Liberate Our Lowcountry - Five Weeks for Freedom
June 14 to July 19, 2025
This essay is a work in progress. Please check back for revisions and links as the work of others is integrated through the TIDE Network
Current Information
This networked event engages dozens of different groups, organizations, and institutions to surface and cohere an organic moment. We didn't "Organize this." It is happening because the Lowcountry community needs to make it happen. That means that information reaches us through many channels, often very late. If something's missing, let us know and we'll get it online ASAP.
- See the calendar, now filling out with events.
- Check our Blue Sky Feed, whatever we Learn is posted there first
- Read our Blog for Detailed Updates on Specific Issues
- Press Releases from Lowcountry Up is Good, PAC include information on this effort.
Making Our Movement Meaningful.
Sat.June 14 to Saturday, July 19 promises to be the most extraordinary expansion of progressive social organization in the SC Lowcountry in over 50 years. We are calling it Liberate Our Lowcountry, Five Weeks for Freedom. This is your best opportunity to keep our blue island of progressive values in and around Charleston, SC, intact. It may be your last opportunity as well.
Only the MUSC Hospital Strike of 1969 (which expanded to include controversies and a challenge to discrimination across the city) rivals what is about to happen. It’s been coming for a while. It has to happen now, before all the younger people who are unwilling to accept less pack up and leave.
This blogpost covers only a few highlights. Ten years ago, we had about five demonstrations a year in Charleston. Now we sometimes have five a day. Hopefully the new TIDE system (see below) will promote, share and document it all if you help. Charge your devices, we’re about to begin.
These five weeks will begin with a massive burst of demonstrations across the nation on the Weekend of June 14 to 15. At least three major demonstrations are scheduled and permitted for the weekend in the Lowcountry. This weekend includes flag day and the national spectacle of Trump holding a multi-million dollar Soviet style military parade on his birthday at a cost of over 50 million dollars. Activist groups are calling the national push back “No Kings Day.” In the Lowcountry it’s going to be “No King’s Weekend” with Charleston’s irrational and soon to be proven illegal permitting process driving one demonstration to Sunday morning. In the Lowcountry it might also be “No Massah” weekend too. We’re not really fighting the values of Feudalism and Monarchy here. Here is a struggle against the power structure of the Plantation, Master and Slave.
Lowcountry Up is Good, PAC, is choosing to structure its participation in the Five Weeks for Freedom around the seven issues listed on the Mary Flag: Transit Equity, Affordable Housing, Sustainable Environment, Excellent Education, Living wage and unions for all, Healthcare and wellness and equality and freedom from violence. One day of each week will be dedicated to one of those seven concepts. We’ll rotate the concepts so that they don’t always fall on the same day of the week. We don’t expect that everyone will be able to orchestrate everything to match up with this thematic schedule, but we hope it will provoke thought. We can, of course, adjust the weekly rotation to put the right issue on the day of one of your events if you like. This belongs to us.
Lowcountry Up is Good has chosen to mark Flag Day by raising the new “Mary Flag” for the first time in Summerville that Saturday morning. See this detailed blogpost about Mary and the Flag which remembers her. This flag deeply disturbs our opposition which bitterly complains about it every time it is raised. That’s why we’ve ordered a larger copy of the new version and a taller pole to fly it from. The lesson they want us to learn is that Mary struggled, failed and died. The lesson we plan to teach them is We struggle. We remember and we’re here to fight until we win.
A Pride Celebration will color early June reminding everyone that the resistance in the Lowcountry is diverse, sometimes conflicted, but everywhere except in the mythical bathrooms haunted by our Congresswoman.
TIDELC Rises
AWOL Lindsey Graham Button, product of TIDE Workshop
We’ll also fully activate the first interaction of TIDE, Total Information Dissemination for Everyone, our networked effort to make more and better information available to the Lowcountry Progressive Community. We’ll be transmitting live, coded content across new community networks in a coordinated fashion the entire weekend. We will make our own news and be our own media.
TIDE is more of a human-based cultural system than a technology. It’s backbone is Blue Sky and in its rudimentary form, working now, you can simply go on blue sky and search for #chsresist. Other hashtags will code different levels of significance: #TIDEsee; #TIDEact & #TIDEmobilize to start. Music, print, and even old style phone trees will be part of it. It will reach and enrich proprietary mailing lists and online forums connected to it which will in turn feed information back. It will be engineered so Trump and his local minions can’t access all of it or shut it down. Somewhere, we’ll maintain a rudimentary print capacity completely offline and off-grid. The Truth will be hard to hunt down and impossible to exterminate in the Lowcountry.
TIDE’s not going to control everything. Just like with the Post and Courier, nobody gets to control everything any longer. The future (and this is the part the opposition can’t possibly comprehend) is about what people choose to share.
After that initial burst of activity (there are now demonstrations and social justice actions in the Lowcountry nearly every day) we will confront and shape our history.
We actually haven’t finished planning TIDE. If content, ideas and communication entice you, we’ll have some in-person work sessions. Bring your laptop, guitar, keyboard, camera and dreams. Watch our Blue Sky feed, https://bsky.app/profile/wjhamilton29464.bsky.social for details.
Choose How History Happens to Us: The Emanuel 9 Anniversary, Juneteenth, Carolina Day & July 4th.
