Tek Cyear uh de Root, Part Two — The Deliberate Reconstruction of the Charleston Schützenfest
High school football is damn near a religion in Charleston, and it was a religion I was part of as a student. What’s striking about my gridiron experience is that, even as a teenage athlete, I was a witness to Charleston’s racial hierarchy in action.
Summerville High School was a crosstown rival to my school, and the quarterback for Summerville’s team was the grandson of its head coach, who happened to be the winningest football coach on any level—a record he still holds to this day. It was openly stated, not even whispered, by coaches and fans that the quarterback for Summerville would inherit the head coaching position from his grandfather when he came of age. To no one’s shock, it happened in 2016.
I have a few buddies who coach in the area. They are also African-American. When I asked them if they would apply for the position when it opened, each one said the same thing: “Man, you know Joe already got that job.”
The beneficiaries of Charleston’s antebellum society have long manipulated virtually all local industries for generational gain, in an effort to maintain that established hierarchy. Just as it could happen in high school athletics, so it could in the local brewing industry, whose skewed diversity statistics serve as a testament to that longstanding inequity. This isn’t anything new: Systems of oppression constructed during Charlestown’s slave era were disrupted at the end of the Civil War, only to be violently reintroduced after the collapse of Reconstruction.
The Charleston Schützenfest became, by semiconscious choice, a space where this process collided with the United States’ evolving beer culture. In Part One, we saw a tenuous and subversive relationship form between Black and German Charlestonians, one where illicit alcohol consumption allowed each community to subvert the established racial hierarchy in ways that benefitted them. But on the other side of the Civil War, that equation changed. German-Americans’ relationship with white society, in Charleston and elsewhere, shifted rapidly, as did their notions of citizenship and ethnic identity. And so the Schützenfest also changed rapidly, becoming a white supremacist stronghold in the battle for Charleston’s identity.
By tracing that change we can better understand how an ostensibly benign beer space can still exclude and marginalize Black participation in fundamental ways today. We can witness the immense work involved in forging exclusionary spaces, and further, examine how those spaces end up reflecting and reinforcing the wider inequities of the society they inhabit. The history of Charleston’s Schützenfest shows us that ideas like “Black folks don’t like beer” and “beer and breweries are some white-people shit” aren’t truths. They are constructs that people chose to erect centuries ago, and that we choose to maintain today.
CHARLESTON RECONSTRUCTED
The Union Army marched across the South at the end of the Civil War, reinforcing at gunpoint the freedom that thousands of the enslaved were taking for themselves. Federal troops entered Charleston in February 1865 and wouldn’t leave for over a decade. Black Charlestonians wasted no time in exercising their freedom. They built churches, acquired guns and booze, and seized long-denied spaces and opportunities.
The Fourth of July was transformed: White ex-Confederates shunned it and Black Charlestonians claimed it with gun salutes, parades, food, music, and revelry. In the words of a conservative German immigrant and ex-slaveholder, the Fourth became “the Day the Niggers now celebrate, and the whites stay home and work.” Local expressions mixed with national policy as new constitutional amendments codified Black citizenship and Black male suffrage. After 1867, Black voters made up the majority of South Carolina’s electorate. Hope for an inclusive national future seemed possible in that moment. We’ll cover more of the Charleston Black community’s experiences and agency in Part Three of this series.
In the 1800s, public events and celebrations doubled as opportunities to advocate for ideologies, community values, and political agendas. For Black Charlestonians, the ability to participate freely in holidays affirmed their inherent rights, citizenship, and place in public society. In turn, local ex-Confederates understood that control of public spaces, including holidays, would help them resurrect pre-war racial hierarchies. Both communities asserted themselves, and began to compete for Charleston’s holidays.
When the rubber met the road, efforts to assert Black rights received instant backlash throughout the South. White supremacists refused to accept the end of the slave system that solidified racial oppression so harshly, and scrambled to cobble together the closest equivalent. Black Codes and suppressive election laws marginalized Black citizenship while a wave of white terrorism intimidated Black voters. The federal government retaliated with legislation protecting elections and Black rights, including the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That same year, federal troops arrested hundreds of Klansmen in the South Carolina upcountry and forced thousands more to flee the state.
