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.