Tek Cyear uh de Root, Part Three — The Lost Potential of Charleston Beer
Mr. Sammy Backman has been a family friend since I was three years old. A significant part of my upbringing took place on James Island at Backman’s Seafood, a family-owned dock and seafood market that’s been around since the late 1950s. In my life, I’ve never referred to him as anything other than “Mr. Sammy.”
“Back then, Black folks didn’t own any boats. It was hard for us to get loans,” Mr. Sammy says. “My mother once paid off a $100,000 loan, only to have the bank ask for collateral when she later asked for a $10,000 loan.”
The Backman family descends from the Mosquito Fleet fishermen who navigated slavery and Jim Crow to fish South Carolina’s coastline. History runs through Backman’s Seafood: It was once the only Black-owned seafood company not only in Charleston, but in the entire state. At one point, Backman’s secured a contract to supply oysters to Maryland. Shortly after, South Carolina passed laws designed to restrict the Backmans from shipping oysters out of state. As Mr. Sammy puts it, “That was pretty damn disrespectful.”
Read Tek Cyear uh de Root, Part Two — The Deliberate Reconstruction of the Charleston Schützenfest]
At a very young age, I learned how to “bait de line” and roast oysters on scrap metal covered with potato sacks and water “from de hose.” Most everything I’ve learned about seafood came from either my dad or from Mr. Sammy while I was running up and down Sol Legare Road on “Jimmy” Island.
Charleston’s African culture is so engraved in my DNA that it’s hard for me to fathom an alternative way to grow up. From eating chilly bears on Columbus Street or “grabbin’ fush out dey” in McClellanville to “mixin’ up” down on Mosquito Beach, I’ve only ever known how to be a Gullah Geechee boy from Charleston.
And I don’t think a person like me could have ever made a career in the beer industry if I had stayed in Charleston.
We’ve written about the history of the Charleston Schützenfest as a beer-soaked microcosm that is emblematic of exclusion across industries—and across centuries. The festival demonstrates the immense work that has gone into removing Black faces from professions, spaces, and neighborhoods for generations.
Its effects can still be seen today. The grounds where the event once took place are now flanked by local breweries, new condos, and an absence of Black faces due to gentrification. As the festival matured later in the 19th century and helped embed German-American culture into Charleston society, it became a crucible for realigning community relations and the resurgence of militant white supremacy in the state. It shows just how easily refrains like, “Black people just don’t like beer” could be more accurately phrased as, “Black people have been aggressively and violently prevented from liking beer.”
But there’s other work to acknowledge as well, work that the Backmans and others represent—the work of not only surviving white supremacy in Charleston, but of leaving vibrant and indelible marks on the community in the process. Some of that work played out in Charleston’s 1850s markets, as we mentioned in Part One, and it blossomed in the wake of emancipation and the Civil War. Much like Backman’s Seafood, it continues today. And the brewing industry could still embrace Black persistence if it so chooses.
EMANCIPATION CELEBRATION
New Year’s Eve 1862 in Charleston was unlike any that had come before. President Lincoln had announced the pending Emancipation Proclamation, promising that all enslaved Americans within the rebelling Confederacy would be free on January 1, 1863. Black church congregations across the South Carolina lowcountry gathered together late into the night to watch, pray, and hope that the promise of emancipation would be fulfilled. These services came to be known as “Watch Night,” and they’re still held today. I know, because I grew up attending them.
It is impossible to overstate the disruption, the release of emotion, that came with the Civil War and emancipation. In rural South Carolina, formerly enslaved people divvied up land and plundered plantations looking for food, possessions, and at times, revenge. At Middleton Place plantation, just up the Ashley River from Charleston, they burned the plantation house to the ground, broke into the vaults in the slaveholders’ family graveyard, and scattered the bones.
The parade included a group of schoolchildren carrying a banner reading ‘We Know No Master but Ourselves.’ A mock funeral procession was the centerpiece of the parade, featuring a coffin with a sign saying ‘Slavery is Dead’ followed by a train of women ‘mourners.’ A steamer called the Planter, crowded and decorated with flags, went up and down the harbor, and its captain was so overcome by the occasion that he accidentally collided with another ship.