The Schützenfest quietly returned amidst this great upheaval. There was no fest in 1866: The German Rifle Club’s grounds along the Ashley River, known as the Schützenplatz, were needed as a makeshift smallpox hospital that spring. In 1867 the club lent use of the Schützenplatz for another German society’s “May festival,” possibly because military authorities still hesitated to let civilians carry rifles in public. When the Schützenfest finally returned in 1868, a battle over public space in Charleston was already well underway.
In the 1800s, public events and celebrations doubled as opportunities to advocate for ideologies, community values, and political agendas. For Black Charlestonians, the ability to participate freely in holidays affirmed their inherent rights, citizenship, and place in public society. In turn, local ex-Confederates understood that control of public spaces, including holidays, would help them resurrect pre-war racial hierarchies. Both communities asserted themselves, and began to compete for Charleston’s holidays.
On top of the Fourth of July, Black Americans created brand new holidays for themselves. Watch Night Service (December 31) and Emancipation Day (January 1), celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation itself and symbolized their long wait for its enactment. On May 1, 1865, thousands of Black mourners commemorated and celebrated deceased Union prisoners of war who had been held at a former horse track in Charleston. At the time, they called it Decoration Day. Today, we call it Memorial Day.
Charleston whites couldn’t keep up. They tried to overwrite Decoration Day’s Black and pro-Union origins into a holiday honoring the Confederate dead, but it didn’t stick. They turned to South Carolina’s long-standing Palmetto Day, now called Carolina Day, but it didn’t measure up. Again and again, white Charlestonians struggled to resurrect a public celebration that unequivocally reinforced white supremacy. Until they noticed the Schützenfest.
SCHÜTZENFEST REVIVED
Wearing green uniforms and with rifles on their shoulders, 130 members of the German Rifle Club marched through Charleston on May 6, 1868. They started downtown, then made their way to a northerly train depot which transported them three miles west to the Schützenplatz.
That was a major event: Groups of armed men marching through the streets of Charleston had been a common symbol of white power before occupying federal forces suppressed them. In fact, this was the first time since the Civil War that uniformed and armed civilians had been allowed to march at all. Historian Jeff Strickland, whose research informs much of this series, has speculated that authorities allowed the Germans to march only because they explicitly advertised their fest as an apolitical celebration of German culture. But white observers saw a blank slate where they desperately needed one.
Melchers called the festival ‘a mixed mass of people and overall tumult, full of bliss and pleasure, old and young, German, American, African, from all ends of the Earth but without the problems and troubles of the world in general.’ That protean mindset, at that particular time in that space, had the potential to mature over generations into a greatness that assured the value of every person in our country. But human error progressed instead.
The editor of the Daily Courier said of the event, “Since the close of the war, none of these celebrations have been observed, and therefore the appearance on yesterday of the German Rifle Club in the streets, armed and equipped for the bloodless contest, created quite a sensation among the good people of this city. Many pleasant recollections of the good old antebellum period were recalled in the minds of those who witnessed it.”
Alexander Melchers, the German Rifle Club’s president, also happened to run the local German newspaper. He welcomed all to the fest regardless of race; kept promotion strictly apolitical; and emphasized the club’s commitment to firearms education, “manly and athletic exercises,” and general military preparedness. This framing served German immigrants’ purposes nicely, by tempting both elite white society to participate and including the Black community with whom they had forged a close relationship, as we saw in Part One.
It also helped them sell beer. Over three days, around 5,000 visitors drank over 50,000 glasses of Lager beer during the 1868 fest. The city’s most prominent German saloon owners made a tidy profit off the fest each year, importing beer to sell from Northern cities, as Charleston had no breweries of its own at the time.
