Open the Ocean for Kids

Open the Ocean for Kids, will use our new public transit link to the Isle of Palms to make days at the Beach available for some who have never seen the sea. Our inland communities, mere miles from our beaches are home to many children who have never seen the Atlantic Ocean. 

Rev. April 30, 2021

State Rep. Marvin Pendarvis is the honorary leader of the effort. He's actively involved, but until the Legislature is out of session, William Hamilton (843) 870-5299 or wjhamilton29464@gmail.com is handling organizational work. 

This effort is sponsored financially partially by the AFL-CIO and a number of local unions. You can contribute as well online on act blue at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/best-friends-of-lowcountry-transit--inc--1?fbclid=IwAR2LGKxdmMUqJKvcGZGKYPlZKfC0qfcvvk5SyqC0M1FAzs3556LTDvSSEi0

Children designing a transit system in Summerville.

While it seems inconceivable to those of us who grew up going to the beach there are many, many 12 year olds living in Ladson, Lincolnville, Summerville, Goose Creek, Sangaree and North Charleston who have never heard the surf, seen the sea or crossed the inland waterway. There are seven year old children here who have never lived in a Charleston where travel to the beach on public transit existed since it ended in 2013 when CARTA can celled the poorly operated Island Flex Route. Regular, reliable operation of the beloved IOP bus route which ran from downtown Charleston through Mt. Pleasant and Sullivan's Island to IOP ended with the CARTA shut down of 2002.

Open the Ocean for Kids will attempt to bring children from our inland Lowcountry communities to the beach at IOP for swimming and other fun starting with Reach the Beach Day, Saturday of memorial weekend. We'll be working with churches, youth groups and community pools to prepare children with swimming lessons, organize buddies and safety teams and make sure that these kids are adequately equipped for the ocean with bathing suits, towels, snacks and hydration. This is not a simple undertaking. Any activity involving children is inherently dangerous and requires careful preparation and security arrangements against both human and natural risks. The beach is a wonderful place but it can become a dangerous hazard for an inexperienced person in seconds. No single person can every be alone with a child unless they are a proven member of their immediate family selected with approval of their parents. Maintaining these standards while making sure that kids have fun and return to their communities empowered and enriches is not, ironically “a day at the beach.”  We'll be working with established partners like Pink House Neighborhood Resource Center West of the Ashely. 

The official kickoff for the effort will be Sun, May 16th. Duppy Conqueror's Bus2Beach Party in 

North Charleston, SC. and we'll continue with trips to the sea for kids on an irregular basis when the buses are coming until the Opening of the Ocean on July 17.

Pink House Neighborhood Resource Center

Trips will begin at neighborhood bus stops on Summerville, Ridgeville, N. Charleston, Downtown and West of the Ashley. Our conductors and experienced water safety professionals will help the Kids reach the beach, enjoy the ocean, have a snack and get home safely. 

While planning and development of this program has been ongoing for a month and builds on existing community efforts, we can't yet say how many children we'll be able to take to the sea. For families wanting to go, the effort is easier. We'll begin the effort Memorial weekend with guided rides to the beach from major bus stops for family groups.

We're confident that several dozen kids will make the trip at least. We need social workers, teachers and other people certified and checked to work with children who can swim and work in the hot beach environment to help with this effort. Our goal is a two adult to four kid team supervision structure. 

For the children who make it, we have a recognition in the form of a traditional Polynesian bone fish hook pendant which will show they've made it through their swimming lessons, reached the beach and returned safely from the sea on transit. 

While we're proud of this important effort, we need to prepare the public for the careful way in which sharing it with them has to be conducted. We don't want to humiliate children or their families by revealing their identities to the community at large. Expect a lot of pictures of feet, sand pails and sand castles and few, if any images of faces. We have to put a face on the struggle of our community to share the shore with it's children without showing the faces or revealing the identity of those children struggling with extreme circumstances. 

Activist Milicent Middleton

We're still working out the cost for this program, but our provisional budget allots One Thousand Dollars for the effort, plus some in kind donations of things like towels, flip flops, swimsuits and sun hats. Most of the money will go for safety swimming lessons at community pools and bus passes. The children can travel on CARTA for free, but we'll need bus fare for their parents or caretakers. We're accepting donations now through act blue or you can contact William Hamilton at wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or (843) 870-5299.

