Remember Rosa Parks and Don't Give up Your Seat for Lowcountry Transit Feb. 2025

 

Don't Give Up Your Seat in Feb. Remember Rosa on Transit Equity Day Charleston, SC, USA- This year's Transit Equity Day (Feb. 4)  is important because we know a major effort to defund public transit in the United States is on the way. The MAGA agenda is anti urban and destroying the quality of life in our cities is a central tactic. Nothing robs people of their freedom more effectively than rendering them immobile. Charleston's excruciatingly slow progress towards construction of the LCRT might end if the Trump administration manages to defund Transit. Like Rosa Parks, we need your help to prepare to hold on to our seat, our place, our dignity and our rights.  Project 2025's anti transit agenda Update- Our report on Congresswoman Nancy Mace, the location of her new office off the transit system on Daniel Island and our effort to sensitize her to the importance of Transit on Feb. 4. Read the Report on Nancy Mace and Transit. Help Inform the Public Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit will begin our effort with a public information campaign on Martin  Luther King Weekend promoting our local effort to the Lowcountry Progressive Community. its important that people wanting to be involved step forward so we can promote their contributions to this effort. Local media is no longer strong or effective enough to help us, so we need to reach our own people and activate the community.  Join a Carolina Transit Regional Conference on Feb. 4 Public Transit in the Carolinas will be the subject of a regional town hall on Feb. 4, Transit Equity Day from 12 noon to 2 pm in which Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit will participate with a live meeting linked to the electronic one at the Charleston County Library at 68 Calhoun St, Charleston, SC, US, 29401, on the CARTA DASH 210 Bus Route. The local meeting will be linked to a regional zoom conference with participants from Columbia, SC; Charlotte, NC and the Research Triangle expected.  Issues to be discussed will include sustaining progress made in Charlotte, continuing to advance towards construction of the LCRT in Charleston and resisting attempts to defund public transit as planned in the Project 2025 plan connected to members of the Trump administration. This regional meeting is one of several being run that day across the United States for Transit Equity Day by the Labor Network for Sustainability, an annual observance on the Birthday of Transit Equity and Civil Rights Heroine, Rosa Parks.  You can also participate in the regional conference online from your home or office. We'll post a link to the meeting here closer to the date.  Ride with Rosa That week We'll be putting posters honoring Rosa on selected CARTA buses. You can sponsor this entire effort for $100.  Rise with Rosa Right, Social Media Banner Promoting Rosa Pancake Effort, from 2022.We'll also be doing several pancake breakfast efforts that week to connect the community with the memory of Rosa's struggle with our own Civil Rights Hero, Louise Brown. If your church, organization or business wants to serve the pancakes, we'll provide PDF versions of posters and handbills to drive participation and raise awareness not only of Rosa, but also Charleston's own Mary Bowers and Esau Jenkins, Charleston's Transit Equity Heroes. We can be present with multimedia content to empower your members or customers.  If you would like to help, now is the time. We'll soon be involved in a fight to save the millions of opportunities to ride transit provided by CARTA and Tri County Link. A little organization now, will prepare us for a much stronger effort later. We're not going to give up our seat and the opposition will learn that, however if we're strong at the start, the damage the conflict will cause can be reduces and get us to a better future sooner.  We'll be announcing the effort at next week's CARTA Board Meeting, so anyone who can pitch in now will really help. If you can help, reply to this message or Contact William Hamilton at 843-870-5299 or wjhamiton29464@gmail.com

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Charleston Must Fight for a Sustainable Future of Transit Equity

On Wed. May 15, 2024 we expect to be confronted by another large pressure group from the Fairgrounds Organization attempting to pressure the CARTA Board into giving up plans for a Lowcountry Rapid Transit Stop at the Fairgrounds. Last month a group of nearly all elderly, white men outnumbered Transit advocates 50 to 1. Politicians make decisions by counting noses. 

2018 Folly Road Freedom Campaign for transit to the beach. While not bus goes to Folly Beach, we did win a weekend shuttle to the Isle of Palms.

