Native Drums
Explore the powerful symbolism of drums in African American culture, once tools of communication and resistance during the darkest times of slavery. We confront the lingering shadows of economic exploitation and the pervasive influence of media and religion in controlling black narratives. Let’s reexamine the role of the black church and its mission to fight systemic injustices, urging a return to prophetic ministries that prioritize humanity and community over material wealth. This podcast episode is not just a reflection of the past but a call to action for the future, urging us to build a more just and liberated world.
Native Drums
From Augusta's Front Porch to Columbia's Civil Rights Center: The Journey of Dr. Bobby J Donaldson Jr
The front porches of Augusta, Georgia shaped Dr. Bobby Donaldson long before formal education ever could. Through his grandmother's stories, the seeds of historical inquiry were planted, setting him on a path to become one of the nation's foremost chroniclers of South Carolina's civil rights movement.
When Dr. Donaldson arrived at the University of South Carolina 25 years ago, established scholars confidently told him "there wasn't much of a civil rights movement in South Carolina." This assertion – which he immediately recognized as false – exemplifies the historical erasure he's spent his career fighting. Drawing inspiration from pioneers like Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who created Negro History Week (now Black History Month) while facing similar institutional barriers in the 1930s, Donaldson has methodically constructed an irrefutable record of Black resistance and activism throughout South Carolina's history.
Through the Center for Civil Rights History and Research, Donaldson has democratized historical knowledge beyond academic circles. His team digitizes forgotten photographs, develops curriculum for teachers, creates walking tours, and records oral histories – all while training the next generation of historians. The work reveals extraordinary stories: Joseph Rainey, the first Black representative in the South Carolina legislature who helped create a constitution mandating integrated education; the brief period when USC had a majority-Black student body in the 1870s; and the ordinary families from Summerton whose petition for better schools became the cornerstone of Brown v. Board of Education.
Guided by civil rights activist Donella Brown Wilson's principle that "history has no purpose unless you use it," Donaldson's work transcends mere documentation. In our current moment, when battles over curricula and historical interpretation rage across the country, his meticulous research provides both inspiration and armor for those fighting to preserve accurate historical narratives. Listen as he shares how these recovered stories illuminate not just where we've been, but where we might go next.
Good evening and welcome to Native Drums. Our guest on this podcast today is Dr Bobby J Donaldson Jr, Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Civil Rights, History and Research at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Speaker 2:Greetings. I'm Dr Bobby Donaldson. I'm a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, where I serve as the executive director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research, and I'm also the James and Emily Clyburn Endowed Professor at the University of South Carolina.
Speaker 3:Can you describe your educational background and how it prepared you for your career? Can you?
Speaker 2:describe your educational background and how it prepared you for your career. So I'm a native of Augusta, georgia, and it was in Augusta where I had my first training as a historian. Before ever going to formal school, I was trained by my grandmother and my great grandparents on the front porch and living rooms, listening to stories, and so the seed for history and the seed for recovering and documenting the past were planted well before I went to kindergarten. I went to elementary school at a place called WS Harnsby Elementary, which was in an area of Augusta called the Bottoms. It was the lowest part of our city in terms of geography and some thought the lowest part in terms of class and socioeconomic conditions. However, I grew up in a very rich home with supportive grandparents and parents and a community. At the school I attended, ws Hornsby School, I was taught and trained, more or less baptized in black history. The person who had the greatest influence on me was a woman named Mrs CW Eason. She was a school librarian and she turned our school library club into a black history month, or black history training ground. From there I became part of an experiment in Augusta, where I helped to. I became part of the early group of students who were part of a performing arts magnet school, and this pulled students from across the city of Augusta into this performing arts magnet school. My art was theater and so I performed on the stage and still am.
Speaker 2:I graduated from that school and I went from sixth grade to 12th grade, and that one school finished there with every intention of going off to college to become a lawyer. And so I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, connecticut, where initially I majored in political science with every intention of becoming a lawyer. But while at Wesleyan I met an African-American professor who told me about an initiative called the Mellon Foundation. And the Mellon Foundation was an initiative that sought out students of color to pursue careers in the academy, and first I had to understand what the academy was. But through Dr Harris I got this fellowship to the Mellon Foundation and I served as a Mellon fellow as an undergraduate. I then left Wesleyan and went to Emory University in Atlanta, georgia, where I got my PhD in history. Following my PhD work, I did training at Dartmouth College and Harvard University and have been on the faculty of the University of South Carolina now for 25 years.
Speaker 3:How has your education influenced your approach to historical research?
Speaker 2:How has your education influenced your approach to historical research. So I think I have training in two levels. I have formal training. I've been trained in archival research, in academic writing, in scholarship, and that has been quite beneficial to my career. But I've also been trained in what I call old school, the informal training which I incorporate every day.