Please return to this document for updates or subscribe to our mailing list. 

Black Rides Matter- Together We Go Forward!

Fighting for Better Transit on Folly Rd.

Fight for Better Lowcountry Transit before July 10.

In 2016, black voters in Charleston County delivered the margin of victory in the vote for the half penny sales tax. They were promised a rapid transit system to serve their communities in our urban core and improved bus service all the way to area beaches. They agreed to pay for this with a regressive sales tax, the burden of which falls most heavily upon the poor, disabled and elderly. Four years later, the promised improvements to bus service made in the half million dollar 2015 I26 alt study haven’t materialized. Over 40 million dollars of current transit funding has been diverted to a “Pay Go” plan for road construction, an interest free loan from transit riders to privileged drivers.

Six miles of the planned rapid transit line on highway 78 have been downgraded to in traffic operation. In Charleston a 1.5 mile abandoned railroad line will be wasted on a yuppie puppie partially privatized dog walking park with café’s for tourists and the rich while transit struggles to move on Meeting street. A Lincolnville resident will lose an hour a day sitting on a system which wasn’t what they were promised, voted for, or have paid for. The resulting system will be a waste of over 300 million dollars, not rapid, not a system and barely transit.

We have until July 10. Join us in the fight for transit which liberates us from the suffocating oppression of the automobile. Force our leaders to build a safe, reliable, fast transit system from Summerville to the Sea.

Summerville, Ladson, Lincolnville and Sangaree should Demand:

See our detailed Memo on BRT issues in this area- Summerville to the Sea

1. Rapid transit operation in dedicated lanes on Highway 78 from River’s Ave to Downtown Summerville.

2. Safe, comfortable, lighted stops which can be reached safely from the side of the road.

3. A system which can complete the trip from Line Street in downtown Charleston to downtown Summerville in 59 minutes.

4. Service all the way to Hutchison Square in Downtown Summerville with a sheltered stop in the business district near there.

5. Connecting Service in downtown Charleston at a safe, comfortable station hub on Line Street which connects to Folly Beach and the Isle of Palms.

North Charleston Should Demand:

Children in N. Charleston building a model transit system.

1. Affordable housing walkable connected to major stops in and around the old Navy Hospital and other locations.

2.  Improved bus service throughout N. Charleston, including half hour frequencies on major routes as called for by the Charleston Area Justice Ministry.

3. Build “Complete streets” through N. Charleston so riders can reach transit safely on foot, by connecting bus or by bike. Delay construction of a wider I-526 until after improved transit is constructed and operating.

Charleston, James Island, Mt. Pleasant and West Ashley should demand:

1. The BRT should operate on the abandoned railroad line into the city out of congested traffic to Line Street, through and as part of the Lowline Park System and include space therein for high quality stops and a regional transit hub at Line Street. Read our position on how the Lowline park system should be built to accommodate and be more successful with transit. 

2. Reliable and efficient service on the BRT and regular bus lines to allow the working people of Charleston to access employment without having to pay the city’s exploitive rents or struggle with downtown’s declining quality of ordinary life for working people.

3. Transit service prioritized over car traffic be established and maintained to the beaches at both Folly and Isle of Palms.

4. A memorial to Civil Rights and Transit Hero Mary Bowers and others who forced integration of Charleston’s streetcars in 1867. Read our Reconstruction Transit Equity history.

5. Planning for a coastal transit line along Highway 17 to begin immediately with operations to commence no later than June 1, 2025 from Awendaw to Red Top.

Act Now, Before July 10

· Go to our online version of this page for links, background and organizing tools at .

1- Contact us: 
www.blfltransit.com; 
wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or
Phone (843) 870-5299

2- Make your priorities known during the BCD COG’s Online Meeting until July 10, 2020. 

3- Copy your statements to our public blog post comment pages, this page is best. See below.

4- Join us on our Zoom Conferences Monday, July 6 and Wednesday, July 8 at 9 pm

Monday, July 6 at 9 pm.

