Remember Rosa Parks and Fight for Transit, #TransitEquityDay 2025 in CHS

 

Don't Give Up Your Seat in Feb. Remember Rosa Charleston, SC, USA- This year's Transit Equity Day (Feb. 4)  is important because we know a major effort to defund public transit in the United States is on the way. The MAGA agenda is anti urban and destroying the quality of life in our cities is a central tactic. Nothing robs people of their freedom more effectively than rendering them immobile. Charleston's excruciatingly slow progress towards construction of the LCRT might end if the Trump administration manages to defund Transit. Like Rosa Parks, we need your help to prepare to hold on to our seat, our place, our dignity and our rights.  Project 2025's anti transit agenda Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit will begin our effort with a public information campaign on Martin  Luther King Weekend promoting our local effort to the Lowcountry Progressive Community. its important that people wanting to be involved step forward so we can promote their contributions to this effort. Local media is no longer strong or effective enough to help us, so we need to reach our own people and activate the community.  Starting Feb, 4 We'll be putting posters honoring Rosa like those at the top of this email on selected CARTA buses. You can sponsor this entire effort for $100.  Right, Social Media Banner Promoting Rosa Pancake Effort, from 2022. We'll also be doing several pancake breakfast efforts that week to connect the community with the memory of Rosa's struggle with our own Civil Rights Hero, Louise Brown. If your church, organization or business wants to serve the pancakes, we'll provide PDF versions of posters and handbills to drive participation and raise awareness not only of Rosa, but also Charleston's own Mary Bowers and Esau Jenkins, Charleston's Transit Equity Heros. We can be present with multimedia content to empower your members or customers.  If you would like to help, now is the time. We'll soon be involved in a fight to save the millions of opportunities to ride transit provided by CARTA and Tri County Link At little organization now, we'll prepare us for a much stronger effort later. We're not going to give up our seat and the opposition will learn that, however if we're strong at the start, the damage the conflict will cause can be reduces and get us to a better future sooner.  We'll be announcing the effort at next week's CARTA Board Meeting, so anyone who can pitch in now will really help. If you can help, reply to this message or Contact William Hamilton at 843-870-5299 or wjhamiton29464@gmail.com

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Charleston Burners Celebrate Festivus 2024

 

Charleston Burners Celebrate Festivus 2024

By William J. Hamilton, III

The Charleston, SC Burner Community celebrated Festivus a bit early this year at their weekly burner’s gathering, Weirdo Wednesday at Container Bar.

Being burners we’ve been elaborating the limited guidance provided in the essential Sienfeld episode. We’re always looking for things to do at our weekly gatherings. Immediacy means doing, not just talking about it.  Learn more about Festivus.

The Charleston Burning man community gathers at Container Bar on Mt. Pleasant Street in downtown Charleston, SC from about 7 to 9 pm most Wednesdays. We often have wandering burners from around the world join us. We're always having some fun or planning some fun. 

Ed brought out a really impressive Festivus pole from the Magical Bamboo Forrest. The cut down flag pole was mounted on stout metal stand, which kept it erect, but not stable enough for use a dance pole.

The burners sampled the mulled wine from the bar, redolent with holiday spices, and aired their grievances around a Festivus feast of fake Samoas from the discount Aldi grocery store, artfully laid out on a paper plate. Various grievances were aired with the goal of reinforcing the community by recognizing our failure to live out the 10 burning man principles. One memorable grievance was the complaint that people had failed to practice radical inclusion by not inviting a friend for a hair dying party to they could practice radical self expression. The pink and orange haired lady offenders assured her that they would not repeat this offense in the year ahead. It wasn’t very clear that there had been a hair dying party this year, but it was obvious that there will be one in the future.

If the default world is getting ugly, what real incentive is left to conform?

Not everyone had remembered to bring their Festivus gift for the exchange, which is supposed to consist of items worth little or nothing, usually one toss from the recycle bin or next yard sale. We resisted commodifiction by gifting packages of teriyaki flavored dried seaweed misdelivered to Wendy by Walmart earlier this year, cast off candy dishes my mother in law slipped into a bag after a family dinner with severe instructions never to bring them back twenty years ago and a snap  on bicycle light. Someone brought a plate of stones which those assembled concluded might be turned into a game activity of stacking them on someone’s chest or back.