Speaker 2:One story I tell often that shows the impact of teachers in those early careers is when I was in middle school I was part of a group called the National History Day, and this is an ongoing program and the National History Day attempts to well exposes young men and women to historical research. And you can do an essay, you can do a display board or you can do a performance, and so I decided to do a performance on my great-grandfather, whose name was Smart Williams. That was his given name and I knew him. I took notes as I was living and working with him, but when he died it was right as this production was taking place. And so my teacher said you need to have additional research to supplement what you're presenting on stage, and so I had to go and find primary source material and secondary source material about African-American life in South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century life in South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century, and one of the documents that I found, or one of the sources, was this book called Born to Rebel, and at the time I did not know who the author was.
Speaker 2:The author was Dr Benjamin Elijah Mays, one of the most influential scholars, activists, theologians of the 20th century, and Dr Mays wrote this book Born to Rebel to explain his journey from rural South Carolina to becoming the mentor of Martha Keene Jr, to becoming the president of Morehouse College. And in this book it talks about a young black boy from the South who gets a PhD, who pursues a career in the academy, and as I'm reading it I'm like that sounds like an aspiration. So I checked this book out of the Augusta Public Library over 40 years ago and this is the book it is the same book that I've not returned since that time, in part because that book and Dr Mays' example transformed how I thought about the world, how I thought about my own future.
Speaker 3:So how do you handle working with colleagues who have different viewpoints or interpretations of historical events?
Speaker 2:interpretations of historical events. So history is a contentious field of study. It always has been, and it's clearly the case now, but it's always been the case. I am a collector of historical books, and one of the books in my library that I turn to regularly that helps me confront, contend, fight, withstand, resist is a book published in the mid-1930s by a preeminent scholar and historian named Dr Carter Goodwin Woodson.
Speaker 2:Dr Woodson got his PhD from Harvard University in the early part of the 20th century, but he cannot teach at Harvard or any major white university, and so he decided to carve out a path of his own, and Dr Woodson created an organization called the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. He created a new publication called the Journal of Negro History. He started an initiative called Negro History Week. That became Negro History Month, black History Month, and in the mid-1930s he was very much concerned that some historians, some scholars, were teaching and putting forward a history that was incorrect and intentionally designed to minimize the influence and achievements of black people, and that this interpretation was now shaping the curriculum in schools, and particularly public schools and in schools where you had African-American enrollment. And Dr Woodson was deeply concerned that this miseducation of the Negro was impacting how people thought about themselves and their future.
Speaker 2:So that's one of the books I look at regularly the Miseducation of the Negro, and it looks at how Woodson decided that we must do our own work, we must tell our own story. We must tell our own story, we must dig out for our own sources and preserve those sources, and then we take that material and not only publish it as scholarship, but we also work very closely with teachers and schools and students to make sure an accurate and comprehensive history is presented in our curriculum, and so I do that regularly. My job is to tell the truth, and it is to tell the whole truth. But truth is debatable in many respects, and so in the work I do as a professor at this university, we are constantly revising, we're constantly reconstructing the history of South Carolina and the nation.
Speaker 3:Can you discuss the complex historical problem you have solved through your analytical skills?
Speaker 2:When I joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina 25 years ago, I was told by some well-meaning and seemingly well-positioned scholars that there was not much of a civil rights movement in South Carolina, that that surely could not be true. And some said that there were not any notable events and there were not significant sources to document what took place in South Carolina in comparison to places like Mississippi or Alabama. And I had the good fortune of coming at the university and being trained and mentored by several individuals who told me a different account and a different history. One of those persons was named Dr Tom Johnson, and Dr Johnson was the editor of a book called A True Likeness. This is a copy of the book. This book was published while I was in high school and I remember vividly my great grandfather, smart Williams, and his sister, aunt Baby, looking at this book and wondering who was this little boy, who are the people in this book? And I wish Granddaddy and Aunt Baby were here today because we know exactly who this little boy is. His name is Walter Adams, and this has come through research and talking and interviewing people. We've now been able to identify other people in this book through research and engaging the community and similarly, we've now been able to tell a deeper and richer history of black life in South Carolina and of the Civil Rights Movement.
Speaker 2:Two other individuals who had a tremendous impact on me were Dean Willie Hereford, and Dean Hereford was dean of students at the University of South Carolina.
Speaker 2:He was the first director of the African-American Studies program at the University of South Carolina and he was a trained archivist one of the very first trained African American archivists in the country and he taught me a great deal about preserving the record and going into communities and talking to families and churches and organizations and encouraging them to preserve their records so that there will not be a miseducation, there will not be a misinterpretation.
