With many calling the upcoming 2024 elections the most consequential in US history, the midterms are providing a test run of new partisan tactics to harass election officials and poll workers in an effort to jam the system and invalidate the voting process.

And while South Carolina has a better election system than those in most states, we are not immune from the coming shenanigans. Yesterday, the New York Times led with South Carolina in a story about right-wing efforts to undermine the legitimacy of elections.

“On the eve of a primary runoff election in June, a Republican candidate for secretary of state of South Carolina sent out a message to his supporters.

“For all of you on the team tomorrow observing the polls, Good Hunting,” Keith Blandford, a candidate who promoted the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, wrote on the social media app Telegram. “You know what you are looking for. We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack.”

The next day, activists fanned out to polling places in Charleston, S.C., demanding to inspect election equipment and to take photographs and video. When election workers denied their requests, some returned with police officers to file reports about broken or missing seals on the machines, according to emails from local officials to the state election commission. There were no broken or missing seals.” (Full article here.)

Since the 2020 election, 17 of South Carolina’s 46 executive directors of county boards of elections have quit and been replaced by someone who has never directed an election. Statewide, there are currently 23 staff vacancies in election offices.

This collapse of election infrastructure was set in motion by those promoting The Big Lie after the former president’s defeat. The new tactics being embraced and promoted by the extreme right is an unprecedented effort to retain power at all cost.

Our organization has been paying close attention, and we’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve been doing coordinated election protection work since 2008. The system is rigged through gerrymandering and cozy relationships between corporations and lawmakers that have made our elections among the least competitive in the country.

We know that we are not going to be able to vote our way out of this mess; we must organize. The good news is that we are not surprised nor unprepared. All that’s missing is you.

There are two final opportunities to be trained to help protect the vote. No experience needed. Tasks need to be done in every precinct. We need signs promoting the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline posted at sites across the state and on social media. Early voting runs Oct. 25 – Nov. 5. Election Day is Nov. 8.

Final election protection trainings will be held Oct. 20 at 7pm and Oct. 22 at 11am on Zoom: (session repeats; sign up for either hour-long class). You will be emailed election protection materials after you have registered. Poll monitor credentials and t-shirts will be mailed to those who complete the training. The session will demystify the electoral system and highlight the systemic problems crippling our democracy.

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Sign up for either one-hour session

• Oct. 20 at 7pm: register HERE

• Oct. 22 at 11am: register HERE

Last week, someone tried to smash through the SC Progressive Network‘s front window. We are grateful that nobody was hurt, but the attack has set us back.

Read more HERE.

Sunday, May 1, 4-6:30pm

The public is invited to this free program on Zoom. Registration required.

Click HERE to register.

Join us on Sunday to mark May Day, an international holiday celebrating working people (except in the USA, where President Dwight Eisenhower established it as “Law Day” to celebrate the Rule of Law in a Free Society.) We’ll screen the documentary The Uprising of ’34, about one of the largest labor strikes in American history, with the epicenter in South Carolina. Seven strikers were murdered, and many more were wounded at a textile mill in Honea Path, leaving a lasting chill on union organizing. The film about this suppressed history premiered on PBS, showing in every state except South Carolina.

After the film, Dr. Michelle Haberland, a professor at Georgia Southern with a focus on Southern working-class history, will discuss the history and current state of organized labor. Haberland is the author of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the United States South, 1930 – 2000.  

Michelle Haberland is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University.  She received her Ph.D. from Tulane University where she began working on Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the United States South, 1930 – 2000, the first book-length study of the southern apparel industry and its workers. Published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, Striking Beauties was awarded the H. L. Mitchell Award by the Southern Historical Association for the best book published in the preceding two years concerning the history of the southern working class. At Georgia Southern, Michelle directed the Women’s and Gender Studies program from 2012 to 2015. Since 2015, Michelle has served on the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Executive Board. In the History Department, Michelle leads courses on a variety of subjects, including Working-Class History, The United States in the 1960s, The New South, and Oral History. She also served as the Executive Secretary for the Southern Association for Women Historians and represented faculty at public universities on the Executive Council for the Georgia Conference of the American Association of University Professors.