Those who had failed to plan for the gift exchange were driven back to their cars to pick through trunks, back seats and glove compartments in desperation. Everyone participated. No one was disappointed. Burners have an abundance of cast off stuff just waiting to be creatively reused, Festivus presents an obvious opening to gift some of that away. Leaving No Trace always means accumulating baggage. Ed scored an impressive propeller beanie. We even shared some of our gifts with the other patrons on the outdoor bar’s deck.

Noone found or remembered to bring a doll. However no one rained blows upon anyone else. There is a better way.

But what do you do with the pole? In lieu of the Feats of Strength we concluded our observance by gathering around the Festivus Pole, each of us reaching out for a firm grip. The pole symbolizes, Communal Effort, our shared will to gather, to share, to focus and to invent.

Festivus is a made up holiday, but they all are. Burners just refuse to surrender the making up of special days to corporate marketing departments. We can invent a city in the desert and sprinkle burns around the world. We can repurpose a private family holiday, transformed into a sub plot by a TV writer in a long cancelled situation comedy and make it our own as well.

Image, right, a Festivus gift of dried seaweed and mulled wine at Container bar. 

We celebrated our Festivus early, but Dec. 23 is the actual traditional day. I hope everyone has a happy festivus and a wonderful holiday season.

END END END.

DiversCity CHS - Contact Information

DiversCity Charleston networks existing community organizations and leaders together to prevent right wing religious organizations like Moms for Liberty and Unity City from seizing  control of public life in the SC Lowcountry, in and around Charleston, SC. Our goal is to keep public life here diverse, inclusive and free. Lowcountry Up is Good, PAC (Lowcountry Up is Good, PAC will manage DiversCity through to February, 2025 when plans are to reorganize it as a fully independent, self governing organization.

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DiversCity Charleston Communications 

DiversCity Spokesperson Merrill Chapman at (843) 200-1977, merrilltownschapman@gmail.com 

Director of Network Operations (Field) William Hamilton (843) 870-5299, wjhamilton29464@gmail.com 

DiversCity Online Presences 

• DiversCity Charleston Resistance on Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562814266962 
• Lowcountry Up is Good, PAC on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lowcountry.up.is.good.PAC

July 26 DiversCity Update

 

