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S.C.'s 'man for the times'

November 18, 2007

Former governor led state through turbulence, strife

By CAROLYN CLICK
cclick@thestate.com

Robert Evander McNair was the epitome of the New South governor of the 1960s, progressive on racial matters and poised to move South Carolina into the modern industrial age.

But McNair, who died Saturday at age 83 from complications of a brain tumor, found himself at the center of one of the worst confrontations of the modern civil rights era, his administration forever linked to the 1968 demonstrations in Orangeburg that ended with the deaths of three black students.

“It’s the one thing that went wrong,” his biographer, Philip Grose, said.

As word spread of McNair’s death Saturday, his political colleagues and friends spoke of a courtly man possessed of legendary political skills and a sense of his place at a moment of great societal upheaval in the South and the United States.

He was “the man for the times,” said Jim Konduros, McNair’s law partner and former gubernatorial aide.

In some ways, McNair was the “accidental governor,” thrust into the job in 1965 when Gov. Donald Russell resigned to take the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of longtime U.S. Sen. Olin Johnston. But even as a young state legislator, McNair had ambitions for the state’s highest office.

Eighteen months after he succeeded Russell, McNair won a four-year term in his own right. He earned accolades as a chief executive adept at luring new industry to the state and committed to the improvement of education and race relations.

After leaving office, McNair founded one of the state’s most prestigious law firms. He remained the S.C. Democratic Party’s chief powerhouse throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

“I think there are two takes on the McNair years,” Grose said in a 2005 interview. “One, of course, would be the civil rights side, which is very often characterized today by Orangeburg and the 1968 shootings, but which contains much more activity and things that had much happier endings.

“And the other is what today would be called the reform movements,” including aggressive efforts to improve secondary and higher education and overhaul antiquated government procedures.

McNair’s administration is credited with:

• Massive recruitment of new business into the state and greater emphasis on economic development

• Expansion of technical education, including the granting of college status to technical centers

• Linking education with economic development

• Creation of the Commission on Higher Education

• Redefinition of the way the state financed capital projects

• Passage of compulsory school attendance legislation

• Passage of a 1 percentage-point increase in the state sales tax

• Creation of the Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department and development of travel-related industries

• Expansion of cultural opportunities, including establishment of the state arts commission and creation of the state archives and history department

• Creation and development of the State House complex of buildings surrounding the Capitol


A CALL FOR AN IMPROVED RACIAL CLIMATE

In the midst of those achievements, McNair’s handling of the events that came to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre tarnished his administration.

For some, the questions that still linger shadow his legacy, although it is clear McNair was as stunned as the next person by the explosion of violence on that cold winter night.

On his second inauguration day, Jan. 19, 1967, after winning a full four-year term, McNair expressed hope South Carolinians would weather the stormy civil rights decade that had upended the state’s old social and political codes. He called for citizens to strive for what he called “the timeless goal of human betterment.”

McNair spoke in the language of a thoroughly modern Southern governor �" never mind that Alabama’s George Wallace was in the audience and Lester Maddox held court as governor one state removed �" and counseled moderation in racial matters .

“Today’s South Carolina has no time for obsession with either ‘black power’ or ‘white backlash,’” he told those assembled on the steps of the State House.

In “South Carolina, a History,” historian Walter Edgar writes McNair “acted resolutely” to avoid the violence and resistance characteristic of the civil rights movement in other Southern states.

In February 1970, four Southern governors met to plan ways to fight the federal government’s desegregation orders. McNair, now widely viewed as a moderate on the racial issues, was not invited to the meeting, Edgar wrote.

But McNair was not spared the bloody turmoil that had racked the Deep South states of Mississippi and Alabama as blacks clamored to overturn segregation and secure an equal place in society.

Thirteen months after his inauguration, on the evening of Feb. 8, 1968, two S.C. State students, Samuel Hammond and Henry Smith, and a high school student, Delano Middleton, lay dead after a confrontation with the state Highway Patrol over integration of a bowling alley. The shootings, which injured 27 others, capped a week of clashes between students and authorities.

“This is one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina,” McNair told reporters who gathered at a hastily called press conference the following day. “The years of work and understanding have been shattered by this unfortunate incident at Orangeburg.”

In the days following the shootings, McNair lamented the presence of “outside agitators” who he believed had encouraged the students to riot. That would not turn out to be the case, despite the targeting and quick arrest of Cleveland Sellers, field coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for allegedly inciting the riot.

Sellers was a native South Carolinian, having grown up in nearby Denmark.

While Sellers acknowledged being deeply involved in campus protest work, he denied any plan to initiate a riot and later contended police fired into the crowd without provocation. He was sleeping when 150 angry students massed at the edge of the S.C. State campus and lit a bonfire, feeding the fire with boards and banisters ripped from a nearby house.

