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Rhym Guissé: A quick warning, some of the language and imagery used to describe this period of time may be upsetting. Please take care while listening.
Betty Singleton: I remember my mother was getting ready to go to the movies with my cousin and they came back. She said, “They’re riding.” And when they say they’re riding, that mean the KKK was riding. You know, once you knew they were riding, you had to stay home for protection.
Patricia Burgess: My granddaddy was sitting in the shop yard and the police told us to go in the house and make sure all the lights was out. And every light on that corner 21st was out. You couldn’t see nothing. My aunt was scared. She had her young, young baby in there crying and shaking her baby, keeping her baby from crying and nobody said a thing.
Rhym: This is Charlie’s Place. I’m Rhym Guissé. Episode 5: All Costs.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Rhym: While much of Charlie’s life is shrouded in mystery, this moment is different. We actually have documentation, including very detailed FBI records of what happened that night. It was a Saturday night, August 26th, 1950. Around 8:00, the cars rolled into town like a funeral procession, slow and bumper to bumper. There were men inside the cars in white robes.
Dino Thompson: Twenty-six carloads are driving through slowly. People are walking beside cars. Some of them have rifles on their shoulders. Some are carrying pistols. And they slowly slimed through downtown. And people are terrified.
Bobby Donaldson: These white robed Klansmen fitted every category. There were professionals, there were doctors, there were pharmacists and there were policemen, there were law enforcement officers riding with the Klan.
Dino: So now they come right in front of The Kozy Corner. I remember my mom was crying.
Herbert Riley: The Grand Dragon of the KKK in North and South Carolina was a man named Thomas Hamilton. He led the group into town that night. So, this Thomas Hamilton, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, he wanted to be a super big shot. He started pushing this thing because Blacks and whites were partying together and the young Black kids were learning how to dance and taking it back to their community, calling it The Shag. But anyhow, the rumor was spread that Charlie was running a prostitution ring over there. White girls and Black men. They always used the sex thing as a catcall to bring out the lowest elements in their own people.
Rhym: To bring out the Klansmen looking for an excuse for violence. By August, the Grand Dragon Thomas Hamilton had launched a full Klan recruitment campaign in Myrtle Beach. A local judge had helped him organize the Klan motorcade.
Dino: The Grand Dragon’s car was a Lincoln Continental and on the front of his bumper he had a four foot high cross and it was punched out with light bulbs, red light bulbs, and electrified to his battery. And he had a little red light inside like a siren he would turn on occasionally. So it’s a frightening looking thing.
Rhym: It was typical to see cars lining Carver Street outside Charlie’s place on a Saturday night, the busiest night. But not like this.
Herbert: Charlie had a good crowd of people in his club and there wasn’t no white folk in there, strangely enough.
Dino: And people that were there said Charlie came out and stood on the porch. And he said he just stood there, and some of his people were standing there. A lot of people were afraid and ran. As the KKK rolled by, they sent Charlie a message. Somebody had a bullhorn and said, “We’ll be back to see y’all …” the n-word.
Leroy Brunson: And they announced that they would be back at 12:00.
Dino: They intimidated everybody and they left.
Rhym: They promised they would be back. Then the lines of cars snaked away and drove 12 miles up the coast to Atlantic Beach, the Black beach, the one place Black people could put their feet in the water.
Dino: It’s busy. It’s August. It’s summer. Probably 4,000 people are there. They scattered them from fear. People just saw them and just ran.
Rhym: What happened next has different accounts.
Herbert: People always believed that they came back because Charlie dared them to. That’s not the truth. I’ve seen the files. What did happen was this: He called the chief of police.
Rhym: Charlie called the chief of police because he knew him. He knew him well. Several sources mentioned that Charlie and Carlisle Newton had had a special arrangement, Charlie allegedly paying off Carlisle so he could sell illegal liquor. Charlie called Carlisle because he thought, as a chief of police, he could help. But when he called the station, Chief Newton wasn’t there. So Charlie left a message with the radio man …
Herbert: And told him the Klan has been over here, and they say they’re coming back, and the people are not going to sit back and be slaughtered like dogs. They will fight if they come back, and there’ll be some bloodshed. In other words, you’re saying do something about this before it happens.
Rhym: Before the people at Charlie’s place would have to defend themselves. The radio man said he’d tell the chief.
Herbert: In those days they used two-way radios like the military did.
Rhym: And this is where things got tricky, because there were police officers in white hoods in that Klan parade. In fact, some think the head car with the siren blaring and the Grand Dragon Hamilton inside was a police car. And some think that car picked up the message meant for the chief.
Herbert: And when it was radioed to him that Charlie said what Charlie said, Hamilton decided that was the excuse he needed to go back.
Rhym: The Klan cars turned around and headed for Charlie’s place.
Dino: As soon as they came back, people ran.
Herbert: And some people say it was 30 cars. But they’re saying four and five in each car. In other words, you’re talking around 100 people. They formed a skirmish line.
Dino: They actually lined up kind of like soldiers in front of Charlie’s place.
Herbert: This is right after World War II. So you can figure out a large number of them were probably military veterans.
Dino: Now these are good old boys, probably all grew up hunting.
Herbert: They knew how to use weapons.
Dino: They liked to carry bats. A few of them had whips. That’s one of their symbols.
