There it was, a small co-operative store on a little-known island off the coast of South Carolina.
During the harshest days of the civil rights struggle, embattled Black leaders came through its open doors seeking inspiration. Among the legendary civil rights leaders who visited the co-op called ‘The Progressive Club’ were Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr, John Lewis, Cleveland Sellers, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) Andrew Young and many others.
What began in that co-op’s meeting room was a Citizenship School to teach Black people on Johns Island, South Carolina, how to read and write and qualify to vote. Later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) spread that program throughout the South. In 1962, the SCLC brought in other groups who then formed the Voter Education Project (VEP).
Between 1962 and 1966 VEP trained 10,000 teachers for Citizenship Schools and 700,000 Black voters registered throughout the South. That one class, started in the tiny co-op, became thousands of classes in churches, schools and homes. By 1970, another million Black voters had registered.
Aldon Morris in his book, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, wrote: “…the Citizenship Schools were one of the most effective tools of the movement.” That class at the little co-op in the Sea Islands led to millions of Black people voting for the first time and as a result, the South and US history were changed.
A holiday led us to history
In 1996, Ann, Hatley and I were planning to go with family for a holiday in the Outer Banks in North Carolina. However, the plans fell through and changes had to be made. We ended up renting a home in a resort on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. We thought a home on the beach in the Sea Islands would be interesting and we both were excited about enjoying some Southern culture.
We flew into Charleston, rented a car and drove across Johns Island to get to Kiawah Island using Hwy 700. The home was spectacular; on a long wild beach which while there were other houses we had all to ourselves.
We settled in and next day went crabbing along the beach with Hatley. We gave her a dollar for each sand crab she dug out and picked up by hand and put into a shiny red bucket. At the end of the adventure we returned all the captured crabs back to the sea. Hatley bravely earned her dollars.
A few days later, we were poking around a lovely bookstore/gift shop and I asked if they have any books on the Black culture of the islands. The owner paused and then led me to a corner of the shop that had a small collection of books on the Sea Islands. Among them were two books in particular that grabbed my interest. I took them home and devoured their content before the night was over.
Next morning I drew up a short list of the Black history places I had identified on Johns Island I wished to visit. First was the co-op. I tracked down its location on my handheld map and off we went (no Google Maps then). The location on River Road was not easy to find as there were many abandoned buildings all along the road and no street numbers to identify them. At that time there were no signs identifying the co-op.
However, a cinder block building heavily covered in kudzu vines (kudzu can grow a foot a day) seemed like the possible co-op. I walked up to the building and began to pull away the growth and soon I saw green markings on the wall. Pulling more away I began to see a faded green sign “Progressive Club” painted on the street facing wall of the building.
At the time of my visit, the set of buildings had been abandoned since 1989. For years the parcel
had been severely neglected with no homage at all being given to a seminal site of the Civil Rights Movement. I learned from my reading that the store front was the only partly visible to the street. However attached to the rear of the store were meeting rooms where Citizenship classes were secretly taught. The building had been designed that way to hide its purpose from street view and protect it from likely arson by vigilantes.
At the back of the lot was another hidden building created as a makeshift dormitory to
originally house people coming from the other islands for classes. Due to a lack of bridges in the
1960s people had to use ferries to cross between the islands. Students (most were adults) could
not come to the Progressive Club for night classes and get home again that same night. As Septima Clark’s Citizenship classes were having more impact and they needed to teach teachers, people started coming from all over South Carolina and later the South. They too needed a place to stay while they took or were taught the Citizenship classes.
The more that I have learned about the efforts of the Progressive Club the more impressed I
have become of what a handful of intentional people can accomplish. Johns Island is one of the Sea Islands, home to the unique Gullah people who had retained a lot of their African cultural heritage. In the 1940s Johns Island was remote and a nine-hour ferry ride to Charleston, SC. After WWII, bridges slowly began to connect Johns Island to the mainland.