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Topic: Black Rides Matter Together We Go Forward CHS Wed. July 8

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Public Transit, Politics and Protest in the SC Lowcountry Now

Signing the Community Commitment to Transit

Until recently, establishment power in the United States preferred to retain control by avoiding overt oppressive violence. One of the ways this was accomplished was by building a landscape and transportation system which marginalizes the poor, disabled, young and senior citizens. These people have time, energy and motivation to commit to social justice movements and keeping them immobile renders them silent. Please don't add to their oppression by making a car and driver's license the price of entry to your protest event or campaign. Don't be complicit and allowing our precious transit vehicles to become instruments of oppression.

Make Sure your Campaign or Event can Be Reached on Transit

We believe it is essential that protest and political activity be planned for times and places where transit riders can reach them. A campaign or organization which chooses to plan without regard to transit access tells tens of thousands of transit dependent necessity riders that they're not welcome sand they should vote for someone else. It also tells environmentalists and choice riders that they must use a car, with its attendant social and environmental damage, to reach their event. Many people find driving the Charleston's angry traffic full of stressed people to be very taxing and more and more people refuse to do it. Those that do arrive at your event already worn down by the cruelty and violence of traffic.

Get your Prius Coal Rolled or tailgated by a white pickup and you'll know what we mean. In these stressed, angry times the fight trough traffic is often not worth it.

The late Mary Smith, appearing at Gay Pride as Syphide

We worked with the Marvin Pendarvis campaign to design a day long event on Saturday which puts serious, change making political activity in places where it can be reached by transit (with the exception of Summerville, which has not weekend service.) We're also using Bikes as part of the effort. Every event of the day is within a two block walk, on sidewalks of a stop on the #10 Rivers Ave. Bus line. The 9 am breakfast is one block from Superstop.

Remember, being transit enabled includes a safe trip home afterwards. Transit service ends early in some places. Few of our bus lines run past 8 pm and some riders must make a connection to another route to complete their trip. All trips can planned on Google Transit locally now.

Superstop is served by six different bus lines and is the easiest place for a transit rider to reach in teh region.

We're ready to help any campaign, Democratic, Republican or Independent plan events which are transit enabled. Just call William Hamilton, (843) 870-5299. We can usually work through it on zoom or over the phone.

Here is the event announcement for the Pendavis event. https://www.facebook.com/events/1192814577724690/

Opposition to the Use of Transit Vehicles to Facilitate Mass Arrests

Transit Campaign, 2016 Roadside Pitch on Highway 78

Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit opposes use of CARTA and LINK Transit vehicles to facilitate mass arrests in the Lowcountry. Transit vehicles are for bringing freedom and mobility to people, not oppression. We joined with our national coalition of transit, labor and social justice leaders in issuing this statement. As of this time, we are not aware of plans to mis use our local transit vehicles in this fashion, but with major actions planned for this weekend, we want to be on record and will be issuing a statement to the press today. This detailed release has information on what has happened in other cities. If you are planning an action, you should read the accounts from other places. https://labor4sustainability.ourpowerbase.net/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=487&fbclid=IwAR0nthrsm9NoKUQEFxrjcd1KU4lmiH0bnMMaq1M5dbMDzroXaWgD5ObKL98.

Stand for Better Transit

Come Stand With Mary in Defiance of the Redneck Reactionaries in SC or
How a Square White Guy & Jesse are Trying to Build 
a Big Colorful Circle While People Get Sick

Sidewalk Pitch for #CHS #EARTHRISING and #HEROESMOVINGHEROES. Part of #EARTHDAY2MAYDAY

Jesse William talks to drivers waiting for the light to change.

Charleston, SC, USA, April 24, 2020- There were two demonstrations in South Carolina today. One was about the future, human dignity and saving  the planet in Charleston. The other, around the Statehouse, was a gaggle of violent ignorance, demanding that the workers of SC be fed into the grinder of the Coronavirus epidemic in the service of Donald Trump’s tiresome cortege of fear and hate.