Sellers rushed out of a dormitory just moments before shots were fired. In the chaos, he was slightly wounded.

Almost immediately, McNair moved to squelch rumors the highway patrolmen had fired recklessly into the crowd of rowdy students after one officer had been hit by a flying projectile. But it would turn out that many students sustained shots to the back or in the soles of their feet, felled as they attempted to flee the mayhem.

McNair stood by the nine highway patrolmen who admitted firing into the crowd of students. Tried on federal charges of imposing summary punishment without due process of law, all nine were acquitted. None has spoken publicly since.

Sellers was convicted of one misdemeanor count of rioting and imprisoned for seven months. Twenty-five years after Orangeburg, Sellers, now the director of African-American Studies at USC, was granted a pardon.

After he left the governor’s office, McNair ceased to speak publicly of the swirl of events that led to the tragic shootings. As anniversary after anniversary passed, McNair rarely weighed in on what he believed had gone wrong that fateful week.

In Grose’s 2006 biography, McNair made his most sweeping statement of regret and responsibility, saying he had “borne that responsibility with all the heaviness it entails for all those years.”

Jack Bass, author of “The Orangeburg Massacre,” believes that is true, suggesting McNair might have secured the vice presidential spot on the Democratic presidential ticket except for the shootings.

In a 2005 interview with The State, McNair recalled an explosive era of tremendous social unrest. Even as black residents were agitating for greater civil rights, students angry over Vietnam were fomenting unrest on the state’s college campuses.

“You talk to people born after 1970. ... They really don’t have an understanding of what we were changing,” he said. “We were changing a people’s way of life. It was a very difficult, a very delicate period.”

But the lessons of Orangeburg �" the tensions that went unaddressed for days, the massing of National Guard and Highway Patrol, and the lack of attention to the core complaints �" were not lost on McNair, said Grose.

“In his own mind, he said it would never happen again,” said Grose.

Within weeks, after federal court intervention, the bowling alley that had sparked the violence was open to blacks and whites.

A year later, a bitter strike by black Charleston hospital workers spilled into the streets, provoking marches and economic boycotts. The battle between the hospital workers and the Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital drew national attention and threats from the federal government to suspend hospital funding.

McNair made sure he was briefed daily by law enforcement personnel on the scope and tone of the demonstrations, Grose said. At key junctures, he also intervened in the negotiations.

In 1970, as South Carolina began statewide school integration, McNair dealt swiftly with an angry mob that overturned a school bus that had been carrying African-American children in Lamar, an event that also generated national attention and accolades for his actions. Thirty-one men were arrested within 48 hours on charges of rioting.


A LOWCOUNTRY CHILDHOOD

Born in 1923 in Cades in Williamsburg County, McNair was raised in “Hellhole Swamp” in Berkeley County, experiencing boyhood on his family’s Jamestown farm rooted in rural Lowcountry pursuits of fishing and hunting. They were avocations he pursued keenly throughout his adult life.

He traveled by horse cart to school and credited his parents with instilling in him a thirst for education.

When buses finally came to Berkeley County, McNair climbed aboard, passing his black friends who walked to separate, inferior schools. He said later that image “always stuck with me.”

McNair left college to enter the military in World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Navy. He served 22 months in the Pacific, commanding a tank landing ship, and was credited with rescuing 35 people from a stricken ship.

McNair was a believer in persuasion and compromise, his style born of his legislative experience and his natural lawyerly inclinations. His effectiveness at working with the Legislature was legendary.

Although he presided over one of the most turbulent times in the state’s history, McNair never accustomed himself to the street tactics of the anti-war and civil rights protesters.

As governor, he believed the state needed to slough off its stratified approach to education, transportation and health care. His administration commissioned Moody’s Investors Services to prepare a detailed analysis of government operations, published in 1968.

The 440-page report offered a new vision of government and provided a road map for change that forcefully was debated in the Legislature and seeded future initiatives such as the Education Accountability Act.

McNair’s influence extended long past his administration. Although he never held elective office again, he was a Democratic power broker and confidante of dozens of candidates.

McNair served continuously as the McNair Law Firm’s senior shareholder and chairman.

McNair founded the firm in 1971, shortly after leaving office, with two of his top gubernatorial aides, Konduros, executive assistant to the governor, and Wayne Corley, his top legal assistant. The firm is among the state’s largest and most prestigious with lawyers in 11 locations in North Carolina and South Carolina.

He is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Josephine Robinson of Allendale County, four children and their spouses, Robert E. McNair Jr. and Judith Elaine Gibbons McNair of Columbia, Robin Lee and Jon C. Howell of Myrtle Beach, Corinne Calhoun and Stanyarne R. Godshall of Myrtle Beach and Claudia Crawford McNair of Jamestown; six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Staff writer James T. Hammond contributed to this story. Reach Click at (803) 771-8386.

The State