Please join us to demonstrate and make our voices heard during the public comment period of the CARTA Board Meeting starting at 12:45 pm at the Offices of the BCD Council of Governments on Casper Padgett Way in N. Charleston, #12 CARTA Bus Route. 

The Fairgrounds are now the last stop on the Northern end of the Rapid Transit line since the plan to go to Summerville was torpedoed by that Town’s good ole boy’s political gang. Ladson, the area around the Fairgrounds and Lincolnville (Charleston’s County’s historically black town) are the regions’ most affordable housing opportunities now. 

With over a million open jobs in the national tourism industry, skilled hospitality workers are in high demand. Recruiters from Charlotte, Miami and Atlanta have been seen in Charleston in the past. If you are young, strong, and mentally stable with skills in hospitality, these recruiters will help you move to a city where your rent will be lower, the schools will be better, and you’ll be a short, highly reliable ride on good public transit to work. As a transit rider, I’ve seen people I’ve been on the bus with for years, shake those recruiters’ hands, leave the bus stop to go to Starbucks and never be seen again. Other people have been recruiting for the healthcare industry in other cities.

In its 350-year history, Charleston has never really cared about the quality of life of its working class. From colonization, through slavery, the suppression of the mechanics, reconstruction and segregation Charleston’s rulers have always been able to count on people with little power or choice to do the hard work from cultivating rice to cleaning the toilets of tourists. Inadequate transit, along with poor education and overpriced, inadequate housing have been the tools which maintain the money machine which is greased by racism and class privilege.

However, the 21st Century has brought greater connectivity and mobility to America’s working class. Thirty years ago, finding a possible job in Atlanta, Denver or Orlando would have required poking through the want ads of days old newspapers purchased at the Book Bag on King Street, that, and finding an apartment, and knowing how the area’s transit worked can now all be done on a smart phone in minutes. Schools can be rated, local crime statistics found, and necessities priced in seconds online from a bench at a bus stop.  It is no longer hard to leave. 

In the bitter, divided politics of Trump era America, the belief that everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and buy a car so they can sit in traffic for hours a day may satisfy the lucky retired person, who finished paying for their fifty Thousand dollars house a decade ago. They simply won’t drive to their next meeting of the fair committee until rush hour is over. When they’re too old to drive, they’ll disappear into the carless underclass that doesn’t matter. 

However, such delusions do not solve the problems of young families trying to build a life here as well as relocating to a good, transit served neighborhood in another city will. Those cities which have combined good transit with better paying employment, more affordable housing, better schools, and lower crime will claim the reliable, capable workers the future demands. 

Charleston will not be winning its long war against the future which has seen it decline from one of the leading cities in the American colonies to a tourist’s amusement park over the last 200 years. Rice cultivation, phosphate mining and the Navy Yard are all long gone. The real estate for retirees’ industry will eventually exhaust the available high land. The ocean is rising. The expectations of tourists for something authentic and friendly won’t be supplied by skeleton staffing or robots. 

For the first time in the history of the Holy City, it will be forced to value the quality of life of its working class or accepting the reality of an economy where the work does not get done. 

I am aware that the Exchange Club provides charitable donations. I’ve been informed that they intend to weaponize those donations to force their will on the community by forcing area nonprofits to support them. Their role in funding child abuse prevention is given prominence. 

Charity has not and will never solve the Lowcountry’s problems. The fundamental problems in our economy require major treatment and surgery, not band aids. Our private, child abuse prevention programs are often incompetent, tainted with racism and class bias and serve the needs of the people who run them. Families need jobs that pay, transit that works, safe places to live and decent schools. Without this, those families will fail. I know this from personal experience from 35 years of serving as an unpaid attorney in court appointed DSS cases. I have been in court where parents were threatened with the loss of their children because they couldn’t get to charity funded child abuse treatment appointments because we don’t have transit that works. 

