guarding all day. He couldn’t clearly identify what had set him off with this simmering anguish, was it the pitiful approval numbers in his polling, or was it the fact that he was no longer a nameless stranger who could walk unrecognized across the campus quadrangle. More likely it was the haunting temptation of that cadet back at the old library, with his knowing eyes, and his wide grin. Carter couldn’t get him out of his mind. He had decided that it wasn’t just the physical lustful attraction that tantalized him, but the open flirtation, as if their mutual attraction was just as normal as anyone else’s.
He walked over to the nearby parking lot where Margot’s car was parked. Once he pulled out onto Pendleton Street, a tempting thought jumped into his head. He flicked on his blinker and turned left, and then made the next right onto Senate Street with its grassy median. He knew he shouldn’t, it was too risky even under normal circumstances, and now, with his recognition increasing and his campaign about to officially begin, it was even more so. But he also knew that if anything was going to give him relief from this turmoil, even if only for a brief respite, it was this. He drove with caution, not so deliberately that it would arouse untoward attention from an undercover police vehicle, but just casually enough for him to see from the corner of his eye who the other drivers were, cruising the same strip. Some were already parked on the curb, with their windows down, bare arms exposed, dangling smoldering cigarettes from their fingers. These men were all here for the same hidden desire.
He made one lap of the six-block-long boulevard, and noticed one car in particular, a two-toned Pontiac, with a blond-haired youth sitting in the driver’s seat. When Carter passed by the second time, the boy looked him directly in the eyes with a nervous but longing gaze. Carter double-tapped his brake, a maneuver he had learned long before, and then used his blinker to turn right onto Pickens Street. From his rear-view mirror he saw that the Pontiac had pulled out and was following him discreetly down the hill towards the south end of the campus.
Minutes later they had found a secluded corner in a nearby parking lot, and the teenager had his face in Carter’s lap. It didn’t take long for Carter to finish, emptying himself into the back of the young man’s throat, and he heard the moaning satisfaction from the kid as he too quickly came. Neither said a word, and after the young man wiped his mouth a brief smile emerged. Does he recognize me? Carter wondered. The youth left Margot’s car, replacing the faint trace of her Bourjois perfume with his sweaty, testosterone-tinged scent.