The authors of the recently released Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, will lead a seminar March 27 at 4pm on Zoom. The session is part of the Modjeska Simkins School’s public series. The recent book from Harvard University Press is the first comprehensive accounting of the U.S. Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence and a legal legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.

Participants must register in advance HERE.

Written by distinguished historian Vernon Burton and renowned civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner, the book is a timely rejoinder to the latest racial dog-whistles emanating from the SC State House. Manufactured outrage that a Critical Race Theory is making white children feel guilty for the sins of their ancestors has spawned legislation and inflamed school board fights across the country and here in the Palmetto State. Bills mandating a curriculum that denies the racist elements in our state and national constitutions are reminiscent of the 1925 arrest of John Scopes, the high school teacher who dared to teach evolution.

Burton and Derfner highlight South Carolina court rulings that made their way to the US Supreme Court and forced changes in race relations.    

Armand Derfner, a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, has been a civil rights lawyer for more than 50 years, helping shape the Voting Rights Act in a series of major Supreme Court cases and working with Congress to help draft voting rights and other civil rights laws. He has presented arguments at the US Supreme Court and won, five times. He started his legal career in Mississippi in the 1960s and has been practicing law in Charleston for the past 50 years.

 “One thing I have learned, and this applies in South Carolina as much as anywhere, is that almost everything boils down to race. This is not surprising, since African Americans have been in this country for about 16 generations. For 14 of them, the relationship between white and Black people was based on slavery and Jim Crow,” he told the Post & Courier in 2020.

“Sometimes people say I’m overdoing it, but after we talk a little, they often start nodding their heads in agreement. The bottom line is that even though most of us are trying hard to overcome the past, it will take a lot longer and a lot of mutual understanding. But if we can overcome the past, we’ll see we are all on the sameteam and, as President Kennedy liked to say, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’”

Burton knocked on Modjeska Simkins’ door at 2025 Marion St. in Columbia in 1974. He wanted to interview her for South Carolina insights to include in the PhD. dissertation on Reconstruction he was working on at Princeton. When she discovered he didn’t have accommodations, she invited him to be her guest for the next couple of weeks.

Dr. Burton is now the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology at Clemson University.

Burton has written more than 100 articles, and penned or edited 14 books. His books include In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina that was the subject of sessions at the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association’s annual meetings. It was also submitted for a Pulitzer. He also wrote The Age of Lincoln, winner of the 2007 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for non-fiction.

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has tried to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. His 2014 book Penn Center: A History Preserved, captures the 156-year history of Penn’s role in the long struggle for equality at the still vibrant location of the 1996 founding of SC Progressive Network.

Burton was born in Georgia, and grew up in Ninety Six, South Carolina. He earned a B.A. in 1969 for his undergraduate studies at Furman University,and received his Ph.D. in 1976 in American History from Princeton.

Justice Deferred is available at Harvard University Press.

Participants must register in advance HERE.

We invite you to join us for the SC Progressive Network‘s general membership meeting on Saturday, March 12, 2–5pm. To keep everyone safe and to accomodate members from outside of Columbia, we will meet on Zoom.

Because we will be discussing critical in-house business, to attend you must be dues-current since March 12, 2021. As there will be critical decisions to consider at our meeting, please review the c4 bylaws. The dues cycle is now Jan. 1 to Dec. 31.

Current members will receive information before the meeting so they can meaningfully engage in the process. To join or renew your dues, you can pay securely online. To check your membership status, call 803-661-8000.

These are perilous times. We need a clear-eyed plan as we re-organize and map plans for 2022 and beyond.