I have been accused by members of the Exchange Club of being a know nothing woke do-gooder that meddles in public affairs. I’m white enough to get their approval, but I do the rest wrong. I have in fact been legally blind my entire life. I have never and will never be able to drive an automobile. I have been nearly killed crossing highways on foot and on bicycle to get to places I’ve needed to go. I fish for rides. I’ve paid fortunes for cabs, limos, and ride share. I have missed innumerable events because the cost to go there was simply too high, from my Senior Prom to the Mt. Pleasant farmer’s market. I’ve spent thousands of hours sitting at bus stops since the first SCE&G bus blew by me without stopping in 1977 on Coleman Blvd because white people in Mt. Pleasant did not ride the bus back then until last weekend’s delightful trip to Container Bar on the #20. I’ve done some of that waiting on bus stop benches I built with my own hands and paid for with my own money. I understand the cruel power of the car.

Left- Working for passage of the 2016 referendum on Highway 78 near the Fairgrounds. Campaign materials were handed out to passing cars stopped in traffic during the fair and delivered to Fair Management at the Fairgrounds. 

I have been told to leave the Lowcountry my entire life because I can’t drive a car. I probably should have, long ago. It’s too late now. My family arrived in SC in 1695. We’ve fought the Indians, the French, The Redcoats, the Yankees, the Germans, and the Japanese. We’ve built two schools two churches and one Town. I plan to stay. fight it out here and have my ashes interred beside those of my wife Julia who died after four years of helping me in this fight. I would like my ashes to be carried to Magnolia Cemetery on the LCRT. 

My decision to stay isn’t going to be too much of a disappointment to anyone. However, the young family packing up to take its energy, intelligence and capacity for hard work elsewhere will be missed. Their children and their grandchildren will be missed too. When the empty restaurant spaces and unopened hotel rooms are common enough, perhaps Charleston’s ruling class will grasp what they’ve missed.

The Lowcountry Rapid Transit Line should be built in the form promised to voters in 2016 in  the half million dollar I26 Alt Study with a stop at the Fairgrounds, all the way to Summerville, connecting with our train station, running outside of traffic into downtown Charleston. Less won’t resolve our region’s growing workforce deficiency. Charleston’s indifference to the quality of life of ordinary working people is no longer sustainable. It must end. 

William J. Hamilton, III, Exec. Director, Best Friends of Lowcountry Tranist, wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or (843) 870-5299 

Transit Equity Demands for the SC Lowcountry, Feb. 4, 2022

Transit Equity Demands for the SC Lowcountry, Feb. 4, 2022

Our upcoming actions to push transit progress in the Lowcountry Forward are listed on our BFLT Facebook Events Page. 

Bus Stop- Mt. Pleasant, SC Town Hall

Goals for 2022

1. Extend the existing CARTA #10 Bus Line Northwest from its current terminus at the Health South Hospital on Highway 78, up Highway 78 through Ladson and Lincolnville to Summerville. SC before May 4, 2022 using the recent 800k grant from the US Dpt. of Transpiration. See details on this proposal. 
2. Secure another year of bus service to the beach. Double ridership. (Approve by CARTA Board at January meeting.) See detailed information  on bus service to the Beach. 
3. Increase CARTA Ridership by 30%. Get more middle school aged students on transit. We've already begun work on our Park Pleasantly Play Downtown effort in Mt. Pleasant.  CARTA's board voted in April to make May a fare free month as part of rebuilding ridership with our commitment to support the effort. CARTA Ridership is now up 13% over March 2021 to March 2022.
4. Push the future Lowcountry Rapid Transit line terminus back North to Lincolnville, near the Charleston County line, walking distance from downtown Summerville. Details on returning the line to Summerville.
5. LCRT before I526- Fight to get the promised Lowcountry Rapid Transit line operational before work begins on widening I526. Read our blogpost Transit First, 8 Lane Gridlock Later on this issue. Read the statement by Dana Beach founder of the Coastal Conservation League on why enlarging I526 will make congestion worse. 
6. Obtain 10 more lighted & sheltered bus stops on the CARTA system, 2 on the Sea Islands & 2 in Summerville. One great new stop on Houston Northcutt (image above) in Mt. Pleasant shows was a fully realized stop which emphasizes pedestrian safety on a busy road looks like, including a center island waiting area for pedestrians with lighting. 

Daniel Dewald has also compiled a list of problems and possible solutions for the failure to get functional transit operating in Dorchester and Berkeley Counties. Read Dewald's one page bullet list. 

