Walter Edgar's Journal

The late Ken Burger spent almost 40 years writing for two South Carolina newspapers, during a career that included stints covering sports, business, politics, and life in the Palmetto State.Burger’s book, Baptized in Sweet Tea, is a collection of columns he wrote for the Charleston Post & Courier. As the title hints, the common thread running through the collection is Burger’s southern-ness… and, more specifically, his identity as a born-and-bred South Carolinian.

On June 17, 2015, twelve members of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina welcomed a young white man to their evening Bible study. He arrived with a pistol, 88 bullets, and hopes of starting a race war. Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine innocents during their closing prayer horrified the nation. Two days later, some relatives of the dead stood at Roof’s hearing and said, “I forgive you.” That grace offered the country a hopeful ending to an awful story. But for the survivors and victims’ families, the journey had just begun.

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876–1958), a leader of the Charleston Renaissance, immortalized the beauty and history of the Carolina Lowcountry and helped propel the region into an important destination for cultural tourism.In the book Alice: Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Charleston Renaissance Artist, Dwight McInvail and his co-authors draw on unpublished papers, letters, and interviews to create a personal account of the artist’s life and work. The book is enriched by over 200 illustrations of paintings, prints, sketches, and photographs, many shared for the first time.McInvaill and internationally renowned South Carolina Artist Jonathan Green join Walter Edgar in conversation about Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and her work.

General U.S. history courses in many high schools depict the American Revolutionary War as a series of battles in the Northeast - Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, etc. - that lead inexorably to British General Charles Cornwallis's surrender of 8,000 British soldiers and seamen to a French and American force at Yorktown, Virginia, October 19, 1781. The truth is much more complicated, of course. A major component of the war, one that paved the way to Yorktown, was the fighting that took place in 1780 - 81 in the South - especially in South Carolina. In essence, according to Dr. Jack Warren and Dr. Walter Edgar, the war was won in the South.

On the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone’s throw from city hall in tiny Hamlet, NC, burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry.

New York Times bestselling author, Mary Alice Monroe, talks with Walter Edgar about her latest novel, The Summer of Lost and Found. Monroe is the author of 27 books, including the Beach House series: The Beach House, Swimming Lessons, Beach House Memories, Beach House for Rent, Beach House Reunion, and On Ocean Boulevard. More than 7.5 million copies of her books have been published worldwide

This week on Walter Edgar’s Journal, John S. Sledge’s talks with Walter about his book, The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History (2021, USC Press). In it, Sledge presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the earth's tenth largest body of water. In this beautifully written and illustrated volume, Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich.

In his book, The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670-1720 (2020, University of SC Press), Dr. John Navin explains how eight English aristocrats, the Lords Proprietors, came to possess the vast Carolina land grant and then enacted elaborate plans to recruit and control colonists as part of a grand moneymaking scheme. In his conversation with Walter Edgar, Navin tells of a cadre of men who rose to political and economic prominence, while ordinary colonists, enslaved Africans, and indigenous groups became trapped in a web of violence and oppression.Threatened by the Native Americans they exploited, by the Africans they enslaved, and by their French and Spanish rivals, white South Carolinians lived in continual fear. For some it was the price they paid for financial success. But for most there were no riches, and the possibility of a sudden, violent death was overshadowed by the misery of their day-to-day existence.

Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (2020, USC Press), John Garrison Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority.

Daniel Harrison, author of Live at Jackson Station: Music, Community, and Tragedy in a Southern Blues Bar (2021, USC Press), talks with Walter Edgar about how Jackson Station, in the little upstate town of Hodges, SC, emerged as a cultural kaleidoscope that served as an oasis of tolerance and diversity in a time and place that often suffered from undercurrents of bigotry and violence—an uneasy coexistence of incongruent forces that have long permeated southern life and culture.

This time on Walter Edgar’s Journal, former SoCon commissioner John Iamarino, author of A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of The Southern Conference (2021, Mercer University Press), tells the story of the notable athletes, coaches, and athletic programs that have built such a rich tradition over so many decades. Legendary sports figures such as Jerry West, Arnold Palmer, Bear Bryant, Sam Huff, and Steph Curry are all part of the Southern Conference's past.

In his book, The Virtue of Cain: From Slave to Senator (2021, Rocky Pond Press), Kevin Cherry focuses on the short but extraordinary life of Reconstruction era Senator Lawrence Cain of Edgefield, South Carolina. Cherry, Cain's great great-grandson, also tells the contemporaty story of a family with Southern roots, long identified as having some American indian ancestry, re-discovering their true heritage.

On the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone’s throw from city hall in tiny Hamlet, NC, burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry.

Kathryn Smith, author of Gertie: The Fabulous Life of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, Heiress, Explorer, Socialite, Spy (2021, Evening Post Publishing Company) joins Walter Edgar to tell the amazing story of Gertrude Sanford Legendre, a woman whose adventurous life spanned the twentieth century, beginning in Aiken, S.C. in 1902 and ending at her plantation outside Charleston in 2000.

George Singleton joins Walter Edgar to talk about his new collection of short stories, You Want More, some of his favorite stories, and his life as a writer.

On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran of World War II, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.

The League of Women Voters of South Carolina has a long and colorful history. Born out of the women's suffrage movement, the South Carolina League was organized in 1920, the year of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that ended a 72-year struggle for women’s right to vote.

After World War I, Black South Carolinians, despite poverty and discrimination, began to organize and lay the basis for the civil rights movement that would occur after World War II. Dr. Bobby Donaldson of the University of South Carolina talks about the efforts by black South Carolinians to obtain justice and civil rights during a time of economic collapse and political change.

Four years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a federal judge in Charleston hatched his secret plan to end segregation in America. Julius Waties Waring was perhaps the most unlikely civil rights hero in history. An eighth-generation Charlestonian, the son of a Confederate veteran and scion of a family of slave owners, Waring was appointed to the federal bench in the early days of World War II.

In her new book, Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (2020, USC Press), journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, cross burnings, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured—as well as the astonishing courage, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.