South Carolina United Action
Kamau Marcharia, Founder
Corry Stevenson, Community Organizer
P.O. Box 2786
Orangeburg, S.C. 29116
(803) 536-9376
(803) 536-2441 fax

The town of Orangeburg, a county seat in the piney woods and hardscrabble farming country of Central South Carolina, stands out in the history of the civil-rights era because of a terrible event that occurred here in February 1968: The Orangeburg Massacre, when three black young people were killed by National Guard troops during rioting that followed efforts by local college students to integrate an all-white bowling alley.

Sometimes it seems as if little has changed since those awful days, says Ann Johnson, an intern and former board member of SC United Action, a community organizing group that spends much of its effort fighting police and community injustice in a rural South where time seems sadly to have stood still. This is a region where a small-town police chief recently shot a black man dead in a routine traffic stop -- and local officials spent years resisting investigation. It's a place where blacks are routinely hassled by police, who break up groups of three or more in the belief that this is an effective way to stymie drug traffic. It's a region where a police chief not long ago posted wanted posters offering $100 for the live body of a black suspect or $500 for him dead -- then got off unpunished with the claim that it was "just a practical joke;" and it's a region where efforts by white teachers to oust a black principal led to the joyous support of the Ku Klux Klan, which offered $25 to anyone who'd help break up a rally organized in the principal's support. It's also a state where Gov. David Beasley and Charles Condon, his attorney general, have filed suit to block implementation of the Voters Rights Act ("Motor Voter"), arguing that its requirements are "an unfunded federal mandate" and unconstitutional.

These events happened not in the 1960s, mind you, but in the 1990s. And it's injustices like these that inspired the formation of Tri-County United Action -- later expanded to a statewide mission. It began in 1989, when Kamau Marcharia, an organizer with Si Kahn's Charlotte-based Grassroots Leadership came to the village of Norway, S.C., to investigate reports of four black players on an integrated baseball team who were forbidden to play with their team on a public field, and threatened with violence for daring to object.

Marcharia began knocking on doors, organizing meetings of African-American residents (who outnumber whites in Orangeburg, Bamberg and Calhoun Counties, the group's original "Tri-County" region, but who had little or no political power).

Working with the support of Grassroots Organizing and, more recently of the Oakland-based Center for Third World Organizing, SC United Action has continued organizing residents to learn and then fight for their rights since that day. Operating out of a cluttered office suite two long flights of stairs above a loan office in downtown Orangeburg with a paid staff of one and a budget of less than $100,000, the group has achieved some notable victories. Through electoral organizing, they placed the first African-American on the county commission, and gained a majority of votes on the school board in the town of Springfield, a victory that led directly to a bond issue replacing a dilapidated predominantly black school with a sparkling new facility. Working with the Oakland organizing group, they have spearheaded a national Campaign for Community Safety and Police Accountability. In local efforts, they've won significant gains in housing cleanup and rehabilitation in several small towns, and gone to bat for fired black workers at a mental-health center, besieged African-American principals and teachers, and the victims of police brutality.

One model program in conjunction with the Center for Third World Organizing, called the Minority Activist Apprenticeship Program (MAAP), provides training sessions for potential young community leaders, both on site and at the Center's headquarters in Oakland, seeking to develop "indigenous leadership" to help build a new generation of what Marcharia called "the warrior class" of leaders who spearheaded the civil-rights struggle in the South.

Marcharia, a charismatic and articulate leader, calls for "a positive culture of resistance," arguing that mere silence is wrong when it's time to speak out against evil. "When we witness millions of children being both physically and mentally abused and we seek to cover it up and are not angry, we fail to resist," he wrote in a guest column for the South Carolina Black Media Group. "When, living in the most affluent society, technologically and economically, we see people eating out of garbage cans, dying daily from curable diseases, and we are not angry, then something is wrong. We fail to resist!"

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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