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July 26 DiversCity Update - Bridges over Walls, Rivers towards a Smarter, Better Lowcountry   Fordham Speaking Friday, Noon Damon Fordham, a member of our Education Working group and one of the leading African American historians in Charleston will be speaking online at Noon Friday as part of the Bridge not Walls lecture series sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Charleston. Fordham brings a complex and deep understanding of the historic forces which have placed us where we are and which indicate how we can avoid losing the progress we have made to groups like Moms for Liberty and Unity City. You can reach  the livestream online at https://www.facebook.com/events/3400599050247713?active_tab=about Art and Culture Working Group Organizing - Why Unity City Brought Their Money Here As we’ve worked towards staffing our Art and Culture working group (See our new Art and Culture web page with details) we’ve learned a lot from the people on the front lines of what is clearly a historical culture war at the heart of why Unity City’s backers chose to invest hundreds of Thousands of  Dollars in a colonial city in a red state. To bolster their claim that the US was at its founding and must remain a nation under the control of “Christ Centered people” , capturing control of the metro area containing a historical city with roots in the Colonial period, revolution and Civil War is very important to them. There’s no chance they can take over New York, Boston, Baltimore or Philadelphia.  Charleston is their only available target. Our region, embedded in and surrounded by a right wing, red state is essential to them symbolically as a future stage for a national takeover.  This insight developed from talking to front line workers in our area’s historic community who have been encountering increasing numbers of aggressive tourists eager to confront them and correct the “mistaken” beliefs they’ve acquired from years of professional work and research using the rich troves of original material available in the city, much of which has become available thanks to modern electronic indexing. A major effort to deepen understanding of the American Revolution on its 250th. Anniversary is at hand. Given what we’ve been learning, there is a lot of stuff out there Unity City would want to suppress. Revised page on our Arts & Culture working group now online.  We’re aware of another Unity City type effort launched in Detroit which clearly targets rust belt social issues, but they came to Charleston to capture control of the past.  Dorchester Waylyn CARTA Bus to the Beach Trip Saturday Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit is one of DiversCity's founding organizations and it's volunteers have provided much of the muscle which has pushed our organizing effort forward through the summer. On Saturday they'll lead children and adults from the Dorchester Waylyn community in N. Charleston on a 1 hour and 46 minute journey to the beach, all on Transit. Help is needed with snacks and drinks and helping get progress of the effort out online. The reward is a trip where some of the young people may see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in their lives. The weather is iffy. CARTA can be unreliable. It shouldn't be this hard, but dreams are earned by the determined. You'll can ride along or follow the trip online. Everyone's welcome. https://www.facebook.com/events/496239996150638?active_tab=about Education Meeting Online Sunday Evening We plan to join the Quality Education Projects Sunday evening meeting on their plans for addressing the tremendous and draining struggle for control of local school systems. Our working group will connect with several existing efforts. The current tactics of mass presence at meetings aren’t sustainable, though they’ve prevented a huge amount of damage. However the cost to the community in time sacrificed from other local efforts is starving Charleston’s human economic and social justice efforts. This was an intended result of Mom’s for Liberty’s attack on Education. Join online at 7 pm Sunday, Facebook Event Listing Science and Technology Group Organizing Look for information next week about the effort to organize our Science and Technology group, which also included medicine.  Labor Day Effort in Planning DiversCity will hit the road on Labor Day, visiting progressive events around the Lowcountry. If your planning something, let us know and our team will work out a time to visit. You can sign on to a Facebook event page to follow plans as they develop.  Communications We’re looking for input on people’s experience with the Mobilze platform. Please let us know how it has performed for your organization. Email wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or call (843) 870-5299 with your input. Recurring problems with Facebook experienced by us and other local activist organizations indicate it would be very dysfunctional to continue our primary reliance upon it as an organizing platform. The Dominionist right has deployed an army of hactivists to shut down progressive access to Facebook and other platforms by flooding their automated systems with complaints about our activities. The day before our July organizing event, both William Hamilton and Thomas Dixon were locked out of posting for over a day and for most of the previous week. It impossible to tell why we were locked out. These systems are almost entire automated and if you file enough complaints, they'll act on them.  More Information  For more information on DiversCity Charleston contact spokesperson Merrill Chapman at (843) 200-1977 or William Hamilton at (843) 870-5299. More information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/DiversCityCHS   Online.   Copyright © 2024 Hungryneck Straphangers (Public Transit Advocacy), All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Art and Culture of Resistance

Development of Arts and Culture Working Group 

Image, right, Gazebo Bus Stop shelter in community garden in Chicora Cherokee neighborhood, N. Charleston, SC DiversCity works through seven working groups to protect our community from the problems groups like  Moms for Liberty and the far more ambitious Unity City plan for the Lowcountry. They have already attempted  to secure control of our local governments, schools, libraries and selected nonprofit institutions. They are  actively attempting to take over Lowcountry religious communities with trained operatives. Thousands of  hours have already been consumed trying to stop their school takeover by several groups. The amount of time,  energy and money consumed has been staggering. Every bit of this has been taken from people who would  otherwise be meeting critical community needs and building a higher quality of life for us all.  

Unity City has targeted Charleston's Art and Culture as a mountain of influence which the plan to place under the control of "Christ centered people." This would move the destructive and alienating dynamic which is destroying our school systems into a much more vulnerable sector. Unlike the disaster at the school board, we're ahead of them this time. We will stop them.

Read the DiversCity plan for protecting the Lowcountry’s seven hummocks of influence. 

Why We Must Move to Protect Lowcountry Art and Culture Now

Among the seven “Mountains of Influence” they seek to place under the control of “Christ centered” people is Art and Culture. We invite you to investigate online what similar groups have done to the art and culture of  their community elsewhere. Their strategies include defunding arts groups they don’t control, depriving  organizations of performance spaces, legal actions, disrupting the memberships of arts organizations, online  attacks and imposing content objectives on artistic groups or their funding.  