Before the pandemic, the Modjeska Simkins School held a series of Sunday Socials that were open to the public. A guest speaker or panel made a presentation or screened a film, which was followed by a group discussion. Now, we do the next best thing on Zoom. The public is still welcome to join us for some excellent speakers on compelling topics, but must provide their own snacks.

So far, three public seminars have been set. More may be added, so look for email alerts and keep checking modjeskaschool.com for a current schedule.

March 13, 4pm–6pm: Dr. Justene Edwards presents on her book Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. Her research tracks the development of market capitalism by SC colonial slave masters.

March 27, 4pm–6pm: Dr. Vernon Burton will address Lincoln’s Unfinished Work, his Pulitzer nominated book, particularly as it pertains to South Carolina’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America. Dr Burton is a nationally recognized expert on Reconstruction.

May 1, 4pm–6pm: Screening of The Uprising of ’34, a documentary about the largest labor strike in American history with the epicenter in South Carolina. May Day is an international holiday celebrating working people — except in the USA. We’ll talk about why.

We’re just weeks away from the start of the 2022 session of the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights, and we can’t wait to meet the new students. Orientation is Feb. 20, with classes meeting Monday nights through June 27 on Zoom.

Dr. Robert Greene II will again serve as lead instructor, as he’s done since 2019. “The school has reminded me, time and again, why I decided to become a historian in the first place,” he said. “Talking to others who share my love of history and concern about community has been enriching.”

Dr. Greene is a rising star, and we are grateful that he is sharing his time and talent with us. He teaches history at Claflin University in Orangeburg, and has published more than 350 articles. Most recently, he co-edited the just-published book Invisible No More documenting the experiences of African Americans at USC over its 218-year history.

Dr. Bernie Gallman, who took the class two years in a row, said, “As the lies and the assault on truth continue, the Modjeska School is a breath of fresh air. It provides a correction of the lies that have been told in schools for generations, as well as a firewall against the lies being legislated today. Everyone should take this course.”

Other students offered comments about the school and how it strengthened their understanding of South Carolina and their capacity as advocates, citizens, and parents.

James Deweese, a retired pharmacist who graduated last year and has signed up for the 2022 session, said, “The Modjeska School made me a better man.”

His classmate Michael Moton will also repeat the course this spring. “My experience with the Modjeska School was both frustrating and exciting. Frustrating to know that we have been fighting for basic rights for too long, but exciting to know that people are there to guide the old and new alike.”

2017 graduate Sara Williams said, “The Modjeska School taught me things I never would have known but need to know to be a whole human. I am so glad to know about SC’s powerful women from the Grimke sisters to Harriet Hancock to Modjeska herself.”

Debbie Billings, who completed the course last year, said, “Thank you for coordinating a program that expanded and deepened my knowledge about where I live and who I am. Most importantly, I’ve been able to integrate a new depth of analysis into my teaching, activism, and everyday conversations.”

LaKisha M. Wheeler also graduated last year. “It was amazing to learn about Modjeska Simkins and the huge role she played in advocating for Black people,” she said. “I absolutely loved getting on Zoom every Monday and learning about where I was born and raised, and the issues Black people still struggle with today. Everything I learned I was able to talk to my children about. Thank you.”

Kyle Criminger, who graduated in 2015, said, “The Modjeska School took us on a haunted, enthralling trek through South Carolina’s stolen and denied history, giving me a long view and a wide perspective on the problems here. The work I am doing with fellow graduates allows us to carry out a shared commitment to the values and principles that South Carolinians like Modjeska Simkins herself have held and lived by. The school is a complete program and national model for community organizing.”

Melanie McGehee said, “Honestly, of the times I’ve left somewhere with a certificate, this is the one I’m most proud of.” She graduated in 2019 along with her 14-year-old son Ian McGehee.