Speaker 2:And the final person was a woman named Dr Grace Jordan McFadden. And Dr McFadden was the first African-American woman tenured at the University of South Carolina and she was a phenomenal and relentless public historian. And Dr McFadden created a rich collection of oral interviews about the civil rights movement in South Carolina and when you listen carefully to those stories and those who recollections, you see very clearly that anyone who makes the claim that there was no movement in this state are blind and are intentionally misinterpreting the record, are blind and are intentionally misinterpreting the record, and so for the last 25 years I've worked with colleagues and community members and students to tell a deeper and richer history of the black freedom struggle in the state of South Carolina.
Speaker 3:So how do you communicate your research findings to a non-academic audience?
Speaker 2:communicate your research findings to a non-academic audience. Well, the Civil Rights Center of the University of South Carolina was established in the fall of 2015. And the center builds upon another organization that I helped establish called Columbia SC 63, our Story Matters, and both of these initiatives Columbia 63 and the Center are very much about engaging a wider public. We have built up and we have amplified great archival collections, and we do so for really a threefold purpose. We want these materials to be utilized to advance teaching and research, so that books can be published, articles can be published, websites can be designed. We also use these materials to train teachers, and so we develop curriculum, we develop workshops, we develop summer institutes so that teachers are better equipped to use this material in their classrooms and to engage younger audiences.
Speaker 2:We have done art exhibits, we have done art competitions, we have walking tours down Main Street, we have virtual tours online, and we engage the public, and so, on a regular basis, we are doing lectures and we engage the public, and so, on a regular basis, we're doing lectures, we're doing oral histories, and so we try to find whatever capacity we can to make sure that all of this material is not locked in my office.
Speaker 2:It's not locked in my head that we are creating platforms that people have access, and so one of the things we're doing right now with Richard Samuel Roberts, for example, when this book was published.
Speaker 2:This book has about 300 amazing images of African-American life in downtown Columbia. So what we're doing now to make this collection available. We're now digitizing all of his images, which are about 6,000 images, and so very soon there will be a web portal where anyone around the world can go in and look closely at these images and hopefully help us identify who these people are. And also, currently, at the Columbia Museum of Art, there is an exhibit called Intersection, and in that exhibit anyone can go in during the working hours of the museum and see an amazing display of photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts photographs from the famed photographer Cecil Williams in Orangeburg and can see what African American life looked like in downtown Columbia from the period of reconstruction to the 1970s, when so much of that area became the target of eminent domain and urban renewal and has disappeared from the landscape. And so what we try to do is, through our outreach, through our research, we try to reconstruct this history so that it is more accessible to the, to the general public.
Speaker 3:Two more questions. Can you discuss any peer reviews you have received and how you address the?
Speaker 2:feedback. I am regularly reviewed as a professor on campus and as a scholar. I'm regularly reviewed as an administrator on campus and generally I've been positively reviewed. I've had a very successful career at the University of South Carolina. But the audience that concerns me most there are two audiences that I want to be reviewed regularly and I'm paying careful attention. I you know I am always mindful of being reviewed by colleagues and professors. That's very important to my career as I advance. I'm mindful of how people think about my scholarship and my publications, but at the end of the day, I want to be measured as a great professor and a great teacher. Day I want to be measured as a great professor and a great teacher, and how my students think of me in the classroom as a mentor and advisor is is crucial. I have made adjustments over time as a result of that feedback and I want to be regarded as a good public servant and a good public historian, and so I am regularly talking to people about what I can do differently or better and what the center and the Columbia 63 can do differently or better as well, because ultimately, we are servants of the community, of the people, and I train all my students in that way too, that I want to train you to be a phenomenal and fierce scholar and intellectual. But the greater challenge is to take all that knowledge and to go out and do something.
Speaker 2:One of the people who had an impact on me was a woman named Donella Brown Wilson. Miss Wilson was a native of Fort Mott, South Carolina. She comes to Columbia in the 1920s, right around World War I, and her mother was a domestic on this campus, a housekeeper, and she has clear memories of working on this campus but not being allowed to be a student on this campus and never envisioned that a day would come when a professor like myself would be employed or students of color would be enrolled. And I had a chance to talk to Ms Wilson, to interview Ms Wilson, and at the end of one of our conversations, after we had spent time talking about her career as an educator, she wanted to know what we were going to do with this information, with these recordings, and I explained.
Speaker 2:I said, miss Wilson, we'll use the material For teaching, we'll use it for scholarship and public, public engagement. And she says she said something that actually is now part of the civil rights centers mantra. She said to us that history has no purpose unless you use it, and we use that now regularly. So this is a photograph of Smiths Wilson in downtown Columbia in 1948. And right next to it is the quote the 100 year old told me history has no purpose unless we use it, and so that's my job to use the history to advance teaching, research and public engagement.