Melchers called the festival “a mixed mass of people and overall tumult, full of bliss and pleasure, old and young, German, American, African, from all ends of the Earth but without the problems and troubles of the world in general.” That protean mindset, at that particular time in that space, had the potential to mature over generations into a greatness that assured the value of every person in our country. But human error progressed instead.
Only Germans could enter the shooting competition, while non-German visitors amused themselves with carnival-style games and contests scattered around the Schützenplatz. Children entered sack races and attempted to climb a greased pole to claim prizes at the top. They also bobbed for dimes in broad bowls of molasses and fed boiled starch to other children while blindfolded. German parents kept their children out of the more vulgar games, but local Black and sometimes Irish children played freely. Newspapers, inappropriately, came to refer to these attendees as the “gamin class,” derisively using the French word for “kid” or “child.” Especially for Black participants, it wasn’t about amusement: The chance to win some extra cash or toys was a big deal at a time when opportunities were pretty few.
Gullah Geechee Charlestonians weren’t just seen as “gamins” at the Schützenfest—they were also welcome guests, employees, and entrepreneurs. The special consumer relationships they had built with German grocers under slavery had formed community bonds. Black Charlestonians heavily patronized German-owned shops, and frequently labored alongside working-class Germans. The German business owners who organized the fest often retained Black employees throughout the rest of the year. Those connections secured Black Charlestonians work operating games, running food and beer stalls, and serving as target minders on the shooting ranges.
These ties, and the social gray spaces that Black and German Charlestonians had used to form them, all coalesced in the new Schützenfest. This could have seeded a more inclusive American beer culture and sustained Black participation in the beer trade. But that’s not what happened. As the fest evolved, it would align ever more closely with the white community that instinctively sensed so much opportunity in the first parade to be held after the war.
After 1868, attendance at the Schützenfest grew. Melchers even invited outside groups to take part. In 1869, other German organizations at the Charleston parade included the New York Schützen Corps, the New Jersey Schützen Corps, the Augusta Saengerbund (a choir), and the Augusta Turners (an athletics club), all joined by Charleston’s own German clubs in the parade. As the Schützenfest gained popularity, the German Rifle Club watched with delight as white citizens began displaying an abundance of German flags along the parade route. More and more of them also trekked to the Schützenplatz to consume floods of Lager.
The Schützenfest was a beer festival as much as it was a shooting competition. The German Rifle Club drank with the invited clubs and organizations during the fest, then hosted a special reception (read: multi-barrel kegger) in their honor on the last night of the 1869 event. The next morning they took their guests on a tour of the city, including many private residences where they drank yet more beer. Then they escorted them back to the harbor so they could board their steamships home, but not before drinking even more Lager and Champagne together. To cap it all off, the German Rifle Club offered a barrel of Lager as a parting gift, and were given one back in return.
Beer also helped facilitate social ties between Germans and white visitors. As one guest put it in 1870, “[a German] without any ceremony, puts a glass [of Lager] in your hand. Being carried away by the force of his example, you drink it almost unconsciously. After having swallowed about twenty glasses, you begin to feel a kind of change coming over the spirit of your dreams.”
Such displays of German festive culture, as historians call it, were changing American drinking habits one glass at a time, and the Schützenfest became a cornerstone of that process in Charleston. But they focused almost solely on Charleston’s white community. Flags can help explain why.
FLAG SOUPS
I like to think of myself as a proud American citizen, but I still stay clear of large gatherings flying American flags. The January 2021 acts of terrorism at the U.S. Capitol are prime examples of why I keep away from those soups: Bigotry and oppression often come wrapped in a flag.
Beer also helped facilitate social ties between Germans and white visitors. As one guest put it in 1870, ‘[a German] without any ceremony, puts a glass [of Lager] in your hand. Being carried away by the force of his example, you drink it almost unconsciously. After having swallowed about twenty glasses, you begin to feel a kind of change coming over the spirit of your dreams.’