Five weeks after Union forces, including the Black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, marched into Charleston in 1865, the Black community hosted a “grand jubilee” to celebrate emancipation. Four thousand Black Charlestonians marched in a procession two-and-a-half miles long, including Black Union army units and their bands. Cheers for Abraham Lincoln rang out almost continuously. The parade included a group of schoolchildren carrying a banner reading “We Know No Master but Ourselves.” A mock funeral procession was the centerpiece of the parade, featuring a coffin with a sign saying “Slavery is Dead” followed by a train of women “mourners.” A steamer called the Planter, crowded and decorated with flags, went up and down the harbor, and its captain was so overcome by the occasion that he accidentally collided with another ship.
That was only the beginning. Black Charlestonians immediately set out to build the lives they had never been able to realize. Charleston’s population swelled with African-Americans moving in from the countryside. They discussed job prospects openly, or what share of the coming crop they could sell themselves instead of handing over to some white landowner. One travel writer at the time noted: “The Courthouse and the City Hall are substantial edifices. Around them are always lounging crowds of negro men and women, as if they delighted to linger in the atmosphere of government and law, to the powers and responsibilities of which they have lately been introduced.” Black fire companies, social and welfare groups, and militias all formed overnight. These organizations countered the negligence and hostility that the Black community faced from white supremacists, and often coordinated directly with the local Republican Party.
As we mentioned in Part Two, Black Charleston’s catharsis generated and transformed many of the city’s public holidays. Memorial Day as we know it was born out of Black ceremonies to honor fallen Union soldiers. The Fourth of July transformed, temporarily, from a mostly white holiday to a majority Black one. Watch Night soon found a partner on Emancipation Day, held on January 1, and Black Charlestonians came to celebrate the anniversaries of other civil rights milestones like the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, among others. If white interest in the Schützenfest and its parade was a response to Black public celebrations, there was much to respond to.
Because most whites, including Germans, actively refused to help Black Charlestonians celebrate the Fourth of July, Emancipation Day, and other holidays associated with civil rights and the federal government, these events became wholly Black in procession and character. White Southerners thought they could ignore the Fourth in 1865, only to scramble when they discovered that local Black organizations had organized an extensive celebration independently. But rather than simply continue European-American celebratory frameworks, these new Black-led celebrations melded them with African elements. They were boisterous, musical, and interactive.
Spectators didn’t just watch—they were integral to the procession. Sometimes individual audience members would move along the parade route, forming a second line in the parade that kept pace with specific performers. Humor, satire, embellishment, and drama were all valued elements. As historian William Piersen has explained, Black musicians and performers had injected some of these elements into white-majority parades during the antebellum era, similar to the West African negotiations in Charleston’s marketplaces that we saw in Part One. But these practices split as white and Black celebration diverged following the Civil War. Whiteness only sanctioned African-American culture when it could be harnessed for its own purposes. In fact, white participants in Black parades were often assigned a form of Black status by white supremacists.
These celebrations were also opportunities for entrepreneurship. White shop owners generally closed on holidays, so Black vendors—mostly women—would walk ahead of the parade selling refreshments, or else open small stands along the route. They sold sassafras beer, gingerbread, soda water, ice cream, lemonade, and other street-style refreshments. Lager beer doesn’t seem to have been a large part of the festivities—it was all over at the Schützenfest. But homemade brews such as persimmon beer had been produced by Black Americans since before the Civil War. Food historian Michael Twitty has written about the persimmon beer his ancestors made to toast the end of American slavery in 1865. But of course, the future of American brewing was fizzy, yellow, German, and increasingly white.
MADDER THAN A WET HEN
At this point, you may be wondering why there isn’t more beer in this beer-media article. There won’t be much, and that’s the point. As Charleston’s dominant beer culture swung toward Lager beers in the mid and late 19th century, white supremacy purposefully carved out the city’s beer spaces as separate from the Black community. It did so just as it had transformed the Schützenfest parade into a display of white power; just as the German Rifle Club (and others around the state) attacked Black militias and political meetings; just as the Red Shirts intimidated Black voters; and just as these things paved the way for the quiet, polite, and often duly elected agents of Jim Crow to hold back the many Backmans of Charleston. Black freedom and celebration during Reconstruction, as we saw in Part Two, was systematically hobbled within a decade.