There must be a thoughtful response to the Emanuel 9 shootings ten years ago when that 10th. Anniversary arrives. Charleston is working energetically to give that tragedy a happy ending consistent with a culture which values tourism and real estate income. We’ll have to support genuine voices who will witness to this community that it was injustice which murdered our friends and injustice that lives here still. Whatever happy ending we hope for, is ahead of us somewhere. It will take a fight to get there.
There will be a Juneteenth celebration from Summerville and Moncks Corner to the ocean which promises to be more muscular and energetic than any we’ve had before. Gullah Geechee culture is deeply embedded in our lives here. Trump may want to root out DEI and wallpaper some Wonderbread analogue across the country, but everyone in the Lowcountry is born, lives and dies to the background rhythm of Africa. Expect this year’s drums to be very loud.
June 28th. Is Carolina day, the traditional celebration of the Colonial victory over the British Fleet at Ft. Sullivan (later Moultrie) in 1776, the news of which gave the Colonial Congress the courage to sign the Declaration of Independence. It’s a traditional Charleston holiday, but we plan to complicate it by sharing the different stories about how people sought freedom that day, from the slaves who helped build the fort and fought the British on the American side to the thousands of African Americans who fled slavery to join the Black regiments of Redcoats to fight for their freedom and the King’s empire.
July 4th will begin in the Parking Lot of North Charleston City Hall, where Pastor Thomas Dixon is putting together a morning celebration which is sure to be hot, loud and inclusive. Bring a chair and hydration at minimum. He’s managed to convince nearly everyone to clear the deck so we can all come together, sweat hard and get loud (North Charleston doesn’t interfere with our right to be heard by prohibiting PA).
On July 18, the 54th. Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry will pilgrimage out to Morris Island where the bones of heroes lie to raise their silk battle flag with its golden stars and remember again, what the fight for freedom in Charleston looks like. You can buy a ticket and join them on the boat to the location of the battle depicted in the movie “Glory.”
Ten Years Later, A Return to the Sea
Straphangers March to the Sea, 4.8 miles, 95 degrees, July 18, 2015
Finally, five weeks after we've begun, we’ll mark ten years since the Straphangers March to the Sea with a return to the Beach at the Isle of Palms, this time on the bright red free CARTA bus route we fought seven years to get and five years to keep. In 2015, a month after the Emanuel 9 shootings, 81 year old Louise Brown led 11 marchers 4.8 miles through the blazing heat from the closest bus stop at Mt. Pleasant Town Center to the front beach at the Isle of Palms. There was no bus anywhere which would allow people without access to a car to go to the sea. This year's march to the sea will be considerably shorter, about two blocks from the bus stop to the beach. Four people who participated that day are no longer with us. They worked and waited for a just and inclusive Lowcountry they never lived to see. Julia, Mary, Moya & Dave are gone. We are still here. We will walk from our shiny red trolley bus to the sea, join the waters again and spend the day remembering where we’ve been and looking forward to where we’re going.
July 20 begins a year of struggle to change the entire direction of the Lowcountry. The nation is already watching us. The right wing monster organizations like CATO and Heritage are already deeply frustrated by the stubborn persistence of our “Blue Island” of resistance. We hang on like the British and French at Dunkirk, but we don’t leave. We’re not waiting on an evacuation fleet. We are not hoping for reinforcements. We’re just going to fight as hard as we can with our backs to the sea because we don’t want to be Greenville or Macon.
We’re not going to win this fight in our Five Weeks for Freedom. July 19 at IOP won’t be a victory celebration. The fight in those five weeks is mostly within our own heads and the heads of our friends. We must first free ourselves. We must disenthrall ourselves from the mandates of the redneck imperative and the delusions of the Good Ole Boys. We must persuade ourselves that we deserve and can win a Lowcountry that is decent, equitable and free. Five weeks is a good start, an opportunity to participate with all of the diverse progressive communities in the Lowcountry and coalesce into a powerful movement.
Liberating the Lowcountry - the Year Ahead
Then the real work of Liberating Our Lowcountry will begin.
We’ll have municipal elections in November. With work, we can keep our Towns and Cities out of Trump’s hands. We’ll have to fight to keep our schools and libraries decent and free. The Court Case against the City of Charleston’s ludicrous attempts to strangle freedom of speech will need to be pressed to victory. Our civic and cultural organizations can fight with or against us. Washington will send disasters. We will answer with resistance. They will say “People are fighting in the SC Lowcountry.”
If we continue to build our numbers and organization, the cost of containing our hope and killing our dreams may become higher than the rednecks and Good Ole Boys are willing to pay. We may save our part of America, Charleston and the urban islands around it, from Summerville to the Sea.
If there are enough others elsewhere, when the Republic turns 250 next summer on July 4, perhaps we will have a nation we aren't ashamed of. The music and noise of Justice will be so loud here that those outside our Blue Island will hear it (with PA from N. Charleston) from every direction and Trump’s lies won’t be loud enough to drown it out before the mid terms.
More Information
Attorney At Law, Writer, Activist
Ex. Director Lowcountry Up is Good, Inc. PAC &
Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit
wjhamilton29464@gmail.com
(843) 870-5299
https://bsky.app/profile/wjhamilton29464.bsky.social
#chsresist #TIDEsee
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