Nikki Haley Is Wrong; Racism’s Alive, Well In South Carolina And Elsewhere
Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former South Carolina governor who said the U.S. is not a racist country, probably doesn’t know about Monica and Shawn Williams.
“We’re not a racist country,” Haley, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, said in a recent interview. “We’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”
The Williams couple are African American, Army veterans who live in Conway, S.C., a short drive from the tony Myrtle Beach area. The day after Thanksgiving 2023, they looked outside and were terrified that someone had posted a burning cross, the most lasting and vile example of racism.
Had Haley known the Williams couple, she probably would not have insisted recently that the U.S. is not a racist country. And had Haley read her history books she would not have claimed that enslavement was not a cause for the Civil War.
And had Haley known the couple, she might have supported creation of a hate crime bill while she was governor of South Carolina. As governor, Haley did not back passage of a hate crime law and South Carolina along with Wyoming remain the only states without hate crime laws.
In her effort to whitewash racism, Haley conveniently did not mention the bitter battle in her home state, while she was governor, to pass a Voter ID law which effectively disenfranchised thousands of people of color in South Carolina.
And as far back as the 2010 gubernatorial race in South Carolina, Haley was not against flying the Confederate battle flag over the state house as she called the Civil War a battle between “tradition” and “change.”
Haley says the nation is not racist but her only opponent for the presidential nomination, trump, continues to feed the flames of racism as he describes Haley by her south Asian name of “Nimrata,” rather than referring to her chosen name, Nikki. Haley’s birth name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She was born in South Carolina and is the daughter of Sikh parents who emigrated from India.
Monica and Shawn Williams bought their three-bedroom retirement home in 2021 in what they believed was a quiet, peaceful community. They were the only African Americans in the neighborhood and within hours of moving in their white neighbors, Worden Butler, 28, and Alexis Hartnett, 27, were scowling at them, followed by uncomfortable stares and racial slurs. On the day after Thanksgiving, the Williams’s discovered a cross set on fire just outside their yard.
Butler and Hartnett had harassed and intimidated the couple repeatedly, chased away a surveyor and other workers from the Williams property. They continued hurling racial slurs even when police responded to the cross burning. Monica Williams said Harnett told her that she “shoots [expletive] for a living” while Butler posted the Williams’ address on Facebook, wrote that he would “make them pay” and that he was “summoning the devil’s army.”
Butler and Hartnett were arrested and charged with harassment related to the cross burning. Butler was released on bond as was Hartnett, who was also booked for an unrelated assault and battery charge. The charges brought against Butler and Hartnett are misdemeanors because South Carolina has no hate crimes law. The FBI also is investigating for possible violations of the federal civil rights law.
Kenneth Floyd, interim president of the Conway branch of the NAACP, said there hasn’t been a cross burning in the area that he knows of for more than 10 years.
“This is a form of domestic terrorism is what it is,” Shawn Williams said. “It’s designed for intimidation. It’s designed to send a negative message. All the negative connotations associated with cross burnings, especially just before reconstruction and after reconstruction. We all know what that means.”
Last March, Axel Cox, a 24-year-old white supremacist in Mississippi, was sentenced to 42 months in prison for a federal hate crime after pleading guilty to unlawfully intimidating his Black neighbors. Cox had set fire to a a large cross in the front yard of a home occupied by African Americans, violating the Fair Housing Act and prompting an investigation by the Department of Justice.
In two other incidents, Louis Revette and James Brown were each given lengthy prison sentences for cross burnings. Revette was convicted in 2019 after burning a cross in an overwhelmingly Black Mississippi community, while two years later, Brown received 18 months imprisonment for setting fire to a cross in the front yard of a Virginia family who had recently taken part in a civil rights protest.
In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban cross burning without evidence of an intent to intimidate. Without evidence, the law violated the constitutional right of free speech, the court ruled. In the case, three defendants appealed after they were convicted in two separate cases of violating a Virginia statute against cross burning. The high court ruled that cross-burning can only be a criminal offense if the intent to intimidate is proven.
Since the early 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on hillsides as a way to intimidate and threaten black Americans and other marginalized groups. The first recorded cross burning in the U.S. was on Nov. 25, 1915, when a group of men led by William J. Simmons burned a cross atop Stone Mountain, Ga., inaugurating the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
The cross burning came 10 months after the debut of the D.W. Griffith film, “The Birth of a Nation.” The film glorifies the Klan and begins when a Confederate colonel’s young sister rejects a marriage proposal by a black Union captain. The girl kills herself after the captain would not stop pursuing her. The captain is later captured and executed. A poster for the film shows a Klansman holding a burning cross while on a horse.
Last month, Haley told a New Hampshire town hall that the cause of the Civil War was “basically how government was going to run, what you could and couldn’t do, the freedoms in what people could and couldn’t do,” omitting any mention of slavery.
