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The Redneck Shop is a KKK hub. Years after the store closed, a southern city is counting on this history


A grassroots organization is forcing a South Carolina city to recalculate the history of white supremacy — a past some residents would rather bury.

The Redneck store, housed in a formerly isolated movie theater in Laurens, a suburb of South Carolina, opened in 1996. It sells and displays a wide variety of racist paraphernalia: Ku Klux Klan robes, saint photos. The prices were on fire, the t-shirts sent out loud messages (“If I had known this was going to happen, I would have picked my own cotton”; “Save our land, join us.” Klan”).

Until closing in 2012, the store also functioned as a hub where the Klan and the American Nazi Party would gather and recruit.

Project Echo, founded by Pastor David Kennedy, 68, of New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church and burgeoning community organizer Regan Freeman, 25, wanted to transform the currently vacant building into a nurturing home for healing. healthy and reflect the values ​​of Blacks. The residents had to endure the cruelty brewed in the store.

This month, the organization has taken a significant leap forward. It tapped two academics – Orville Vernon Burton of Clemson University and Nicholas Gaffney of South Carolina Upstate University – to oversee an oral history initiative that starts now and will document the traumas of the heart. Orthodox white supremacist spirits enjoy a safe space in the store.

As Kennedy told CNN, “It’s been a long journey, a tough road. What we’re doing is creating a place where people can feel their worth as a human being – which is what we do.” which black Americans have long denied.”

An unlikely pair

Born and raised in Laurens, Kennedy was familiar with racial terrorism. In 1913, a white mob detained his great-uncle, Richard Puckett, in the county. For about seven decades, the rope used for hanging has been preserved, dangling from the railroad truss as a warning to Black residents.

Kennedy recalled, “We were taught to never put it down. If we did, the whites said the same thing that happened to Richard Puckett would happen to us.”

Such experiences motivated Kennedy to pursue civil rights. When the Redneck store opened, the pastor didn’t take it away. In fact, on the store’s first day of business, he led between 400 and 500 people in a peaceful protest against it.

But soon, a not-so-good friendship arose between Kennedy and Michael Burden, a large dragon of the South Carolina Klan and one of the founders of the Redneck Shop. Within a few months of opening the store, Burden, urged by his wife, turned down the Klan. As a result, John Howard, a Klansman and owner of the Redneck Shop, evicted Burden and his family from their apartment above the store. They are homeless.

One day, Burden ran into Kennedy and asked for help. The pastor treated Burden and his family to a meal and checked them into a motel. When Burden decided to sever ties with the Redneck Shop, he sold the deed to Kennedy and his church. But the technical legitimacy allowed Howard to continue running the store. Howard did just that—until Kennedy won a 15-year court battle that forced the store to close.

(Andrew Heckler’s 2018 film “Burden,” starring Forest Whitaker as Kennedy, recounts the development of the complicated relationship between Burden and Kennedy.)

Father David Kennedy and Regan Freeman stand outside the former Echo Theater.

Project Echo was born out of a similar unexpected partnership. In 2018, when Freeman, who is white, was an undergraduate student at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, he watched the story “60 Minutes” on the National Monument to Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. A native of Clinton, a town southeast of Laurens, Freeman was amazed to learn about lynching in his hometown and began immersing himself in books and websites that taught him about the history of racial violence ethnicity in South Carolina.

Ultimately, his research led him to the Redneck Shop – and to Kennedy.

Freeman phoned Kennedy to express support for the pastor’s effort to repurpose the old store. The next day, the two meet for lunch. And the following year, they founded Project Echo, named after the now-defunct isolated theater that houses the Redneck Shop. Freeman paused his plans to study law so he could work full-time with Kennedy.

However, not everyone is supportive of their work.

“Like so many other places in South Carolina, Laurens still has a colored line. Maybe it’s not as obvious as the ’60s, but it’s there, if you look,” says Freeman. “There are people who don’t want to bring hate. They say, ‘This makes the community look bad.”

Indeed, as Project Echo continues to grow, there is some concern about how Laurens’ opponents might react.

“When I heard this,” Freeman said of the criticism that his work reflects poorly on the community, “my mind immediately went to the first line of (Tallahatchie County) sorry Emmett Till’s family: “Racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth.”

Reaching forward

How to develop an effective center for recollection and reconciliation, especially when some people don’t think it should exist?

According to Claire Greenstein, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose research has focused on restitution and transitional justice, those leading such an initiative should consider many different factors. For example, whether they are trying to change the collective memory around an event; whether they are trying to honor the victims; whether they’re trying to pinpoint perpetrators who went unpunished – or some combination of these purposes.

Greenstein notes that, whatever the goal, a combination of informational and experiential aspects can make for a pretty effective celebration project — and monetizing the community is key.

“People who have been negatively impacted by a particular event should participate. If a website reflects the honored people and their wishes, you are more likely to make an impact,” Greenstein told CNN. , adding that one way to achieve this goal is to amplify individual stories.

“People find it easier to empathize with a particular individual. With personalized stories, observers find it easier to connect with those who have been misguided and say, ‘I see this. What can I do to prevent that, explains Greenstein.

Regan Freeman looks through a container of racist material belonging to John Howard, leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Project Echo is taking this more detailed approach to storytelling in collecting oral histories, a task that Orville Vernon Burton, history professor at Clemson University, is helping lead.

Burton emphasized that the monument was important because it was essential to document these stories, which shed light on how enduring white supremacy was.

“Black Americans in the Old Confederacy lived in a society of terror until at least 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law,” Burton said. “But then you also have the Redneck Shop, which celebrates hate and shows what black Americans had to deal with in rural areas in the ’90s onward.”

One way to see the Echo Project’s resolute truth-telling is through a poem that Kennedy cherished: “by Paul Laurence Dunbar”We wear masks, “published in 1895.

The poem sheds light on how black Americans have had to conceal their true reactions to racial trauma: “We wear a mask of wrinkles and lies / It covers our cheeks and covers our eyes / This debt we pay to guile man / With hearts torn and bleeding we smile,” Dunbar wrote.

But not Kennedy. “I refuse to wear a mask,” he said.

The January 6 uprising, voter suppression, the climate crisis, the theory of critical race, high-profile trials where race is prominent. It’s been a year. What questions do you have about the most pressing political and cultural battles of 2021 and what awaits us in 2022? Race Deconstrised wants to hear from you. Email us at racedeconstruct@cnn.com by November 30th.

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