Since stupidity and prejudice gets more publicity than it deserves, I thought I would tell you about today’s street corner banner pitch for better public transit that was part of #CHS #EARTHRISING and #HEROESMOVINGHEROES.  At the intersection of Meeting Street and the I26 onramp, Jesse Williams, activist and candidate for Charleston County Council and William Hamilton, Attorney and Executive director of Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit. This location was half a block from the former site of Charleston-s tent city of homeless people, cleared out four years ago.

At the North end of what was once Charleston’s now forgotten street car system that Mary fought to ride (her story later) and a few hundred feet from the planned route of the long promised, mostly paid for, over planned and as yet unconstructed bus rapid transit line, we made our stand while the rednecks surrounded the statehouse.

This banner faced the I26 on ramp

We pitched large banners declaring that it would be “Better on the BRT” an long delayed rapid  transit line between Summerville and Charleston we helped win voter approval of four years ago. Since then we’ve been fighting to force our elected leaders to spend the sales taxes we won for them on the transit system they promised to build. We have that promise in writing, incidentally.

The other banner, painted by the transit deprived people of the Johns and Wadamalaw Islands, declared “Sea Island Transit, There is Power in Togetherness,”  That one was so well received in it’s outdoor debut that Christian King of West Ashely started a project to create a large banner for their campaign to increase transit frequency there. We also have a twenty foot monster that demands bus service be returned to area beaches. That one is going up somewhere appropriate on Mayday.  We have tool boxes of bungee cords, rope, tent stakes and zip ties to put these up and keep them up in the wind.

Sticking It by the Side of the Road

Every pitch is different. This one’s curse was hidden concrete underground. Plastic tent stakes cannot be pounded into it with a rubber mallet. We finally found a soft spot. Jesse put up the chairs and cranked up our sound system and we were ready to go online.

Meta demo- This passerby  livestreams us livestreaming him

There are lots of people better at livestreaming that we are. Most of them aren’t putting up banners, greeting traffic and trying to manage a phone attached to the tripod with medical tape because the phone clip on the tripod broke. Tape is not an adequate substitute.  We finally got a shaky stream running shortly after 3 pm, as planned.  Then we had to finish staking up the other signs and banners. After that, when the tent stakes got pulled out in the wind due to soft ground, we put them up again.

It took us a while to get everything working but we get it all happening about 45 minutes into the stream. We call out our US Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, greet bus drivers, meet the public and wave at all the cars slowing down for a peek at the resistance.  You can see how we did on the record. The first 45 minutes are full of putting stuff up and the phone falling off the tripod. It isn’t exactly Avatar or Casablanca after that, but we hold it together for about 45 minutes until our failure to connect the booster battery to the phone catches up with us and we go dark.

https://www.facebook.com/BFLowcountryTransit/videos/2540528476220419/?t=2773

Jesse worked at it hard, pushing through the mask and helping  out. We got it done. We threatened non- one. People smiled. The young people walked by reveling in the spring with the soulless pleasure that their doctors prescribe for them. They seemed unworried, but they should be. We were that small, persistent   voice among the noise warning the redneck army the future has it supporters here, even in reddest, most backward South Carolina.

Not Staying Home, Managing the Social Distance

Folly Beach Hates sent the Police to take this banner down. 

We wore masks and gloves and got out of the house.  We’re going to pitch our big “Bring Buses Back to our Beaches” banner on Mayday, to remind the community of the fierce injustice of relying on the low wage service labor of thousands of transit riders to keep it’s tourism economy working while refusing, year after year, to offer those without a car a way to take their children to the beach. 

The angry men with guns in white pickups demanded the beaches be reopened to them. The governor gave that to them. The people who own the governments that control access to those beaches then closed them again, sort of. That was injustice, the white pickup army declared. The people on the beaches and the shite pickup guys still remember the time when there was a gate on folly road that black people were only allowed to pass if they had a job cleaning a white person’s beachhouse. They want that world back.  We’ve got twenty feet of hell no to put up on the workers day. We’ll be livestreaming then too.

We couldn’t stand by while the white pickup rednecks for the exurbs started their government takeover in SC. We gathered the weary, frightened survivors of our long, mostly losing struggle here on the phone and cajoled them into putting on their masks and picking up their flags. We begged, we promised and occasionally, we lied. Some came. More are coming. We’ve put together 12 days of struggle in the Lowcountry and Charleston and branded it #CHS #EARTHRISING, a part of the larger #EarthDay2MayDay celebration. Ours goes past Earthday because we needed to reach an anniversary in a city where the past from Francis Marion to the Civil War casts a long, dark shadow in our shared lives.