Flags were everywhere at the Charleston Schützenfest. As white society took more and more interest, Charlestonians began flooding the streets and buildings along the parade route with black, red, and yellow flags—the well-known German tricolor was then best associated with the Revolutions of 1848 and was a longstanding symbol of Germans’ desire for a unified, democratic nation. The rifle club proudly adopted the same design as their own. Massive flags flew over the entrance gate to the Schützenplatz alongside the American and South Carolina flags, and inside the fest, booths, the main stage, trees—anything else that could have a tricolor flag on it—did. But in 1871, the flag changed.
Germany did successfully unify that year, but its new flag was a different tricolor: black, white, and red. It was a small distinction with a big difference.
The German states had unified not under pluralistic democracy, but under the stark Prussian leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm and Otto von Bismarck. Theirs was a nationalistic, imperial, and ethnically proud regime with a flag to match. Though an ocean away, German-Americans (many of whom were “Forty-Eighters” themselves) had maintained vested ties with their homeland and its national fate. Bismarck’s new German Empire placed a fork in the road. German-Americans had yearned for unification as vociferously as any German in Europe, but many had also spent decades committed to the liberal democratic ideals of 1848. Was a unification based on conflicting ideals like ethno-nationalism, militarism, and power a deal-breaker? It was not. And as historian Alison Clark Efford has written, German-Americans were more ready to shift their politics than they were to abandon their support for the new Germany. Those political shifts reverberated throughout the United States, including Charleston.
German-Americans all over the U.S. had often supported egalitarian Reconstruction policies—those that most benefited African-Americans—with expansive ideas about who belonged in American society, because they saw themselves in those policies, too. But as they cheered on the bombastic new nation-state from afar, they began internalizing Bismarck’s ideas of ethno-nationalism and reforming their own model of citizenship. Support for previously held policies faded and sympathy for white supremacist ideas rose. Simultaneously, postwar society invited German-Americans into American whiteness like never before. Their military service, their entrepreneurship and civic engagement, and even their beer all vindicated Germans of many nativist accusations of the prewar era.
In 1871, the German Rifle Club in Charleston voted to adopt a new flag. It was black, white, and red.
The Schützenfest had become a soup of flags. Just like the military structure of the rifle clubs resembled pre-war slave patrols and KKK “scouts,” the festival’s flags betrayed a certain sympathy with segregation and white supremacy. They communicated to the Gullah Geechee community the Germans’ willingness to stand against the perceived threat of a free Black population. Whether or not the German Rifle Club intended that message when they first marched in 1868, it was there now. And the trajectory of the fest would only entrench it.
TRANSFORMING SPACES
Over time, the festival became more exclusive. In 1869 tickets could be bought in advance at various German-owned businesses around Charleston, and also at the gate. From 1870 the Schützenfest became “invitation only” (meaning “members of the club and their friends”) and no tickets were sold at the door. Rifle Club members were expected to police attendees and generally keep order at the fest. In later years sheriffs would take on this role, and their primary responsibility was reportedly “to keep the gamins from jumping the fences or from crowding the acrobats,” according to coverage in the Charleston News and Courier from 1876.
Black Charlestonians still attended the fest—in 1870, the Charleston Daily News described the Schützenplatz as “an arabesque pattern of humanity, changeable in its aspects as the colors of a kaleidoscope. The amount of Lager punished was fearful.” They still competed for prizes in the carnivalesque games, even as the grosser contests were phased out in favor of more presentable options. A “regiment” of African American servers kept the beer flowing all day in Schützenplatz saloons. But the needle was moving, and each tweak of the fest helped convince white Charlestonians that a postwar racial hierarchy could be restored.
The Schützenfest became the highlight of white Charleston’s social calendar. A reporter at the 1873 fest, lamenting the bygone (white) Fourth of July celebrations of ‘never-to-be-forgotten Antebellum days,’ thought it only natural ‘that in the absence of a fete of our own we should console ourselves with that of another people, and in the amusements of the Schützenfest vent those enthusiastic feelings lavished of yore on the Anniversary of American Independence.’
