SOUTH CAROLINA: Backfire

Behind the polite and expensive façade of its seaside resorts, South Carolina’s famed Myrtle Beach is much like any other Southern coastal town. Negro tobacco hands, as well as tourists, invade it for entertainment and for years many of them have headed for Charlie Fitzgerald’s place in a section locally known as “Nigger Hill.” A man could get almost anything he wanted at Charlie’s—whisky, a woman, food, or a fight.

By “cooperating” with the town police Charlie had done well in Myrtle Beach ever since 1937. But recently, members of the Ku Klux Klan began muttering about him; they swore his good-looking, light-skinned Negro wife, Sarah, was white, and that white women were entertaining at his place.

Night at Charlie’s. One evening, a fortnight ago, the Grand Dragon of the South Carolina Klan, a Leesville (S.C.) grocer named Thomas L. Hamilton, assembled a mob of his men on a road near Myrtle Beach. With an electrically lighted cross shining on the lead car, 26 automobile loads of Kluxers rolled through the Negro section of town. Most of the colored population was terrified, but one bold Negro telephoned the police that there would be bloodshed if the Klan came back.

Someone relayed the warning to the Kluxers. They raced back into town and headed straight for Charlie’s place. His customers bolted out rear doors and windows. Charlie himself stood stubbornly in the doorway, holding a pistol, as the hooded mob ran toward him. But he did not shoot. A Klansman wrested the weapon from him; he was beaten within an inch of his life, one of his ears was notched with a knife, and he was stuffed into the trunk of one of the cars. The mob smashed his furniture, and then shot up his “casino” with pistol fire.

A Conway, S.C. policeman named James Daniel Johnston—who had just pulled his Klan robe on over his uniform before joining the mob—was hit in the back by a stray bullet. His fellow Kluxers hurriedly abandoned him, dumped Charlie out at the side of a road and vanished.

A motorist spotted the wounded policeman and took him to the Conway hospital, 19 miles from Myrtle Beach. There he died. Next day, city, county and state police refused to say a word; but the case was too hot to hush. As newspapers began digging into the story, Myrtle Beach’s tourist-conscious resort owners wrung their hands over the threat to their trade.

About-Face. Abruptly, after five days of inaction, Horry County Sheriff C. E. Sasser did an about-face, and began investigating the affair as if Judgment Day were upon him.

He announced that Charlie had been arrested and was being held in some undisclosed place, but cleared him of any blame for the shooting. Then he arrested Grand Dragon Hamilton, charged him with inciting a riot, and confiscated his robe and a 16-ft. bull whip.

At week’s end Sasser was still plowing ahead with his investigation. He had arrested ten more Klansmen (one of them, a member of the state constabulary, was promptly fired) and he swore he was going to pinch a hundred more. The state governments of North and South Carolina took steps to suppress Klan parades, and many predicted that the Klan, after its cowardly night’s work, was through in both states for good.