Charleston, South Carolina
Travels and Thoughts
Charleston is in a region of the Southeast I had previously only heard referenced in a kind of food—a low country boil. And much like a low country boil, Charleston is delicious. The city is famous for its food. I discovered upon visiting that many of its restaurants aren’t just tasty, they’re cuisine, the kind of restaurants that win James Beard Awards, the kind you plan to visit a city for. They’re no joke.
But Charleston isn’t just known for its food. Charleston is part of a greater legacy of South Carolina (and South Carolina being part of a greater legacy of the South) of racism. Almost exactly three years ago from now as I write this, a white supremacist terrorist murdered nine African-Americans in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. This was a horrifying hate crime, sending shock waves across the community of Charleston as well as the rest of the U.S., and while we were there around its anniversary, the wounds were still very apparently raw.
Charleston is also where the Civil War officially started. The first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861, and the Confederate States of America spent the next four years trying to secure independence from the United States of America in order to preserve slavery. I grew up going to a school that was heavy on Civil War history (or…