We only began the fight against Moms for Liberty when we discovered they had captured a five member  majority on the Charleston County School Board. They also established near complete control of the Berkeley  County School Board. They’re seeking full control of the Dorchester Board this fall. It’s far harder to organize  resistance and protect freedom when these people are already in control.  

We have a massive, critical arts and culture sector in the Lowcountry to protect. It’s full of vulnerable people  and programs sustained by sacrificial efforts which often last lifetimes. The color and beauty of our lives here  could be destroyed in months. It does not have the institutional barriers the school district has. The fight for  artistic freedom and diversity will be very personal.  

DiversCity defines Art and Culture to include theater, graphic arts, music, dance, performance art, creative play, history, museums, archives (libraries of regular contemporary materials are grouped with education), Gullah geechee culture, African American culture, Latinx culture, other ethnic and cultural activities, art and cultural festivals and the performance and activity spaces associated with these activities as well as their funding. This working group also includes tourism activities focused on historic education outside of educational institution contexts, that is to say directed to tourists and the general public, as opposed to enrolled students.

National Significance of A Historic Colonial City in a Red State

Image, left, Making buttons to promote better transit with Children in the Dorchester Waylyn neighborhood in N. Charleston as part of their summer basketball program. Bo Rupert assisting the kids in coloring their buttons. Culture includes history. In Charleston history is an exceptionally powerful influence. It has also been highly manipulated. In the lifetime of one of our Founding members, Louise Brown, the history she helped make during the MUSC hospital strike of 1969 has been distorted to fit the “civilized Charleston narrative” where there was no real threat. This was a conflict which tore the city apart for months. Louise Brown and her 11 friends forced a confrontation over Charleston’s future direction at gunpoint at what is still an unmarked location at the intersection of King and Morris Street. 

Contrary to online accounts, there was no KumbaYa moment. The eleven women and one man who led the strike did not live happily ever after in the service of tourism and real estate marketing. Promises were broken. The progress gained came at a severe personal price to Louise and her friends. 

Read the biography of Louise Brown, Mother of the Movement and a founding member of the DiversCity Network.

There was also a cost to Charleston managing again to delay the progress needed to maintain a competitive and rewarding economy for its workers. When the closure of the Navy Base and Yard in the 1990s exposed the weakness of Charleston’s economy thirty years after the hospital strike, the area lost thousands of skilled workers and their families. Even service businesses like hospitality and F&B struggle today because the math of living and working in Charleston is impossible for people working in our tourism and medical sectors. Problems which should have been fixed 50 years ago have led us to an economy where even Charleston’s long established formerly aristocratic families now survive by liquidating assets they’ve retained for centuries. Historical revisionism departs from the facts and leads to debilitating delusions and failure in a competitive global economy where talent is free to leave. 

Friends in the historic tourism sector have reported increasing numbers of politically focused tourists in Charleston, often determined to challenge the knowledge of professional historians who now have access to a depth and variety of material never available before. They are often angry and combative. Front line workers feel threatened. 

Why the Fight is Here

We can now offer a richer and more complex history that is inclusive and diverse. However, these people are arriving with an agenda, having its origin in right wing media, to dismiss the impact and reality of slavery, workers rights and social justice issues  and install a historic fairy tale which will support their agenda of American exceptionalism. Capturing control of our history, the history of the only Colonial American city they might be able to obtain control of is clearly a priority of the national organizations pushing agendas like Project 2025. They can’t do this in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston or New York. Charleston is the place from which they can rewrite colonial history, symbolically critical to their world view where the meaning of the United States is frozen in the views of a right wing group of Christian founding fathers. 

These people, which includes right wing operatives already working locally with Moms for Liberty and Unity City, come to our history to create a foundation for their Dominionist agenda. They know taking over control of our archives, museums and historic tourism will support their national effort. 

This is why they’re spending over half a million dollars in the Lowcountry.