Elections

We're also trying to help the needs of Lowcountry Transit Riders be heard during this year's elections b getting candidates to ride the bus and provide answers to our questions about local transit.  See our page on the Congressional election. We don't endorse candidates. 

Help Support Our Continued Push for Better Transit

Contribute to us through Act Blue (Tax Deductible)

For more information about Transit Equity Day

 See www.bfltransit.com or call William Hamilton at (843) 870-5299. 

 

Jackson Traction helps build Transit efforts across America

 Chris Jackson- Together We Go Forward- Transcontinental Launches in North Charleston, SC on Friday, Feb. 4

North Charleston, SC- Now that life over the road has settled down, Chris Jackson is ready to connect struggling transit advocacy efforts across the United States. He will launch the national effort on Feb. 4th. Transit Equity Day at the Rosa Parks Pay it Forward Pancake Breakfast at Mini Sue Sue’s Kitchen at 3910 Rivers Ave, N. Charleston, SC 29405, ph (843) 718-1278, on #10 Bus Line. Look for the gold pop up tent at the edge of the parking lot. 

The breakfast is one of several across the SC Lowcountry and US serving pancakes made with Rosa Parks’ personal recipe. Each breakfast purchased helps a locally owned business and generates an additional pay it forward morning meal for the homeless. 

Image, above, Christopher D. Jackson (In Red) with pickup load of Christmas supplies for Charleston, SC’s homeless and Donna Gill, Dec. 2020

Transit activist and community organizer Chris Jackson earned a CDL during the pandemic and left the comforts of life in Charleston and working with Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit to mount his massive Tractor Truck and begin pulling 80 thousand pounds of cargo over the mountains and across the icy roads of a stricken nation. Chris is the supply chain. Sometimes we call him Action Jackson. 

Chris has a crock pot powered by the tractor's massive APU to assure a warm dinner and sleeps in its homey cab. The sleeper cab of his 405 horsepower Kenworth T680 has everything needed to sustain life on the road. He's Bluetooth connected to his truck and the world. Now he's ready to take the skills and strength he brought to six years of leadership of the legendary lightning crew in your community, In Charleston, SC. Chris helped win the 640 million dollar transit referendum and return transit service back to the beach after 8 years of Lowcountry Transit riders being landlocked. Chris will  encourage and connect our growing constellation of people ready to hammer the infrastructure money about to drop from DC into transit systems and better service across America. 

While Transit riders like regular schedules  and plans, Chris isn't in a position to know when he is going to be there far in advance. His destinations change with every load, keeping the shelves of our stores stocked with what we need. When those shelves are empty, that is where he goes.

Chris will work with our national leadership to identify new and growing efforts to improve transit along the way. During his mandatory breaks and time off driving, he'll meet with transit organizers and try to help encourage new efforts. He'll collect mementos of our national effort to help people move towards better transit and drop them off in another. If you see a Bay Area Transit Rider's T-shirt on the back of a hard working bus route improvement activist in rural Alabama, you will know Chris was there. If you feed him a home cooked meal or help him do laundry, he'll appreciate the favor. If you are sleeping under a bridge, maybe he'll dip into his crock pot and give you some stew. 

Jackson doing street outreach in N. Chs. 2021

You can follow Christopher  D. Jackson on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ElderCJackson

Chris' effort kicks off on Transit Equity Day, Feb. 4, 2022, the Birthday of Rosa Parks. Whereas Rosa Park’s feet were tired, Chris's foot is heavy. He's rolling now. Watch your texts and listen for your phone. A nation of transit advocates rises. Get ready. Together, We Go  Forward!

To be put on the list of places Chris may be able to visit in the future, contact Chris @ 843 277 7958. Be sure to provide a physical address with zip code, email address and voice phone number. 

Lowcountry African American Transit History Effort

African Americans have contributed mightily to the history of transit in the United States. Some are remembered, like Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus and helped recruit and train Martin Luther King as a Civil Rights leader. The “real McCoy” refers to an engine lubrication system which transformed railroading, invented by African Canadian Eijah McCoy. She went on to become the national Poet Laurette, but Maya Angelo was also the first woman streetcar driver in San Francisco.