Rev. Dr. Tom Summers, a retired United Methodist minister and a 2015 graduate, said, “I’ve been involved with the SC Progressive Network since its beginning, and this school is indeed one of the best products in their 26 years of fine work. For anyone interested in the historical and current struggle for racial conciliation in our state, I strongly recommend that they attend this unique school. I also urge every congregation to sponsor a student.”

If you or your organization wishes to sponsor a student or contribute to a scholarship fund, email modjeskaschool@scpronet.com or all 803-808-3384. The SC Progressive Network Education Fund’s annual financial reports are available at guidestar.org.

For more on the school, class schedule, or to fill out an application, see ModjeskaSchool.com. Tuition may be paid in monthly installments. Some needs-based scholarships available. Deadline to apply is Feb. 16.

The 2022 South Carolina legislative session has just begun. Voting reform, critical race theory, redistricting, the loosening of gun restrictions, access to healthcare (or the lack thereof), challenges to trans rights, and the relentless assault on women’s reproductive rights are all expected to be among the losses this year. While we always need to protest injustice and inequality, we also need to understand that we cannot vote our way out of the currently rigged system; we must organize our way out. This calls for the effective and strategic citizenship — expressly designed for South Carolina’s problems — that we teach in the Modjeska School. With that, we are pleased to announce that enrollment for the 2022 session of the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights is officially open. 

The session will be held on Zoom, and runs from Feb. 20 through June 27, with regular classes each Monday night and graduation scheduled for July 2. The curriculum includes a people’s history of South Carolina designed to provide a framework for understanding our current political, economic, and social conditions, to inspire and caution us, and to inform and guide our organizing efforts. Our intent is to graduate effective citizens who can effectuate radical change in unjust systems and improve life in South Carolina. Tuition is $350, and some scholarship assistance is available.

Two students from our 2021 session gave their perspectives on what the school offered them:

“As the lies and the assault on truth continue, the Modjeska School is a breath of fresh air. It is an oasis of truth in a steadily expanding desert of lies. It provides a correction of the lies that have been told in schools for generations as well as a firewall against the legislated lies being told today. Everyone should take this course.” Dr. Burnett Gallman 

“The Modjeska School provides like-minded South Carolinians focused on community activism a place to learn their history and resistance tactics.” Amber Pelham

As Modjeska Simkins herself wrote in 1946, “It must be conceded that at this very hour more so than at any time in the history of this nation, there is urgent need for the development of progressive thinkers to become the leaders of tomorrow.” Whether you’re a seasoned revolutionary, a new organizer, or simply a concerned citizen, we invite you (or someone you think would be a good fit) to apply.

Click HERE for details on the 2022 class schedule and topics. Several Sunday sessions are open to the public.

This Giving Tuesday, we’re asking for your help. We have exciting plans for next year, but one of the biggest is raising enough money to finish setting up shop on Elmwood Avenue — right next door to Modjeska Monteith Simkins’ historic home in the heart of Columbia. There, we will continue to strive for Modjeska’s lifelong vision of an equitable and truly democratic South Carolina, and we hope you will join us.

The building already belongs to us, but our next big step is making it yours and ours to use. We have lots of plans for our new home, which we’re calling GROW in a nod to the Network’s former name and space (Grass Roots Organizing Workshop). Some of the things we hope to bring to you include:

• Headquarters and meeting space for network members.
• Classroom and library for Modjeska Simkins School alumni and students.
• Cafe, performance space, and showcase for local artists.
• Rooftop deck for dreaming, creating, organizing.

Can you help us reach our goal?

We are the only S.C.-focused, S.C.-based nonprofit organizing around a radical praxis, propelled by a beloved community that puts action to words. Your investment will help us develop the infrastructure needed to host and support that community.

In the spirit of Giving Tuesday, you can share your gift with a loved one. If you donate on behalf of someone, they will receive a letter making them aware of your gift. Be sure to include your honoree’s address in [the “Honoree Name” field]. You will also receive a receipt for your tax-deductible donation by email.

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