Crawford’s own perspective is delightfully pointed: “The place has an amnesiac, ahistorical quality that is highly attractive to white celebrants, who drowsily pad along its pretty streets before tucking into their next big meal; they are enjoying the suggestion of moneyed graciousness around them, not thinking too hard about where that money came from.” The Holy City may be a top tourist destination, but Crawford makes it clear we’re not here to relax. We’re here to do some tough reckoning with what compounded denial, boosterism, widespread development, segregation, gentrification, white supremacy and public complacency have wrought.
For centuries, Charleston has played a starring role in the nation’s tortured racial history: first as a major slave port, then as a central domestic slave market, then as the spot where the Civil War started, at which point the ratio of Black people to white in the state was around 3 to 1. Charleston’s economy was developed on the backs of the enslaved who worked in the rice paddies and picked the indigo and filled the soggy edges of the peninsula with trash and rubble and offal so the city could grow. Which it did in spades, most remarkably in the three decades following Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when the local mayor harnessed national attention plus public funding to develop the peninsula and spread outward, over marshes and sea islands — a process that involved annexing suburbs, attracting retirees, gentrifying rampantly and transforming a majority Black city into a majority white one.
Discrimination persisted into the current era, during which, after the massacre at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2015, long-simmering tensions boiled into protest that finally brought down the Confederate flag at the state capitol. But if you’ve gone through centuries of second-class citizenship and generations of flooding without being heard or helped to get to higher ground by the city you built, as the toxic sludge pulls at your ankles, you must ask yourself, is this progress?
For white and wealthy residents, Charleston’s quandary is a real estate issue. But whether to sell now or stay is a question that its poor may not have the luxury of posing. For these citizens — renters and public-housing residents — the issue is a moral one. As the historian Annette Gordon-Reed asks in her foreword to the book, “Will the government authorities be able to rise above historical patterns and take action on behalf of the marginalized people in the city?”
Crawford wouldn’t have written this book if she thought the answer was no. Her vision for Charleston involves revising, resettling, rewilding and redrawing the metropolitan map. She’s not alone in imagining that the city, and by extension the nation, has the potential to get this transition right. Toward the end of her book, she quotes Michelle Mapp, who’s not giving up: “If Charleston can change, the South can change. If the South can change, America can change.” But so much depends upon who’s seated at the table of power.
