South Carolina History

Dozens of workers scurry under gray skies on a site edged with tall slash pines as the largest residential development in South Carolina history, Sun City-Hilton Head, rises from the coastal lowlands. Sun City-Hilton Head, Del Webb Corp.'s first retirement community in the East, will have 8,600 homes and is expected to bring about 20,000 people to the area within two decades.

Nobody's in any hurry to get anywhere this rainy morning inside Buddy's Automotive on Mechanic Street. Cecil Padgett is dropping peanuts in his bottle of Coke and talking to his old friend, Robert Thompson. Robert, 73, is black. Cecil, 68, is white. That's not supposed to matter, not anymore anyway, except this is the cradle of the Confederacy, so it still does. "They can leave it up or they can take it down. Don't make no difference to me," Cecil grunts. Robert smiles and looks at his shoes.

Nobody's in any hurry to get anywhere this rainy morning inside Buddy's Automotive on Mechanic Street. Cecil Padgett is dropping peanuts in his bottle of Coke and talking to his old friend, Robert Thompson. Robert, 73, is black. Cecil, 68, is white. That's not supposed to matter, not anymore anyway, except this is the cradle of the Confederacy, so it still does. "They can leave it up or they can take it down. Don't make no difference to me," Cecil grunts. Robert smiles and looks at his shoes.

Dozens of workers scurry under gray skies on a site edged with tall slash pines as the largest residential development in South Carolina history, Sun City-Hilton Head, rises from the coastal lowlands. Sun City-Hilton Head, Del Webb Corp.'s first retirement community in the East, will have 8,600 homes and is expected to bring about 20,000 people to the area within two decades.

Federal authorities announced Wednesday the largest single cocaine seizure in South Carolina history--1,780 pounds--and the arrests of five suspects. U.S. Atty. Bart Daniel and FBI Special Agent Fred Verinder said the arrests stemmed from a May 6 seizure of uncut cocaine worth about $16 million.

Gov. Jim Hodges signed legislation Tuesday to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome where is has flown for 38 years, saying it was time the state ended years of racial divisions the banner has caused. The flag will come down July 1. "Today, we bring this debate to an honorable end.

Winding up a two-day political swing, President Reagan took time out from his fund-raising activities Thursday to meet with this area's drought-stricken farmers and to watch an Operation Haylift government cargo plane unload hay flown in from the Midwest to replace parched crops. The President said that the drought, the worst in recorded South Carolina history, is "reaching tragic proportions," and that his Administration "stands ready to help."

Andrew Jackson's uncertain birthplace may be a simple footnote to history, but to the folks living in the two counties straddling the North and South Carolina border, it is as important as Sunday dinners and high school football. Road signs and murals in both counties--Union to the north and Lancaster to the south--proclaim Jackson a native son in a controversy whose intensity is matched only by the annual late summer gridiron clash between area high schools.

Frank McGuire, the New York City coach whose "underground railroad" of New York recruits was a cornerstone of college basketball's rise in the South, died at his home in Columbia, S.C., Tuesday after a long illness. He was 80. Complications from a 1992 stroke had added to McGuire's declining health, the same year he suffered a broken hip in a fall.

Before affirmative action, there was merit. Or so the argument goes. You were admitted to college, hired for a job and promoted through the ranks not because you belonged to a disadvantaged racial or ethnic group but because you deserved it, by dint of hard work, superior effort and proven good results. Affirmative action, its opponents lament, subverted that most American of principles: that merit--not favor--is the fuel that propels you upward through the system.

Taking his campaign to a state that spurned him four years ago that will serve as a crucial test of his appeal to the conservative voters in his party, Mitt Romney kept his focus trained on the economy and unemployment Wednesday - arguing that his private-sector credentials made him the best suited Republican candidate to defeat President Obama. Romney's top surrogate in South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley, echoed that message as she made her pitch for Romney and chided the Republican contenders who have been criticizing Romney's work at Bain Capital, a private equity firm that he co-founded.  “We have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like Democrats against the free market,” Haley said.

Two years after the Civil War, with much of this city still in ruins, some of the bitterness over the conflict was put aside by a single gesture: New York firefighters collected pennies to buy Columbia a firetruck. So overwhelmed was former Confederate Col. Samuel W. Melton that he made a promise on behalf of South Carolina's capital city to return the kindness "should misfortune ever befall the Empire City."