Sol Legare Island Transit Activists

May  4, is the 50^th. Anniversary of the Kent State shootings. It is also the 153^rd anniversary of the date Mary Bowers, a free woman of color, won the right to ride for all in Charleston. It was a month-long campaign that proves Mary would have consider us wimps. Mary’s approach to change was breaking things and setting them on fire.  Riots surged around police stations ended by shaky alliance confrontations with ex Confederate white police officers and very black Civil War Veteran US Army occupation forces. Mary wanted to ride the new horse drawn streetcars. They represented the future. So did her new freedom. The campaign began after a mass organizing meeting for the black reconstructionist Republican party in SC on Marion Square.  Mary decided to ride even though the “colored cars” were still allegedly on order. The conductor put her off. She said she would dismount, but there would be trouble.

Mary Does Not Do Zoom, She Summons Stones

Mary did not convene a zoom meeting to propound the value or her online petition and beg for donations for her new nonprofit on act blue. Mary did not beg for permits and pester Susan Dunn over at the ACLU. She went out and found a crowd. They found cobblestones. There was shortly a grave shortage or window glass. Charleston was then a city which had only two years before had so many windows blown out by the union bombardment that a yankee reporter, walking  through the weed wild streets South of Broad said the wagon ruts appeared to be paved in diamonds. After a month, General Scott commander of the Freedman’s Bureau suggested the street car company allow everyone to ride without discrimination as the new reconstruction act required. The board of directors held a meeting and concluded the implied idea that black federal troops would be riding streetcars with bayonets to increase the racial sensitivity of the conductors would be bad for business. On May 4^th the affirmed the right of all to ride.

Talking to a Member of the CARTA Board

It has taken me ten years of advocacy to get new bus shelters up in Charleston and the long promised rapid transit line that votes agreed to fund in 2016 is still only a plan after four years. We need to be shovel ready now.  It took Rosa Parks and the mighty Martin Luther King over a year to desegregate the buses of Montgomery Alabama. It took Mary only a month to liberate the Holy City’s streetcars. Of course Mary broke and burned things, lots of them apparently. So many, in fact, that the conservative newspaper refused to admit it had happened.

Evidently breaking things accelerates the rate of progress on social justice in Charleston. I suppose that’s why they don’t tell the tourists about Mary Bowers and why she doesn’t appear in our kid’s school books. I still don’t advise setting cities on fire to change them. However, it apparently works.  If the redneck army wants to escalate, Mary has warned them about where we can go and who wins we do.  Perhaps our elected officials should listen to people who don’t bring assault rifles loaded with thirty round clips of live ammo to their rallies. I and Jesse saw police officers all afternoon, every one of them glad to see us. Let’s keep it that way if we can.  We buried nine friends here after Dylan Roof shot up a prayer meeting at Mother Emanuel Church five years ago. Violence has no charm for us.

Mending the Circle, Claiming the Center

On May 4, her day and the day of the martyrs of Kent State, we’re planning a socially distanced demonstration in the Lowcountry, a great circular gathering. The circle has a radius of 98.6 feet and family groups will gather around the 300 foot circumference 12 feet apart. Speakers and musicians will take the center and the noise we make will move out through those gathered to the community and across the World Wide Web. We will restore the fractured circle of community and reclaim the center. The North axis will be dedicated to leadership and Government. The South axis point to family and community. The East will be dedicated to environmental justice. The west to social justice. To learn more, see the #Earthrising Rally event listing on Charleston’s new social network for Activists www.goodsharing.net

Even in the midst of this epidemic, we cannot surrender access to the roadside and public square. We can’t agree to stand on the street while our transit system serves the priorities of tourists instead of the hard working people who serve them. We can’t stand quietyly playing TV on Zoom while people are forced to return to work without even the flimsy protection of an 80 cent disposable mask. We are not their children, we are not disposalble pieces of meat and as Mary Bowers knew, we should not be slaves.

END END END

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