As Charleston’s dominant beer culture swung toward Lager beers in the mid and late 19th century, white supremacy purposefully carved out the city’s beer spaces as separate from the Black community.
When Charles Werner built his Iron Palace in the 1850s, with ornate Lager halls and German-style concerts, he catered to white society and used the proceeds of enslaved labor to do it. When Black Charlestonians tried to get a drink at the city’s poorer, German-owned groceries, white society criminalized and brutalized them for doing so, and persecuted immigrant grocers for good measure.
After the war, when the Black community caught its best glimpse of an equitable society, German and white rifle clubs began clinking mugs of Lager together at the Schützenfest. In inviting German-Americans still further into the white supremacist fold than ever before, white society claimed the dominant local beer culture as its own.
Charleston didn’t have a large commercial brewery until 1880 or so, but even if it had, and even if Black Charlestonians had secured jobs there, they likely would have been relegated to auxiliary roles rather than brewing positions. White brewers and owners would have claimed all the credit and filled all the history books. That’s what happened with Edmund Egan, a slaveholder who used enslaved Black brewers to operate a Charleston brewery during the American Revolution. And now there’s a Charleston brewpub named after Egan and not the Black brewers who did the work. Hell, we couldn’t even find record of their names while researching this project.
As Reconstruction crumbled and newly opened doors closed again, the lavish potential beer culture we might have written in this space diminished. This story remained. That’s not a reason to stop scrolling—it’s a reason to continue. We must not shy away from the chapters of beer history that lack beer, lest our silences write new ones. What we must do is learn to differentiate negative spaces from denied spaces.
EVERYTHING ON THE MENU
Food, the heart and soul of Gullah Geechee culture, is the only commodity allowed to peek its head from the back row of Charleston’s economic house party. Anything else associated with that community—anything the city can’t appropriate or monetize—is methodically shunned.
“I don’t think the City of Charleston has done a good job of espousing all of the virtues of the Gullah people,” says KJ Kearney, the founder of Black Food Fridays. “Gullah Geechee cuisine is the foundation to which Southern cooking is based upon. Charleston is recognized as a Southern cooking hotspot, which is an inadvertent shoutout to Gullah Geechee culture.”
You can walk in most bars or restaurants in the Holy City and see a lineage of Gullah Geechee influences on their menus: shrimp and grits, red rice—virtually anything on the menu that incorporates rice—or any type of Frogmore Stew. Some even go to great lengths and appropriate the title of Geechee. Examples of erasure, appropriation, and mascotification abound.
‘I don’t think the City of Charleston has done a good job of espousing all of the virtues of the Gullah people. Gullah Geechee cuisine is the foundation to which Southern cooking is based upon. Charleston is recognized as a Southern cooking hotspot, which is an inadvertent shoutout to Gullah Geechee culture.’
This is the history and cultural context I’ve experienced my whole life. I can recall countless Sundays when I ravenously hightailed it to an aunt or family friend’s kitchen to stow away red rice, fried fish, okra, and oysters by the mouthful. The cuisine is at the core of our being, and traces its lineage directly to the Caribbean and West Africa—links that still impact our dialect, agriculture, and community.
“I remember being in college and a couple students heard me speaking with another friend from Charleston,” Kearny says. “They thought we were from the islands, like a Caribbean island.”
There’s no other city in the United States like Charleston, and growing up there immediately gives you a distinct life experience—but only in spurts, as the city of Charleston has a history of minimizing the voices of Gullah Geechee culture through violence, redlining, and exclusion from a variety of spaces.
As a result, segregation in Charleston is evident across many industries, fostering all those archaic beliefs: White people only do this. Black people only do that. To a certain extent, there may be some kernel of truth in these suppositions. Just ask Mr. Sammy how flounder is harvested, and learn how the formerly enslaved members of the Mosquito Fleet developed that method. Or ask my buddy KJ, who posed that question at a local brewery: Where are all the Black people? The answer is hidden in undertones—and calls for a conversation longer than one session of pint-drinking.