The Progressive Club was started in 1948 by Esau Jenkins and other Johns Island residents as both a consumer co-op and a mutual aid organisation. About forty families started the co-op and bought an old school building on River Road that sold everything from groceries to gasoline and seed to feed. The members used it to trade goods and services and as a mutual aid program to help each other in time of need.
Every member of the Progressive Club had to be a registered voter and had to pledge to get one or more voters out to vote on Election Day. A little later, Esau and others organised the CO Federal Credit Union to serve low income Black people who could not get mortgages or loans.
In his business life, Esau Jenkins ran a bus service which served the needs of high school students and daily workers going from the island to downtown Charleston. One day, in the 1950s one of the passengers, Alice Wine, said to Esau Jenkins, “I’d like to hold up my head like other people, I’d like to be able to vote. Esau, if you’ll help me a little when you have the time, I’d be glad to learn the laws and get qualified to vote. If I do, I promise you I’ll register and I’ll vote.”
Esau Jenkins heard her plea. He copied off the laws and handed them out to his passengers. He
began a daily custom of teaching them how to read and write and learn the law while he drove the bus. Black people could not get the vote in South Carolina unless they could pass tests on literacy and the state constitution. Alice Wine was the first of his passengers to register to vote. What Esau Jenkins was teaching on the bus to a few passengers he wanted to make available to all the disenfranchised Black people on the Sea Islands. But how?
Another avenue for Esau’s road to democracy was about to be opened by Septima Clark. In 1953, Septima Clark, an activist Charleston teacher learned about the Highlander Folk School (Highlander) in Tennessee as one of the few places in the South where Black people and white people could meet together. The Highlander was modelled after the Danish Folk Schools which nationally spurred the Danish agriculture co-operative movement.
Septima had taught on Johns Island and Esau had been one of her students. In 1954, Septima went twice to the Highlander. There she met the founder Myles Horton and his wife Zilphia who that summer came down to Johns Island to learn what was going on.
In 1955-56, Septima taught a leadership class at Highlander. She used her car to transport three groups of people there from the Charleston area, including Esau Jenkins. That journey of about 400 miles through the South could not have been easy or cheap. During his time at Highlander, Esau Jenkins saw that a combination of the Highlander teaching technique and his rolling bus classroom was the next step.
Esau saw also that Septima Clark was an exceptional teacher of the Highlander method. Propitiously, Bernice Robinson, a cousin of Septima, was another of the Charleston attendees. Jenkins asked Highlander to help merge the two formats and sponsor a Citizenship School on Johns Island.
The first form of the Citizenship School began at the Progressive Club in 1957. But with the co-op having grown to 400 members, the old school building could not also accommodate the growing needs of the Citizenship School. They tried to rent, however, none of the schools, churches or organizations on Johns Island dared to let the “Citizenship School” use their buildings. They were afraid they might be burnt down.
Esau and the members of the Progressive Club saw that the only option was to do it themselves by buying land and building a new co-op store with meeting rooms. Esau called Myles Horton at Highlander to talk about where the Progressive Club would get the funds.
Highlander lent the funds to the Progressive Club to buy land on Johns Island to build a new larger co-op store. The new store was built nearby on River Road and opened in 1963. Some of the walls of the co-op still exist and it is now on the National Register of Historic Places. At the front of the co-op’s building was the retail shop with store rooms behind it that acted at night as meeting rooms. Behind that they built a dormitory to house participant from off island.
There amongst the weighing scales and storage counters democracy was born for many Blacks
in the South. Alice Wine became one of the cashiers at the co-op and she can be seen in a lot
of the historic photos. Septima Clark is one of the most unsung heroes of the Civil Rights movement. (In 1955, Septima invited Rosa Parks to her class at Highlander. Only months later, Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama).
In 1955, the State of South Carolina passed a law stating that teachers who were members of the NAACP would not be allowed to keep their jobs. Septima Clark would not leave the NAACP and in 1956 she lost her teaching job in Charleston. Myles Horton learned that Septima had been fired and asked her to become Director of Workshops at Highlander as well as the Highlander’s liaison with Esau and the Citizenship School.