Speaker 3:And that's the last question here which strategies do you use to build and maintain professional relationships within the historical community?
Speaker 2:I think the most effective strategy is how you communicate, and I think what you want to do, what I want to do, is train my team and to train my students to be versatile and to be able to speak to multiple audiences and to figure out how we educate the broader public. So I am a professor at the University of South Carolina. So who are my constituents? My constituents are the students, the undergraduate and undergraduate students who are enrolled here. My constituents are the faculty and the staff who are employed here. But my constituents are also the state of South Carolina, its citizens and its people, and we know that we can't simply be hemmed in by the horseshoe in downtown Columbia. We must go forth and tell the story, and so, on a regular basis, I am in a car. Sometimes I drive myself, someone drives me and we go all over because we know there is an expectation that we serve the public. And one of the things I know is really important, particularly in a time like this, is that we stand firm in telling a complete and comprehensive story of South Carolina. And so, for example, we tell a story about Reconstruction. I want to make sure every citizen of the state knows about this man whose name is Joseph Rainey. Now, who is Joseph Rainey? Joseph Rainey is a native of Georgetown, south Carolina, a barber by training, but Joseph Rainey is one of the founders of this country. Joseph Rainey was a member of the Reconstruction Legislature of South Carolina. Joseph Rainey is the first African-American to sit in the House of Representatives of the state of South Carolina In 1868,. Joseph Rainey is part of a group of people who write a new constitution for South Carolina, and in that new constitution it says all schools that receive public funding must be open to all residents of South Carolina, without regard to race or color. So what does that mean? It means the public should now know that in 1870, in 1870, that the University of South Carolina, where I sit now, looked like this, and that the majority of the students from 1870 to 1877 were African-Americans, or from 1873 to 1877, and that they included young women who were being trained at what's called a normal school. So this is a group of women trained on this campus in the 1870s, including this woman whose name was Celia Dow Saxon. Now they're seated on the horseshoe on the steps of a place called Rutledge Chapel, which is still standing at the University of South Carolina.
Speaker 2:We want to make sure that students know that in the 1940s there was another movement called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. And what these students did? They gathered at the Township Auditorium. They gathered on the campus of Allen University, at Benedict College, to study the period of Reconstruction and to use the lessons of Reconstruction in their own fight against racial injustice in the 20th century. And the Southern Negro Youth Congress included people like Majeska Monteith Simpkins, a woman named Annie Bell Weston. It included a woman whose name, who was a professor. Her name was Ethel Williams. Ethel Williams later marries a minister named Roscoe Wilson who is the pastor of the St John Baptist Church in Columbia. And many may not know the name Ethel Wilson, but they may know the name Asia Wilson. And that was Asia Wilson's grandmother, who was very instrumental in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, very instrumental in the Southern Negro Youth Congress.
Speaker 2:People in this state should know, and we're trying to tell, the story of the sacrifices and the determination of average citizens who were not seeking to make history. They were simply seeking a better education for their children. So in the work we do we help tell the story of these families from Somerton, south Carolina, who simply wanted to improve the educational resources and the educational outcome of their students. They did not know when they signed a petition in the late 1940s they were going to become part of the landmark United States Supreme Court case Brown versus the Board of Education. And so today in America, many people can tell you exactly what Brown did.
Speaker 2:But many do not know that the most important component of the Brown decision was what took place in South Carolina and the efforts of ordinary parents who lost their livelihood. They lost their land, they lost their jobs for simply saying we are citizens of this country and we want every right and privilege that comes with that citizenship, including an equal education. So who were the plaintiffs in Briggs v Elliott? What did they endure? What was the outcome of their litigation? That is a story we tell quite often in the work we do at the Civil Rights Center, and there are many more stories I could tell about how we link together the historical record of South Carolina and are determined and intentional to make sure that history is accessible to anyone around the world.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to say that I'm deeply honored to have the opportunity to spend time with the Savannah Grove congregation and those who are listening to the Native Drum podcast. In a time like this, it is critical that our churches and our religious leaders play an active role in making sure that this history is heard, that this history is preserved and protected and defended. What we're doing, what we're dealing with right now, in terms of whose history is valuable and whose history is important or whose history is truthful, is an ongoing battle, and I think it's really important, as we think about the current struggle to preserve our history, that we're mindful that there are lessons to be gleaned and lessons to learn from the past and lessons to learn from the past. So I'm excited about the beginning of these conversations and I look forward to spending the next several weeks with the Savannah Grove Congregation.