Slavery and racism have a long and vile history in South Carolina, which was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, and was one of the founding member states of the Confederacy in February 1861. In a January 1860 speech, South Carolina congressman Laurence Massillon Keitt condemned the “anti-slavery party” and claimed that slavery was not morally wrong, but rather, justified.
South Carolinian Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell said slavery was justified under the Christian religion, and that those who viewed slavery as being immoral were opposed to Christianity.
More recently, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond Sr., R-S.C., was known as one of most racist members of Congress. Thurmond served for nearly half a century, from 1954 to 2003. He was a staunch opponent of civil rights legislation during the 1950s and 1960s, voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Lynching throughout the south and in South Carolina became so widespread that the years 1882 to 1930 were referred to as the “lynching era.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) defined lynching as murder committed extralegally by three or more persons who claim to be serving justice. Victims were lynched for a wide range of behavior, including murder, theft, arson, and assault, trying to vote, being disruptive, and frightening a white woman.
Between 1882 and 1930 there were 2,805 lynching victims in the South including 156 in South Carolina. South Carolina was the site of one of the largest lynchings when on Dec. 28, 1889, in Barnwell County, eight African American men were accused of murdering a local merchant. A mob broke the men out of jail, tied them to trees, and then shot them.
The last known lynching in South Carolina occurred on Feb. 17, 1947, when a white mob murdered Willie Earle, a young black man who had been arrested for killing a white taxicab driver. Those responsible for Earl’s lynching were acquitted.
While acts of blatant violence against African Americans may have subsided, the state of South Carolina is bent on attacking African Americans in other, more subtle although extremely effective ways, like the 2013 Voter ID law.
The initial version of the law required that voters show a valid and current South Carolina driver’s license or other form of ID containing a photo issued by the Department of Motor Vehicle. On May 18, 2011, Then-Gov. Haley signed the voter-ID law, saying, “If you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you have to show a picture ID to get on an airplane, you should show a picture ID when you vote.”
The proposed law was rejected by the Justice Department in 2011 in the required pre-clearance but Haley was persistent. The state applied for reconsideration, and the proposed law was again denied pre-clearance on June 29, 2012. South Carolina then sued the Justice Department and in October 2012, a panel of federal judges blocked the law for the 2012 general election. The judges ruled that, given the short time remaining before the election, the law put a burden on minority voters that violated the Voting Rights Act. However, the judges also said there was nothing inherently discriminatory about the law and that it could be utilized in elections after 2012.
South Carolina’s photo ID law took effect Jan. 1, 2013. The law was modified to allow voting without an ID if the person signed an affidavit explaining why they had a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining voter ID.
Apparently intentional confusion arose after the State Elections Board tweeted incorrect information saying “If you have Photo ID, you should bring it to the polls. If you don’t, you’ll have to show it later for your vote to count.”
When the law went into effect, 178,000 registered voters, 7 percent of the electorate, lacked a DMV-issued photo ID. Minority voters are 20 percent more likely than whites to lack a DMV-issued ID, and there are 63,756 nonwhite registered voters without one, according to a news story in The Nation.
Former Democratic state Representative Bakari Sellers, an African American who served from 2006 to 2014, said the voter ID law was created to target black voters.
“Race was at the heart of this. After Obama was elected, there was a fear of many more brown people and persons of color showing up to the polls,” Sellers said.
South Carolina is one of just two states without a hate crime law. A proposal was approved by the House in 2022, but failed to pass the majority Republican Senate, despite a plea by a survivor of the 2015 killing of nine black members of a Charleston church during a Bible study.
Last March, the bill was again proposed but its passage is again doubtful. The bill would allow a judge to sentence offenders to up to an additional five years in prison if they are indicted and convicted on a state charge that their violent crime was motivated by hate against the victim’s race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, national origin or physical or mental disability.
The most conservative House Republicans wanted to remove gender or add law enforcement officers or fetuses to the classes of people protected to the bill. Other opponents said increased penalties for crimes committed because someone hates a certain group is unnecessary because a crime is a crime. They also worried a hate crime law could eventually be used to curtail free speech, especially against Christians.
Republican State Sen. Josh Kimbrell has opposed the hate-crimes bill but said he’ll consider it if the bill removes protections based on sexual orientation.
Kimbrell, 40, has been a state rep since 2020. A former Christian talk radio host, Kimbrell was charged in 2014 with sex crimes against his 3-year-old son. After being held in jail without bail, the charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence in 2015.
In June 2021, Kimbrell sponsored a bill in the state senate that would “allow mental health professionals to refuse to provide care that violates their religious beliefs.” During the 2022 session, Kimbrell also introduced a plan to ban “prurient” books in children’s library sections at public libraries.