In Ready from Within, Septima Clark comments about the co-op store, “… Esau’s group fixed the
front part like a grocery store and sold things to themselves … There were two rooms in the back and in those two rooms we taught. We didn’t want white people to know we had a school back there. We didn’t have any windows…”
Brought in to be the regular teacher at the Progressive Club was Bernice Robinson, the young cousin of Septima Clark who had also attended Highlander. Highlander raised funds to pay for the program and had Septima Clark oversee it. Soon the Marshall Field Foundation in Chicago took an interest in growing the program beyond Johns Island. However, at this time the State of Tennessee decided to use illegal tactics to close down Highlander. As a result, Highlander was closed and all its properties and assets sold by the local sheriff at auction.
To protect the Field grant and the Citizenship School program, the Highlander quickly transferred the funds and the program to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson and others were transferred with it. Andrew Young and Dorothy Cotton were asked by the SCLC to grow the program beyond Johns Island to the rest of the South.
Young and Cotton, and many other civil rights leaders, were still taken to the Progressive Club to see how the program best worked. On her way back with other Mississippi voting rights activists from their visit to the Citizenship School Fannie Lou Hamer was infamously beaten up in Winona, Mississippi.
There are many other stories about the impact of the Progressive Club. For example, one of the stories would be about the Sea Island Folk Festival that took place in the field behind the Progressive Club. Intertwined with all of this is the work of Guy and Candy Carawan of the Highlander who lived on Johns Island in 1963.
Carawan spread an old song from South Carolina through the Highlander to Pete Seeger and the rest of the world. That song, ‘We Shall Overcome’ is now a freedom anthem worldwide, and the song rights are owned by the Highlander Folk School.
‘We Shall Overcome’ reminds us of the accomplishments of that simple Citizenship
School humbly created in a co-op shop that became one of the greatest untold success stories
of the Civil Rights Movement.
The ten days we stayed on Kiawah Island were replete with visits to Johns Island. We loved driving through the long avenues lined by trees festooned with moss. We enjoyed the tasty regional dishes often featuring seafood, okra and Carolina Gold rice. We ended up loving the character, culture and people of Johns Island.
Attending a Sunday morning Black makeshift church in an existing auto body shop with the cars moved out was a reminder to be humble. Talking with family members of the founders of the Progressive Club showed us how brave people can be. Seeing a deserted Moving Star Hall with its plain benches and dusty floor reminded us of the power of prayer and song to stir, soothe and save the soul. Once Moving Star Hall had been an epicentre of hope for the Johns islanders. Fortunately a 2023 NYT article on the rebuilding of Praise Houses featured the renovation and revitalization of Moving Star Hall. The Hall is back in use.
As we learned more about the area we became aware of the rapid over-development of second home rentable mansions and golf courses on Kiawah Island. We came to realise we were renting one. We saw no Black people still owning and living in Kiawah. Almost every Black person who worked on ritzy Kiawah Island lived in sub-tandard shanties on Johns Island. At one point the Kuwaiti Government owned most of Kiawah Island.
The Sea Island people and culture no longer exists on the resort islands of Kiawah, Seabrook and Hilton Head. The Sea Island shoreline was gobbled up forever and except for a small corner of a bookstore the Black history of those islands was almost wiped out.
However, a generation later the descendants and others have begun their efforts to remind people of a strong Black activist history. Charleston recently opened the International African American Museum and there are important academic collections on African Americans in the city. More historical markers have been erected, more books have been published and more history tours created.
When Ann and I went to the public opening of the National African American History Museum on the Mall in Washington DC, we were proud to see one unique display from Johns Island. Sitting there was the original VW bus driven by Esau Jenkins between Johns Island and Charleston. This was the bus in which he taught Black passengers how to win the vote and participate in a democracy that they had been denied. What an emotional moment that was for us both. What a reminder to America that victories have been won yet the struggle for democratic rights goes on.
David J Thompson
