Untold stories: Pandemics for blacks in SC — and why we now march in the streets
Black lives apparently didn’t matter to whites during the last great pandemic to strike South Carolina.
Will it happen again?
It happened with the Spanish flu of 1918. It’s not so much that African Americans were written out of that key moment in history. They never were written into it. It’s as if they did not exist.
And we wonder why America’s streets, including our own, are filled today with people sick and tired of this mindset. Who could possibly wonder why blacks are rising up and saying, Enough is enough.
The Charleston Public Library says this about the 1918 contagion that killed almost 300 souls in that city:
“It’s important to remember that all health care services in early-twentieth-century Charleston were segregated according to local customs and laws during the era of Jim Crow politics. The heroic work of the Red Cross and other agencies during the influenza pandemic of 1918 flowed in two streams, therefore, extending separately to both the white and black communities.
“The white-owned newspapers of that era, which survive and provide valuable historical information, contain little information about relief efforts in the black community, while copies of Charleston’s early black-owned newspapers have not survived.
“We have, therefore, precious little data about the effects of the Spanish flu within African-American households across the city.”
SC African American Heritage Commission
Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, South Carolina’s African Americans are being urged to change that.
The South Carolina African American Heritage Commission has set up an online portal for African Americans to record how the pandemic has affected their lives, using words, video, art, photographs or other documents.
It’s called Black Carolinians Speak: Portraits of a Pandemic, and it can be accessed at https://greenbookofsc.com/speak.
The collection is to reside with the S.C. Department of Archives and History, according to the instigator of the idea, retired National Park Service ranger Michael Allen. In that job, he spent decades helping write blacks back into the history of South Carolina.
Now he says the state archives have very little about African Americans in the 1918 pandemic.
The story of today’s pandemic has many, many chapters yet to written.
But at first, the South Carolina public wasn’t seeing numbers by race and ethnicity.
When we did, it showed that COVID-19 has hit black South Carolinians harder than whites or Hispanics.
African Americans make up 27% of the state’s population, but 43 percent of the COVID-19 cases and more than half of related deaths.
The black experience
And we know that the S.C. Legislative Black Caucus has concerns.
It announced May 18 a list of priorities for the state, to include:
▪ “A specific allocation of federal funds designated to ethnic minority groups which include funds designated for small business relief and health care needs.
▪ “Allocate funding to bridge the ‘Digital Divide’ for disadvantaged and rural South Carolina students. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the gap that exists between school districts and ZIP codes in South Carolina.
▪ “A specific allocation of federal funds designated for rental assistance in the form of targeted and direct payments to landlords to cover for lost rent due to the pandemic.”
The heritage commission wants African Americans to tell:
▪ “What effect has this pandemic had on your personal life, family, business, church, organization or community?
▪ “What feelings are you experiencing?
▪ “How have these changes affected your political or economic outlook?
▪ “How have you or others in your community showed resourcefulness or learned new skills as you have adjusted to the crisis?
▪ “What advice would you give to others who may face similar crises?”
Quiet churches
On Hilton Head Island, Gullah Museum founder Louise Cohen breaks into her storytelling mode to describe life with an invisible enemy.
“It’s almost like walking outside in the night,” she said. “You don’t know what you might bump into, but you know you better stay in the middle of the road because you know there’s a ditch on both sides.”
Modern Hilton Head comes with another concern, she said: “ People coming here from who knows where, and a lot of them, from what I have seen, are not wearing masks.”
Hilton Head’s black community has not been hammered by the virus.
The Gullah are taking it seriously.
And that has meant sacrificing traditions.
“Everything that we have done for generations and taken for granted has changed — hugging and embracing,” said the Rev. Louis Johnson of Central Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church on Mathews Drive.
The church — a cornerstone of the black community since First African Baptist was founded on Hilton Head during the Civil War — has gone quiet.
Johnson’s services are streamed on websites, Facebook and Zoom.
He conducted a funeral by Zoom.
“More than 100 people were there, but they were in 100 different places,” he said. “That is so different from our huge homegoing services and our huge repasts with food afterward.”
And it’s hard on a preacher with no choir, organist or drummer — not to mention the response of the congregation.
“It’s sterile, but it’s what we’re forced to deal with now.”
The awful part, he said, is that family cannot be with family in hospitals or nursing homes or assisted living homes.
That is a toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The South Carolina African American Heritage Commission wants it written into history, because black lives do indeed matter.
This story was originally published June 7, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