Taprooms in Charleston, implicitly or not, uphold the city’s historical patterns of exclusion. When the violence of white supremacy played out yet again in Minneapolis last year, many in the beer industry spoke out, often just performatively, in solidarity with African-Americans experiencing racial injustices. During that time, I noticed most breweries—all but two—in Charleston stayed clear of making any statements opposing systemic modes of oppression.
A small glimmer of hope revealed itself during a conversation I had with the owner of one of those two Charleston breweries, who did make an effort to speak out. “We don’t have all the answers and we’ve been welcoming to all, but realize that’s not enough,” Jaime Tenny, owner of Coast Brewing Company, said. That sentiment could help to compensate for the city’s history of oppression, violent racism, and exclusion, if only more breweries shared it with the same honesty and humanistic perspective.
Eliminating the potential Gullah influence during the Schützenfest was a lasting disservice to beer in Charleston. If it had been allowed to inhabit that space, it could have been a precursor to vast creative possibilities across the industry. Yet Charleston—and other cities throughout the country—still fail to address the root causes behind such segregated spaces. As Kearney says of the local food scene: “Charleston cuisine is Black in its foundation, but not Black in its manifestation or marketing. The Blackness of Charleston is not a part of official city business.” Charleston’s attitude regarding its food culture eerily parallels that of the current beer industry and its spaces in the city.
THE GREATNESS OF MIGRATION
In 2007, I left Charleston for Washington, D.C. In 2016 I found my path in the beer industry, and have been at it ever since. Thanks to a casting call I applied for and won, my life was forever changed. I’ve stated in past interviews that beer was “under my nose” the entire time I was searching for the thing—the one pursuit that I could dedicate a large portion of my life to. I’m now in spaces where I can share my opinions and experiences and have others learn from them. Even more significantly, I get to learn from others.
One thing I’ve learned in that time is that we don’t achieve societal harmony by pinning our ears back, or listening to only one group of people. We all benefit when we’re all accounted for. Since this project’s inception, I’ve come to understand how our country suffers from rampant exclusion and segregation. When I first moved to D.C., I was searching for my authentic self. I found that self by building a life in beer, one which I should not have had to leave Charleston to obtain.
The fear of change and lack of understanding I’ve encountered exist beyond beer, of course. Now, we have to locate the why in every space of exclusion, because it exists in all corners of American culture. The more time the seed of generational exclusion has had to germinate, the deeper and stronger those roots grow.
Beer could lead to this change. My experiences in the industry have been favorable, and I’ve met many interesting people with noble missions that aim to use beer for reform—from women’s rights to LGBTQ+ representation, from addressing excessive excise taxes to community waste management and renewable energy sources. Beer has everything needed to sustain communities, no matter where they fall on the spectrum of income or ethnicity. At its best, it can be a real place of intersection.
The exclusion of specific groups of people hinders this ability. I often wonder, “What if a career in beer had been a reality for me as a college student?” When I see major universities like UC Davis or Appalachian State which offer brewing and fermentation science degrees, I get a glimpse of what could have been, of the missing African-American influence on beer. Had the exclusion from beer spaces never happened to the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina, and to other underrepresented groups, it could have been my reality earlier in life.
The only way to make our industry right with our communities and history is to provide opportunity for those who have, by design, been excluded from brewing and beer spaces. Before the tree can heal, care and attention should be given to its roots. The creation of inclusive spaces across the beer community, or any community, generally falls on the shoulders of those already in it, which can hinder expansion and recruitment. The marginalization of African-Americans during the German Schützenfest is one of so many roots leading to the lack of diversity in beer spaces today.
Addressing these hard truths means working to right ongoing exclusions. For beer and for Charleston, the Schützenfest is a guide for how we can begin that change. We can trace the root of why certain groups of people are underrepresented, and we can actively correct for that now—but we’re still only speaking for Charleston. If the beer industry is to continue its rhetoric of community-building, then it’s going to need to pay attention to the roots of oppression in its own communities, and across the country.
There’s no genetic makeup that means certain human beings just don’t like beer. As lazy as that assumption reads, wouldn’t it be even lazier not to figure out why it exists in the first place?
Words by Jamaal LemonIllustrations by Colette Holston
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