Black South Carolinians continued the work of recovery even as the American Red Cross prepared to leave the Lowcountry during the summer of 1894. The Red Cross’s effort had, in many ways, been a success. Black South Carolinians had rebuilt thousands of homes, dredged nearly 250 miles of ditches, and refurbished thousands of items of clothing. The Red Cross had distributed thousands of bushels of seeds and tens of thousands of food rations to hungry Lowcountry residents. The organization distributed final rounds of rations and accompanied these material goods with circulars and lectures containing instructions on farming and economy. The goal, the field agent Dr. Hubbell wrote, was “to cultivate thrift, ingenuity, enterprise, develop prosperity, with the view of breaking up the ‘credit system’ of business among them and making them independent, progressive and prosperous.” The lectures were well-attended by Black South Carolinians.

(Top) "Cursing the Cross," The Columbia Daily Register, Columbia, South Carolina, May 25, 1894, courtesy of the Library of Congress. (Bottom) Clara Barton's gold medal presented by the Vanderbilt Benevolent Association of South Carolina, July 9, 1894, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

However, the fundamental problem in the Lowcountry was not the individual character of African Americans but the threat of Jim Crow. As the Red Cross tapered off its operations, the organization came under renewed attack by white South Carolinians who resented how Barton had worked with Black South Carolinians. One inflammatory article, entitled “CURSING THE RED CROSS!” alleged that “Not a dozen white men in Beaufort County, unless it be in the towns of Beaufort and Port Royal, have a good word for the society. It is roundly cursed and abused.” According to this assessment, African Americans simply did not count. Governor Tillman supported a call for collections for white farmers in Bluffton, to support whites against what the press alleged was “the discrimination against white sufferers by the Red Cross.” The members of the Bluffton Relief Committee, from a small town located in Beaufort County, fumed in an opinion piece on Barton, “Who is she that drives the streets of Beaufort with Bob Smalls, and sends out agents that sleep, eat and drink with negroes to succor the wants and cares for our poor and proud white people?”

These white South Carolinians not-so-subtly accused Barton and the Red Cross agents of a kind of interracial fraternization that, under some circumstances in the Jim Crow South, served as justification for white vigilante violence against African Americans. That the Red Cross’s presence elicited such a strong reaction demonstrated how meaningful outside support could be for Black South Carolinians struggling to come out from under the destruction of the hurricane and the shadow of racial oppression.

In numerous letters, Black South Carolinians thanked the Red Cross for their contributions. Though the Red Cross had persisted in asserting their paternalistic role over African Americans, the relief effort was a complex endeavor that largely brought its volunteers into alliance with Black South Carolinians. S. J. Pinckney wrote a letter to Barton telling her about his travails after the hurricane—how he and his parents were starving, how he had no opportunity for work, and how the Red Cross provided him with what he needed to survive. “I feel like I could work with you all my lifetime for the way you all have treated me,” he said. The Women’s Aid Association of Beaufort, South Carolina, which was headed by Robert Smalls’ wife Annie, extended to Barton their “heartfelt thanks and inexpressible appreciation for your noble and unselfish work.” Other letters conveyed similar sentiments. Some white South Carolinians also honored Barton, even beyond the coterie of white businessmen and professionals in Beaufort who had associated with the Red Cross. Charleston’s venerable Vanderbilt Benevolent Association bestowed upon Barton a special award for her service to the state.

A woman and man sitting outside of a cabin at Coffins Point, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1905, courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Barton departed in July 1894, having battled slander from detractors and exhaustion from within in those final months. The Red Cross was gone from the Lowcountry. What faced Black residents of the region after their withdrawal? The subsequent decades were not kind. In 1895, Tillman spearheaded a constitutional convention to replace the state’s expansive Reconstruction-era governing document, which enshrined universal manhood suffrage. South Carolina’s new constitution instituted a literacy test and a poll tax to the state’s voter registration requirements, thus stripping nearly all the state’s remaining African Americans voters—the majority of whom resided in the Lowcountry—of their political rights. The Lowcountry economy produced few new opportunities for Black workers beyond the options that already existed. Over the next three decades, many Black residents of the region migrated to northern cities, especially New York City and Philadelphia. These unforgiving changes mingled with the hurricane’s deleterious effects on both the regional economy and the individual lives of Black South Carolinians. 

This exhibit provides a glimpse into those lives, captured at a very particular moment. The American Red Cross brought goods, rations, tools, and other valuable resources to the Lowcountry. But it also left an archive in its wake. Within that archive are the names collected here, Black South Carolinians whose paths intersected with the Red Cross. They aligned with the Red Cross. They worked for their communities. They helped and advocated for each other. Some of them also articulated a vision for the Lowcountry that would empower their communities in ways that challenged the status quo of white supremacy and labor demoralization. This exhibit charts their contributions, their habitations, and their networks across the Lowcountry, as an act of recovery.