More and more, Black visibility at the fest became proscribed. From 1869-1872, a Black entertainer was hired to put on a brown cloth suit with a “hideous mask.” He would then imitate a monkey while greeting guests and being led around by a “keeper” with an ice cream cart. Minstrel singing troupes, featuring either Black musicians or white musicians in blackface, were immensely popular at the fest, starting in 1873. In one case, an “enterprising vendor of Lager beer” hired a troupe to perform right in front of his booth. Such examples show how Black association with the fest was transforming into a function—one of service and entertainment for white benefit, at the expense of inclusion.
Meanwhile, relationships between Charleston’s Black and German communities vacillated. Frederick Wagener, a German immigrant grocer and Democratic mayoral candidate in 1871, attracted widespread German support despite staunch white supremacist views. Obviously, this antagonized Republican Gullah Geechee Charlestonians. The night before the election, African-Americans led a torchlight parade through the heart of Charleston, and a militant minority of that procession began attacking Germans in the streets and destroying German homes and shops.
Wagener’s candidacy was only the catalyst for their anger—rioters specifically targeted shop owners believed to charge higher prices to Black customers or refuse to extend them credit, practices that were becoming all too common. As we saw in Part One, German-Black relations in Charleston had been built mainly upon capitalism and commerce, like grocery stores that sold alcohol. But as that German merchant class grew wealthier, and found more acceptance within white Charleston society, yet another motivation to resist racial hierarchy faded. Martin Luhrs, a German grocer who was among those prosecuted for serving Black customers in 1859, was investing his grocery profits into nearby plantations by the early 1870s.
Charleston’s Black and German communities fell into a kind of love-hate relationship during this era, aligning politically only over the odd local issue. Overall, Germans flocked to the Democratic Party—the party of enslavers. And the Schützenfest became the highlight of white Charleston’s social calendar. A reporter at the 1873 fest, lamenting the bygone (white) Fourth of July celebrations of “never-to-be-forgotten Antebellum days,” thought it only natural “that in the absence of a fete of our own we should console ourselves with that of another people, and in the amusements of the Schützenfest vent those enthusiastic feelings lavished of yore on the Anniversary of American Independence.”
MILITANT DISPLAYS OF POWER
After 1871, the Charleston Schützenfest parade became a fully militant display of white power. Each year the fest opened with an artillery salute—organizers originally had to keep the cannons outside the city, but soon they were invited to salute from the Citadel, the Confederate military college on the Charleston peninsula. Any and all elements of the fest reinforced this message—reportedly, one vendor’s booth “bore the expressive sign of a huge cannon shooting forth a tumbler of Lager.”
The public success of the Schützenfest inspired the formation of several white rifle clubs in its wake. These clubs intentionally modeled themselves after the German rifle clubs so as to mask their true intentions of enforcing white supremacy. Whether out of ignorance or ambivalence toward these aims, the Germans invited them to join the Schützenfest parade from 1871 onward. They marched under the protection of the new and heavily coded German flag just as federal troops were driving Klansmen out of the South Carolina upcountry. In 1872, a new flag joined the others over the festival entrance: a bullet-ridden unit flag from the Charleston-based German Artillery, a unit of the former Confederate forces. German-American nationalism offered a ready veil for glorifying the defeated Confederacy and broadcasting white militancy.
In 1873, the German Rifle Club officially opened its membership to non-Germans. That same year, the shooting festival concept began to spread—rifle clubs in South Carolina and northern Georgia established kindred Schützenfests while the Charleston fest became a kind of regional travel destination. Sometimes the Charleston club would travel to help another club kick off its festival.
As the Charleston clubs marched together through flag-covered streets each spring, commentators often remarked on gun ownership as a pillar or citizenship and guarantor of liberty, a coded way to signal their readiness for a future race war against their Black neighbors. Indeed, after 1871 select members would parade holding captured French firearms from the Franco-Prussian War, which had facilitated German unification, a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm himself and a clear symbol of martial citizenship. It’s no mystery why Charleston’s Black rifle clubs were never invited to join the fest. Indeed, the only Black marchers in the parade would be hired target minders for the tournament.
