Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit, Inc. and the Alston Foundation spent Monday preparing for Thursday, April 25’s 5:25 pro transit demonstration in Summerville by doing outreach in Dorchester County, reaching over 500 people in Summerville and Ridgeville.
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| Summerville Town Council |
We were followed by the police. We learned that a cabal of government and government sponsored private sector nonprofits were devoting their Monday to deflecting our effort to restore Summerville’s link to the transit system in hopes of maintaining Summerville as a white flight refuge from the racially and economically diverse communities growing up around them. We encountered a pair of delightful Ukulele players.
The leadership of Summerville and their institutions gather
around the campfire of racism and class hatred often without consciously
realizing it. They describe it with code words like crime and quality of life.
Sometimes they don’t even understand what they’re doing, like someone who
toasts marshmallows over the coals left from a cross burning after the Klan has
returned to their fish camp to drink beer.
Fifty years after desegregation, the practice of suburban racism
is engrained the muscle memory of places like Summerville. The kids now running
around blowing coal rolling filth on pedestrians probably don’t associate their
“rednecking” with their Grandfather’s parking a burning cross in front of Linda
Saylor’s Grandfather’s home while he kept them at outside the fence with a
loaded shotgun informed by the certainty earned in WWI that he could, if
necessary, kill people.
That’s why Linda’s home is surrounded by a Sears installed six-foot
chain-link fence with the pointy fence top. I don’t know if Linda still has her
grandfather’s shot gun. She keeps that fence locked. You do not what to encounter
the psychotic pit bull she has chained in the back yard at night when it
believes you aren’t welcome. It is from behind that moat of steel and teeth
that Linda runs the Dorchester Unit of Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit and
is planning Thursday’s demonstration. She’s also fighting a three woman war against
the forced gentrification of Brownsville with her mother, aunt and Civil Rights
hero Louise Brown. Linda makes excellent French toast. The house needs a dumpster,
but her mother insists they must keep it all.
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| Original Southern terminus of the Transit Line |
They've been able to get Summerville, Lincolnville and Ladson cut out of the transit line which has been in planning for 25 years. The planned line now ends at the Fairgrounds, miles from Summerville along a road which lacks sidewalks.
What these billionaires want in Summerville and throughout the South, is a
culturally grounded bulwark against the rise of a racially and economically
diverse culture of town and city living in the South. The Southeast is their
racially grounded citadel from which they will make war against the rise of an
America defined not by the color of people’s skin but by the content of their character.
They want to be sure that the music of the song mentioned in King’s great speech,
“Free at Last,” never rises from a racially diverse celebration on Hutchison Square
or even Doty Park. If they can keep racism at the center of our shared lives,
they can make America safe for the rich, two things intimately, but not necessarily
connected.
Most of the people in Summerville don’t have a clue this is
happening. They just know they spend more of every day trapped in their cars,
desperately awaiting their weary reunion with their children who are waiting
for a ride to a playdate or a takeout dinner because nobody has time left to cook.
Those people hate developers and minorities because they’ve been taught to.
They don’t understand that better, different types of development, supported by
transit would work. They don’t get a chance to learn and know that all
minorities are not criminals. Since they spend three hours a day trapped in
their cars, parent with their cars and run the endless creeping errands with
their cars, they’ll never learn otherwise.
Since they’re angry, they’ll vote for Trump and when he implodes whoever the Koch organization funds to replace him. Their funeral parades will crawl through the congestion suffocating Summerville with their survivors still believing what they really need are more lanes and lower taxes. The ukulele players sitting on the square on a sunny spring day getting pestered by my transit advocacy on Monday are just an inconsequential distraction, not the revolution they do not comprehend they need.
We’ll see you at Town Hall in Summerville on Thursday, April
14. It’s a significant day, the memorial of the Last Supper, Christ’s last stab
at building community and his betrayal by someone funded by the billionaires of
that time with 40 pieces of silver. We’re shooting for the shared and blessed supper.
We’ll try to shut down the betrayal and return the promised transit line to
Summerville. The demonstration starts at the opposite end of the square, near
the location of Summerville’s lost train station and moves across the Square to
the music of Eyes on the Prize to a short rally in front of Town Hall before
the march upstairs to participate in the Town Council meeting, with the hope of
putting the body and blood of democracy back into Summerville Town Government. Wear
red. Bring your drum.
Full details on the April 14 protest and rally at https://www.facebook.com/BFLowcountryTransit
Information on the entire Summerville to the Sea effort at https://bfltransit.blogspot.com/2022/02/transit-equity-demands-for-sc.html
To Contact us call W Hamilton at 843-870-5299 or email mailto:wjhamilton29464@gmail.com?subject=Summerville%20FOIA%20Request%20Materials
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