Of course getting control of local stages, galleries, performing groups and organizations by direct takeover or through obtaining control of funding would allow them to silence not only outright dissent, but the effervescent sense of possibility which is even more threatening to them. The art of the Christian right is dull and rejects 500 years of progress. It’s useful to those who control it, but uninspiring. It is not in the Christian or modern traditions which Charleston embraces. 

Why We Have to Win the Fight for Our Own Art and Culture

Image, right, painting map of the Lowocuntry for use in transit campaign, 2018 Charleston needs the hope, joy and energy of all its people for the first time in its 350 year history. Neither a connected world economy nor rising sea levels will ignore reality. There is plenty in our past, good and bad, to inspire. We have a large artistic community which, if given the chance, transform that inspiration into art. In a few years Spolto USA will celebrate its 50th. Anniversary. This is not a new enterprise. Our artists, historians, writers and creatives of all types cannot be sacrificed to the suffocating influence of a distorted heresy of Christianity doing the for hire dirty work of late stage capitalism. 

We will not allow this to happen. Please help us establish our Art and Culture working group and integrate it  into our network so we can be prepared. We know Unity City is training and organizing now. They have no  appreciation of the value of any artistic endeavor which doesn’t advance their religious agenda.  

If you are willing to help, please call me soon. (see contact information below) We would like to hold an in person meeting of the 3-5 person  working group and its core supporters before August 2nd. The entire network has to be fully functional before  Labor Day. 

William Hamilton, III 

Lawyer, Writer, Activist, Poet, & Installation Artist

More Information 

Carol Dotterer helping advance the 25 mile community canvass to force local governments to begin work on the promised Lowcountry Rapid Transit System, fall 2017. 

For more information on DiversCity Charleston contact spokesperson Merrill Chapman at (843) 200-1977 or William Hamilton at (843) 870-5299. More information can be found at https://tinyurl.com/DiversCityCHS  online.

DiversCity Update July 17, 2024

DiversCity Charleston Resistance Update - July 17, 2024

DiversCity Network is Functioning

Sunday’s Launch event, happening in the shadow of an attempted political killing and during a thunderstorm with extensive flooding, still drew a good and active crowd. Much progress was made towards organizing our seven working groups. Education, Government, and Faith are fully operational. Business/Labor and Science, Technology, Medicine, and Environment are coming online. More work needs to be done on Art and Culture and Family. Roland Spear of West Street Designs presented our new logo (see logo presentation video). Our Declaration of Resistance was rolled out to receive signatures. Everyone enjoyed Chicken and Rice and our Vegan Options. We had some wonderful cake and made some new friends. Thanks to the Unitarian Church for providing the Gage Hall historic meeting space.

\New Facebook Page

DiversCity Charleston Resistance has a new Facebook page. It links to our most recent content. We hope you like the page and share it with friends. You can see our new logo being introduced by Roland Spear, read the full text of our Declaration of Resistance and find out about our developing plans for Labor Day. DiversCity is a network and communication is our primary function. We’re not your organization or family’s boss. We don’t think God has told us how we should run you. We need to do this together. Hopefully this dedicated Facebook page will help accomplish that. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562814266962

Help us Pick New Communication Tools

Image, right, canvassing James Island to get a bus stop installed, 2019 Over the past week several of our leaders, including William Hamilton and Thomas Dixon have been locked out of Facebook for reasons Facebook never really explains. A computer decides based on numerical values assigned to communications that we should be locked out for hours or days. Some of this is based on online complaints submitted by our opposition, which uses a massive national network to flood facebook with complaints about ideas or organizations they want to suppress. We never learn exactly what we did to provoke the shutdowns, but it always seems to happen when we comment on major national issues or corporate entities. This problem crippled efforts to prepare for our launch event. Given where we must go, we can’t have this happen again. We’re experimenting with other options for large scale online communication including Signal and Mobilize. Please give us your input by emailing it to Willam Hamilton at wjhamilton29464#gmail.com  or just call him at (843) 870-5299. Please don’t post anything about this on Facebook as it may get our new page shut down.