Much of the local history of African Americans in transportation is unremembered. A year long project to change that will begin at the Sea Islands Transit Improvement meeting on Wed. Feb. 27 at 6 pm at the Johns Island regional library. 

The Lowcountry African American Tradition in Transit & Transpiration

Victory in the 2016 Referendum

This proud tradition is found in the Lowcountry as well. It is time to recover this lost history. The effort will begin on Johns Island at the Sea Island Transit Improvement Meeting on Feb. 27 at 6 pm and end a year later, during Black History Month on Feb. 4, Transit Equity Day, the Birthday of Rosa Parks, with presentation of an entire ensemble of educational tools to share this history and energize its inheritors.

We know African Americans helped build the first railroad here. Plans were discussed to have African American engineers work under the supervision of white conductors. At least one black fireman helped operate the Best Friend of Charleston during it’s first months of operation before being killed in a boiler explosion. He’s often played for laughs in the historic narrative for allegedly weighing down a pressure relief valve. Is that story true. He was a pioneer in the history of transportation. Pioneers often die operating new technology. Ask the aviators. Ask the Astronauts.  What was his name? Where did he live? What words were said for him at his funeral?

Robert Smalls was in Transportation. He Helped rig and run the boats which moved people around Charleston Harbor when ferries and boats were a major part of our transit system. In May 1962, he commandeers the Planter and give dozens of African Americas of short voyage to freedom from a dock on the Cooper River. His story is better known that others, but it grows more powerful in context.

After “The War.”

Lincolnville Town Hall, Mayor Duberry

Mary Bowers forced desegregation of Charleston’s Horse drawn Street cars in 1867. A free woman of color, she stepped out of a mass meeting on Marion Square in April to demand her right to ride on the City’s whites only transit system. (Separate cars for African Americans were on order.) After the driver refused to move the car until Bowers dismounted and with the entire line being held up consequently,, Mary got off the vehicle, warning, “there would be trouble.”

There was. Windows were broken. Buildings were set on fire. The extent of public disorder is disputed between the newspapers of the time with conservative papers like the Courier saying little happened and other papers describing riots. Finally, Mary filed a complaint with the US Army, which was administering military reconstruction of the conquered Confederacy at the time. General Scott suggested the Streetcar company comply with federal law voluntarily. (Black US Soldiers with bayonets was the other option.) In May, 1867 every Charlestonian gained the right to ride.

We celebrate the right to ride every May in Charleston, this year with a march to the Sea from the traditional African American community of Sol Legare, where CARTA service now end, 2.4 miles to once segregated Folly Beach. You are welcome to join us on Saturday, May 4 at the Bus Stop where we’ll march to the Atlantic to close the only remaining gap in our four-year campaign to get Transit to the Atlantic. Sign up for The May 4^th March to the Sea.

We know the Freedman’s settlement of Lincolnville had its own Trolley System in 1910, which grew out of that community’s powerful railroading tradition. Who built it? When did it operate? What, if anything survives of that system? When we join the Town’s back to school festival in August, we would like to be prepared to share that history with Mayor Dewberry and the town’s people.

The soon to open Intermodal Passenger Transit Facility (should have just been called “Liberty Hill Station” a name which rings) will include a history room covering that traditionally African American community where working in the railroad yards was a part of life for generations and other issues. It was the location of one of the last segregated train stations built in the United States, recently torn down. Who where those people. What were their stories?

1938 to the Present, Civil Rights Era

1938 Marked the end of the era of electric traction in Charleston. WWII brought huge numbers of people here to work in the Navy Yard. How did race and this transforming transit system interact?

In the 1950s and 60s, Esau Jenkins fought for Civil Rights on the Sea Islands, becoming a titan of the movement. He found funding for and operated a fleet of VW buses to connect residents of the then rural islands, across a segregated and sometimes racially violent landscape, to the regions only black hospital, high school, urban employment and economic opportunity. On board, passengers got lessons in voting rights, literacy and health. Plenty of people who rode those buses are alive today. What are their stories? Were there schedules or printed materials? Did people really learn to sing the great songs of the Civil Rights movement like We Shall Overcome on the long, hot rides to and from Charleston?

