By Kevin Alexander Gray
Columbia, SC

I was truly surprised that all our major daily paper could offer South Carolinians and the world after Nelson Mandela’s death was a 1998 picture of a 95-year-old Strom Thurmond holding up Mandela’s arm as though he’d just won a prizefight. The photo was snapped during the South African President’s visit to Washington to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

Conservative hardliners like U.S. Senators Thurmond of South Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, among others, supported Reagan’s position against the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which called for economic sanctions against the racist apartheid regime. Reagan vetoed the act when it came before him. He insisted that the 16 percent minority white population in power were “strategically essential to the free world,” although the 84 percent majority of black South Africa’s citizens (to include Coloureds and Asians) were being violently kept un-free.

Reagan and his supporters were on the wrong side of history. Fortunately, Congress ultimately overrode his veto.

Doubtless, Thurmond changed in later life from the segregationist firebrand he was a younger man — but not very much. I thought: Is this photo all the most widely circulated paper in South Carolina had to offer? Surely they had on file countless stories of the anti-apartheid activities in South Carolina.

Maybe someone thought the photo of Thurmond was funny or ironic. Maybe the person who posted the picture was at best, ignorant of history or, at worst trying to revise history by giving the photographic impression that Thurmond supported Mandela and the anti-apartheid cause. It would have been more accurate to locate a picture of Democratic Senator Ernest F. Hollings, who voted to override Reagan’s veto.

For me, telling the history of what was done in our state to advance the cause of freedom is a better story to tell.

A lot happened in the 1980s in the fight against apartheid that Columbia can be proud of. Like in 1985 when the City of Columbia barred any city investments that would benefit or encourage the racist South African government. The unanimously passed measure was introduced by then Councilman Luther Battiste.

Battiste’s counterpart on Council Rudy Barnes at the time said, “This is not a partisan or racial type motion at all” and that the “resolution sends the signal to politicians that we must distance ourselves from this type of oppression.”

Another council member, William Outzs added, “[T]his is further indication of this city’s support for human rights.”

Imagine trying to get City Council to pass a measure condemning a foreign government today.

Maybe there could have been mentioned how a year after the City of Columbia took action that then-South Carolina State Treasurer Grady L. Patterson withdrew $43 million in state investments from companies doing business in South Africa. Or, State Senator Theo Mitchell of Greenville’s efforts to pass an anti-apartheid bill in the State Legislature.

I’m sure somewhere there are pictures of the weekly pickets at what used to be the C&S Bank on Sumter Street to force them to stop selling the South African gold “krugerrand” coins. The picketers won.

There were also the Friday noon pickets on Pendleton Street in front of the University of South Carolina Educational Foundation offices that corresponded with the Carolina Peace Resource Center’s legal maneuvers to force the university to disclose and withdraw their holdings with companies that did business with South Africa. I believe that effort was the beginning of the end for then President James Holderman, who resigned in 1990 under fire over his hidden financial dealings.

Then there were the numerous student marches and rallies at the State House, along with participation in various regional and national marches. Students from Benedict, USC, South Carolina State, College of Charleston and many other campuses across the state took part.

There’s an activist history yet to be written. When it is, it will include familiar names like Modjeska Simkins and Nelson Rivers, then executive director of the state NAACP, Brett Bursey and his Grassroots Organizing Workshop [which grew into the SC Progressive Network], the USC Free South Africa Alliance, which at one point built and occupied a shanty in front of the Russell House to demonstrate and condemn bantustan living conditions of poor black South Africans.

There are lots of heroic people to write about in our local anti-apartheid efforts. They are “part of the collective,” which is how Mandela said he wanted to be remembered. Those are the people who should be highlighted. Strom Thurmond shouldn’t be our state’s reflexive default.

Failing to learn from history, in May the SC House passed the “Freedom of Health Care Protection Act ” on a party-line vote. The bill claims that the state has the power to “render null and void” the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and upheld by the US Supreme Court.

This Tea Party sequel to the War of Northern Aggression is the latest reason why people roll their eyes when you say you are from South Carolina.

Beaufort County Sen. Tom Davis has put together a Senate Select Committee to hold public hearings on the bill the first week in November (times and locations below). Davis, a Tea Party favorite, was recently skewered in Mother Jones for lamenting the Confederate loss at Gettysburg.

Please attend one of the hearings and, in the nicest way possible, tell senators that the ACA has given Americans new rights and benefits, ending lifetime and most annual limits on care, covering preexisting conditions, and giving patients access to free preventive services. The ACA has problems, but it moves us in the right direction of having everyone covered and lowering costs.

The real problem is the fear too many lawmakers have of Tea Party opposition in the 2014 Republican primary. With 80 percent of SC legislators winning their seats with no general opposition, winners are chosen by a majority of the 10 percent who vote in the primary. This dynamic yields a state government prone to cruel delusion.

Our legislature, cheered on by Gov. Nikki Haley, refused to take back 1.4 billion of our federal tax dollars to expand Medicaid and cover some 300,000 of our poorest neighbors. These people will continue to go to emergency rooms and drive up costs. Instead of having a doctor and preventative care, they are collateral damage in an ideological war against the president’s signature policy achievement.

Because of the state’s failure to take the money, an estimated 1,319 people will die for lack of care.

The are literally killing people – lots of them – for a few hundred votes in the primary. Keep in mind all these anti-Obamacare legislators have state government health insurance. Add insult to injury, our tax dollars will now go to other states.

The governor says that we can’t afford the 10 percent matching funds in 2017 to take the billion plus a year to expand Medicaid. It’s a 100 percent grant we are turning down for the next three years. But in fact, eliminating the $300 sales tax cap on luxury cars, yachts and planes would fund the Medicaid expansion.

In other words, the state is not broke; its leaders are morally bankrupt.

Since SC refused to set up a state health insurance exchange, the feds have issued grants to nonprofit groups to help people navigate the insurance marketplace set up by the ACA. These exchanges are intended to hold down costs through comparative pricing, and offer reduced cost policies to lower-income applicants.

A minimum-wage earner in SC ($15,400) will pay around $20 a month for a $4,100 insurance policy. The subsidies are taken off the top, and are not a rebate after payment. The subsidies cover people making between 100 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

Medicaid expansion would have provided free health care for those earning less than $11,490 a year. Because South Carolina refused the expansion, the insurance subsides don’t apply to those in poverty.

The SC Progressive Network received one of the grants, and has 10 Navigators who are certified to help people buy insurance through the federal exchange. Other than the hysteria generated over the government web portal not working, the hardest part of the job is telling people who live in poverty that in South Carolina there is no help for them. That policy that cost a fast food worker $240 a year is full-price for them: $4,100.

When they ask why, we tell them to ask their legislator and their governor.

Public hearings on bill to nullify “Obamacare”

Greenville: Tuesday, Nov. 5, 6pm-8pm
Greenville County Public Library, 25 Heritage Green Place

Columbia: Wednesday, Nov. 6, 10am-noon
SC Senate Gressette Building, Columbia, SC Room 209 G – meeting room

North Charleston: Wednesday, Nov. 6, 6pm-8pm
North Charleston City Hall, Third Floor, Council Chambers, 2500 City Hall Lane