Art and Culture Working Group Organizing

Image, left, Making buttons in N. Charleston to promote Transit awareness and bus to the beach with Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit

Community outreach to support organization of an Art and Culture working group if underway. If you work in this sector or are part of an organization present there, please contact William Hamilton, (843) 870-5299 or wjhamilton29464@gmail.com

Join Joe McGill on Morris Island Thursday, July 28

Join us on Thursday, July 18, 2024 as we commemorate the 161st anniversary of the Assault on Battery Wagner. The Assault on Battery Wagner on July 18, 1863, was an unsuccessful assault led by the 54th Massachusetts, an African American infantry, famously depicted in the movie Glory. Battery Wagner is located on Morris Island in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Boarding begins at 1:30 pm and we will leave for Morris Island at 2:00 pm from the Charleston Maritime Center, 10 Wharfside Street, Charleston on the boat Palmetto operated by Sandlapper Tours. The boat will return at 4:00 pm. Tickets will be $50 and can be purchased by clicking here.

 

DiversCity Declaration of Resistance

 DiversCity Lowcountry Declaration of Resistance

In Charleston, SC - July 14, 2024
Declaration of the South Carolina Lowcountry’s subscribing
activists, citizens and supporting communities

Preamble

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a community to challenge the attempt of a collaboration of persons and corporations adverse to the regular standards of polity which intend to disrupt its decent governance and happiness, the citizens this Lowcountry must assume their powers as citizens of the State and Nation to prevent the subversion of their democracy. Their rights to protect and defend their community, to which the Laws of the Nation, and sacred tradition entitle them, demand that decent respect to the opinions of the full community and those connected to it require that they should declare the causes which impel them to take up agency in the civic contest and select the shape of our common future.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed at their creation with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. --that whenever any group of people attempting to assert control of that government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to urge others in pursuit of the democratic process and free speech to assert their rights and values to shape the form and action of that government, laying its foundation of that government on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that civic contests between friends, neighbors and family waged in the halls of government and within elections should not begin or continue for light and transient causes. All experience shows that people are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right strife between neighbors. Such contests impose a cost upon shared happiness and good order that should be avoided when possible. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursues invariably a design to reduce the community to domination based on religious belief, irrational prejudice, and greed, it is their right, it is our duty, to preserve and improve our  diverse community, and to provide new guards for its future progress.--Such has been the patient sufferance of we citizens; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to act to preserve our local systems of democratic government. 

The history of the two year attempt to force a religious dominion over our public life in the Lowcountry is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of a religious dominion over our shared lives. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid nation.

I - Government

 They have combined to place candidates onto the ballots of our elections committed to their secret agendas to deceive voters and after election disappoint citizens.

They have met with our public officials to influence them outside of public knowledge with the purpose of attempting  to coerce them to abandon our established standards for the separation of church and state and the maintenance of religious liberty. 

They have stripped women of their rights to control their own bodies and reproductive destiny. 

They have forced women to carry babies with no hope of survival, inflicting suffering, infertility and possible death on women who might otherwise anticipate a happy future as willing mothers.

II - Education

They induced a respected educator to leave his previous job and home in Wisconsin and come to Charleston to serve as Superintendent of Charleston County School District (CCSD). He brought his ailing mother with him. They conspired to undermine his work, made groundless charges against him and squandered over 300 thousand dollars purchasing his resignation when their own investigation proved he had done nothing wrong.

They hired a replacement Superintendent without a formal search and without a public vote, in violation of notice and voting requirements clearly set out in SC law.

They have attempted to remove a legally elected Vice Chairman of the school board for seeking counsel from the district's retained attorney and attempted to control which members of the board are allowed to seek the advice of the district’s legal counsel. 

They removed the entire membership of the CCSD health education committee without cause and ended work on a curriculum for the sexual education of disabled students. 

They have conspired to eliminate AP African American studies from the high school curriculum and timed their actions in a way calculated to humiliate the African American community in the midst of graduations and on the eve of Juneteenth.

III - Family

They have denigrated and insulted transgendered and gay people in their May 2024 Unity City training session and other gatherings. 

They have suggested families different from their own are not of equal dignity with the family structures they approve of.

They have introduced acrimony into family gatherings, once a source of  comfort, with the object of alienating people from their own relations, setting parent against child and siblings against one another.