One of those buses still survives. It hasn’t run in decades. Its back hatch was removed to be placed in the African American History Museum at the Smithsonian. The rest of the vehicle was later conserved and put on display on the national mall in DC next to a Chevy Corvette Stingray owned by one of the Apollo Astronauts both of which were drive at the same time, on the same road Highway 17.

What of segregation on SCE&G’s buses? How and when did it end? Activist Louise Brown doesn’t remember any major actions here, but everyone is sure there must have been some lost in the vast clutter of activism from those challenging times. Are those hero's still alive? Can we capture their stories?

However SCE&G also ran the buses in Columbia, SC and On June 22, 1954, Sarah Mae Flemming refused to surrender her seat on a bus there, leading to several lawsuits and legal actions. Read her full story here. 

Muhiyidin D’baha worked occasionally as an activist in our Transit effort before he was shot and killed in New Orleans a year ago. He helped leaflet bus stops and sign up supporters as part of the effort to pass the half penny sales tax and fund the rapid transit system. He once shut down the Ravenel Bridge (0ver our objections) because there were things more important to him the smooth traffic flow for cars.

What of our current African American Transit operators and mechanics? What are their stories? They may not be history yet, but they could be in a generation. We’ll need to capture those stories before their gone.

My Story, For a Start

Warning - Not everyone recognizes the Southern imperative to explain oneself in historic context. If you don't care about who the author is and what his family has been doing for the past 320 years, you might want to skip this section. 

I have worked on history of all kinds for over 30 years. I helped save the only handwritten copy of the City of Charleston’s census of free persons of color from a trash heap in 1986 when an aging Lawyer was clearing out his office and had long ago despaired of anyone taking “these old books.” I also saved the records of James L. Petigru, the Charleston Unionist Attorney famous for saying, “SC is too small to be a sovereign nation and too large to be an insane asylum” during the Secession convention in 1860. 

Transit Advocacy West of the Ashley

My Father rewrote the book on how tourism and real estate were marketed in Charleston in the 1960s and 70s as an associate and later principle of Bradham Hamilton Advertising. It was he who discovered that you could sell condos here to people in Ohio. In 1970, he did the advertising for Charleston's first major desegregated Theatrical event, the Tricentennial production of Porgy and Bess.

 

I attended desegregated public schools, graduating from Wando High in 1978. In 1976, I helped celebrate the Bicentennial and participated in integrated community history workshops. I’m a graduate of the USC Honors College and the USC School of Law. I was young and strong when Hugo blasted the land to pieces in 1989 and worked to prevent the evictions of poor people from their homes in the aftermath in the reckless way that only arrogant young lawyers can do. I have a patient and historically curious wife of 32 years, Julia who will stop for the first few historic markers of a day on the road.

I’ve been a civil war reenactor and the lawyer for the 54^th. Mass. Volunteer infantry (The African American Unit depicted in the movie Glory) here. I sit on the board of the Slave Dwelling project with Joe McGill, who I used to shoot at in pretend battles when we both were younger. I’ve written a million words on life in the Lowcountry and I’ve been riding the bus since 1978.

That’s a lot, but since we’re going somewhere, we need to share where we’re from.

The Way Forward

 It’s time to recover and share our African American transit history in the Lowcountry. It’s time to connect it to all our other history, the wars, the disasters, the harm we’ve done each other and the dreams we’ve tried to share. 

SC State Rep. JA Moore, Transit Advocate, Chef

Just beyond this, we have fellow passengers in the Latino, Filipino and European American communities which stores to share. We’ll talk about it on the bus. Later, we’ll build those stories into the Metal, concrete and wood of the rapid transit system. Every station should have a name, a story and a song.

300 hundred thousand more people are coming here to fight over the land which isn’t under the ocean yet. We need to get our stories in order and connected so we can make these newcomers part of it without losing it. When we know where we’ve been, we’ll be able to find out where we’re going. Once we have that, we’ll be on our way.

Together, We Go Forward!

William J. Hamilton, III
Founder, Executive Director, Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit
wjhamilton29464@gmail.com
(843) 870-5299