In short, Charleston’s white supremacists fully understood German festive culture as a cover for their own agenda, and for German Charlestonians that wasn’t a deal-breaker. So they cheerfully marched to the Schützenplatz together every year, immediately shared a meal and a beer, jointly competed in the shooting tournament, drank more beer, danced and played the games, and bonded over even more beer. There were no seats at the table for Black Charlestonians.
RED SHIRTS
The martial elements of the Schützenfest were anything but cosmetic. They were actively cultivated in response to thriving Black parades and celebrations on Emancipation Day and other holidays. While federal protections under Reconstruction laws and policies remained intact, Black assertions of agency often withstood white supremacy. But those protections were themselves eroding under white Southern resistance, and the Schützenfest played a role in that, too.
In the spring of 1876, the fest was held as usual, but it was also an election year for both South Carolina and the nation. Charleston Democrats, not including most of the city’s German residents, were determined to see Wade Hampton III elected governor. Hampton, no benign candidate, was also de facto leader of South Carolina’s “Redeemers,” or white terrorist groups who were also known locally as Red Shirts. At Hampton’s bidding, these groups launched a wave of political violence and intimidation in the runup to the election.
These terrorist groups had incubated as the local, private rifle clubs that the German Rifle Club had inspired in 1868, invited into the Schützenfest and parade, and embraced for nearly a decade. Through these clubs, Red Shirts coordinated attacks to disrupt Republican meetings and intimidate recently enfranchised Black voters.
That July, white rifle club members near Hamburg, South Carolina, provoked a local Black militia into confrontation, ultimately massacring dozens of Black citizens, including a state legislator. In September, Red Shirts from multiple rifle clubs, including several from nearby Georgia, joined forces in Ellenton to murder dozens more. And when Black Republicans organized a meeting in Cainhoy, just northeast of Charleston, some 150 members of the city’s gun clubs boarded a steamer and disrupted the meeting. A shootout took place, but not a massacre, as local Black militias fought back using weapons stashed nearby.
The violence mounted until President Ulysses S. Grant, egged on by South Carolina’s Republican Governor, dispatched federal troops to the state proclaiming a ban on all rifle clubs. But the damage was done. Thanks to the suppression of Republican votes, demonstrable voter fraud by Democrats, and the erosion of Northern will to continue Reconstruction, Hampton was elected governor in 1876 and all federal troops withdrew from South Carolina. With the end of Reconstruction came the rise of Jim Crow across the South.
The Schützenfest flourished. Charleston’s German Rifle Club became the Charleston Rifle Club, and still exists as a private organization on the same land as the original Schützenplatz. After much controversy, it accepted its first Black member in September 2020—less than a year ago.
REDEMPTION THROUGH DECONSTRUCTION
As we saw in Part One, our current deductive shortcomings are often the products of misunderstood events from history. Beer’s modern lack of diversity and the limits of its community are obstacles that could have been avoided.
Most of the time, I am either the “only one” or one of only a few people of color in beer spaces—a reality with which I am 100% comfortable. During those moments, I’m in the moment, remaining authentic in an industry I have grown to love and respect. But while I embrace the moments when I’m the only face of color in some beer spaces, I’m never hesitant to engage in conversations about race and inequalities in the industry.
I love beer. Not just the tangible product, but the culture, the science, the agriculture, and the people. That said, the paltry number of people of color working in brewhouses and owning breweries in my hometown is nothing short of unfair. Historical events such as the Schützenfest have proven how far back this inequity goes. By now, we can all admit certain beer spaces fall short of wide-ranging representation.
If our beloved beer industry is honest about its duty of fostering communities and creating safe spaces for all, then we should be working to understand how today’s inequitable spaces were originally constructed—if only so that we are able to deconstruct them and rebuild them for the better.
Up next: Read Tek Cyear uh de Root, Part Three — The Lost Potential of Charleston Beer
Words by Jamaal LemonIllustrations by Colette Holston
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