IV - Media

They have threatened and manipulated local media to control who and what is heard and to create the illusion that the community supports their agenda. 

They have presented the media with accounts of their own actions which are incomplete, dismissive and often dishonest.

They have excused actions which have devoured thousands of hours of citizens time with a single vague sentence with the bald assertion that victories in elections, even when the hid their agenda, justify eliminating the rights of citizens.

They have called meetings of the school board at times to evade public attention and frustrate the work of the press. Most significantly, scheduling the most relevant issues so they will be decided and considered after midnight or at 8am on a weekday.

They have repeatedly violated the Freedom of Information Act by calling inappropriate executive sessions.

V - Religion and Faith

They have conspired to disrupt the life and operation of faith communities not in support of their agenda by sending trained agents into other peoples’ churches for the purpose of disrupting them and obtaining control of them, or in the alternative, alienating parts of their membership. 

They have suggested that persons who are not “Christ centered” as they define it are unworthy to serve as leaders of our community and their opinions about public affairs are of diminished significance. 

VI - Art and Culture

They have threatened the public support of arts and culture and suggested only works  supportive of their religious opinions are worthy of presentation.

They have worked actively to prevent individuals and organizations whose opinions differ from their own from finding public gathering places by threatening to boycott business owners who afford them space while insisting businesses locations be available to themselves.

They have threatened the Charleston County Library with actions against librarians based on standards which are impermissibly vague and defy the application of due process.

They have squandered thousands of hours of staff and citizens time attempting to purge books from the libraries of the Berkeley County School District which they evidently have never bothered to read.

They have, through political manipulation, public dishonesty and personal acrimony sought to drive those citizens who disagree with and oppose them from this community, even when those persons they insult come from families with centuries of presence here, and while most of them have only recently arrived from elsewhere. They have done this in disregard to those persons previous contributions to the community and to the future benefits they might confer on the Lowcountry were they to remain here. 

VII - Science and Technology

They have denied the reality of climate change and sea level rise in an area where increasing flooding and the threat of larger and more frequent hurricanes materially reduces our quality of life and economic competitiveness. 

They have by threat and political coercion deprived children suffering from gender dysphoria from obtaining treatment from the Medical University Of South Carolina. In addition, they have denied the reality of these children's conditions.

They have prolonged an epidemic which took over a million American lives by an irrational resistance to common and well established public health measures and have chosen to substitute superstition and rumor for scientifically established fact. 

Resolution and Call to Action

In every stage of this mounting assault upon the continued happiness of the Lowcountry, we have petitioned these persons to respect our established laws, traditions and culture. We have asked them to restrain themselves and to consider the damage they have already done to our schools, governments, institutions and communities. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by new outrages. Leaders who act thusly cannot be trusted with management of the government and institutions of a large and ancient community composed of people from around the world and throughout the US as well as residents of long tenure. 

We have called on their numerous supporters to engage in kindness and restraint.

 We have asked these people, lately our friends and neighbors, to consider the long and enduring damage that is being done in the name of the Christian religion which they claim as their own.

We have reminded them of our long and complex history, which has carried us as a community through so many privations and disasters from the wars and disasters of long ago to the more recent shooting at Mother Emanuel and the Covid 19 pandemic. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common experience to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and imperfect, but enduring common respect.  They have grown deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our division and hold them, as the misguided and destructive victims of an expansively propagated set of delusions. 

We, therefore, the subscribing Citizens of the Lowcountry, organized as DiversCity, appealing to our friends and neighbors for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of the SC Lowcountry, solemnly publish and declare, that we shall gather, stand, speak, demonstrate, vote and organize to preserve and increase our communities long and evolving practice of tolerance, inclusion, diversity and equity for all people who find themselves here without regard to their religious belief or practice, their gender, the nature of their affections, their race, their age or their differing abilities. That any portions of our government which have fallen under  the influence of Christian Nationalists, Dominionists or Sovereign Citizens shall be resisted until such time as exercise of the vote has restored them to public confidence.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on good sense and decency of most of our family, neighbors and friends, we mutually pledge our shared effort to restore the Lowcountry to a healthy polity, good humor and a secure, shared  hope for better days ahead.