Herbert: They started to move forward. And when they did, they got this guy, his nickname was 230 because he always carried a 32 pistol. They grabbed him and they started beating him, asking where Charlie was. He wouldn’t tell at first. I think that he eventually did.
Rhym: According to one report, a man yelled, “Get your guns ready and everybody get in line.” The Klansmen lined up like soldiers. They started walking toward the club. Anyone who tried to leave was driven back into the restaurant.
Herbert: This is when Charlie played hero. Now, he knew he could have been killed, but he also knew if there’d been a straight out gunfight with 100 men with shotguns and pistols, it would have been a slaughter. So Charlie walked out. He had his weapons on him. He had two weapons on him.
Rhym: One of the Klansmen asked, “Who runs this place?” And Charlie revealed himself. “I run the place,” he said. “My name is Charlie.” “He’s the one we want,” the Klansmen said. And then they knocked him out cold.
Herbert: Three of them approached him. One got him from the back and hit him upside the head with a gun or a bat or something and knocked him down. Then they hit him again and rendered him unconscious temporarily.
Rhym: The Klansmen picked Charlie up, and they threw him in the trunk of one of their cars. But they weren’t ready to leave yet. The Klansmen started shooting.
Leroy: Our place was right here. You walk across the street, just like that. I mean, just like a straight bullet, our house was pointing straight into Charlie’s door. And when the guns start shooting and stuff like that, my mom dragged us out of the bed and said, “Y’all, come on, let’s go.” We didn’t know what was happening. She said, “Come on, let’s go. We got to go get out of here. We got to go hide. So y’all go under the house, hide up under the house.” And we did. And we was, my brother and I, he was two years older than me, we were just laughing and looking at people running and shooting. We didn’t, you know, we were young then, you know, when it came through. And she came back again and got us and took us back behind the house. And we went through the bushes, you know, stood out there for a while. People were running all through the woods and different places when they were shooting.
Clyde “Frankie” Foster: Man, they was running all in the woods. I had all my uncles and aunts and stuff, we’d come to Charlie. They were in the woods, running from them, right behind Whispering Pine.
Rhym: When the Klan members got into the club, they started to destroy the place.
Dino: They roughed Cynthia Harroll, the lady we called Shag. They roughed her up. People said that she sort of confronted a few of them, so they roughed her up and probably hurt her.
Clyde: When Shag grabbed the cash register, they had to beat her in order to get where they want. But when Shag didn’t let them do it, they tried to take the cash register and all this, tried to take everything from him. They tried to destroy the place.
Dino: A waiter from the Pink House restaurant was wounded in the leg. Some other people received shrapnel from glass flying and things like that. Newspaper reports said they shot from 300 to 500 shots into his place. One person was killed, and it was a Klansman who was shot, left in the parking lot, bleeding. Under his Klan sheets, he was still wearing his Conway policeman uniform. He was shot dead. No one knows who shot him.
Rhym: Many people think he was shot by one of his own, since he was shot in the back. Now, Charlie was in the back of a trunk, and a police officer had been shot on his property. The men in robes got back in their cars and drove Charlie away. On Sunday morning, the people on The Hill woke up to a terrible realization: The Klansman had taken Charlie.
Patricia: They said they had gotten Mr. Charlie and they took him someplace. We didn’t know where they took him at that time, but it was so sad. It was one sad day in Myrtle Beach, because nobody could do nothing about it. They didn’t do nothing about it.
Clyde: They thought he was dead.
Rhym: When Ms. Pat went to work that day, she saw her boss’s white KKK robe lying out on the bed. And then, the little girl she babysat came in.
Patricia: And the little girl told me, she said, “You see that thing on that bed?” I said, “Yeah.”
Rhym: What was she talking about?
Patricia: She was talking about the suit her daddy wore to kill Charlie. They had the suits and everything, the Klan suits, laying on the bed, so if anybody go in there, they’d know her daddy was a Klansman. And the little girl told me, “If you hit me, he will kill you too.” And all I could do was cry.
Clyde: I had an aunt, the oldest sister that my mother had. Ever since then, she would never let any white person or anybody, showing me anything, enter the house. My mother had let him in one time to get the receipt and she ran him out. She said, “Don’t let them come in this house. Don’t let them do it.”
Rhym: Because she experienced that night, Charlie’s …
Clyde: Yeah, she said, “Don’t let them come in any place you got.” The insurance man had to write the receipt in the car in the rain and then bring it.
Rhym: Because that night must have traumatized her.
Clyde: Yeah.
Dino: You know, that incident was what many of us consider the ugliest black molar in our local history. You know, just pure evil and ugly.
Leroy: And I learned from that, you know, don’t take anything for granted. You just don’t, you don’t know when it’s gonna happen, how it’s gonna happen, who’s gonna do it to you.
Clyde: Everybody was traumatized. But a lot of Blacks, they were strong men. They destroyed everything. But they didn’t take a lot of heart from a lot of people.
Rhym: People thought Charlie was dead, but they didn’t know the whole story. About a month and a half after the Klan attack on Charlie’s place, Charlie turned up in Washington, D.C. He was very much alive. He was there to give his testimony to the FBI, to tell the story of what happened that night. This is the only record I have of Charlie talking at length about this time, beside a brief quote in the newspaper. The statement he gave is just Charlie in his own words. No speculation. Just what he says he saw and experienced after the Klansmen threw him in that trunk.
Charlie said, “They drove me around for about an hour-and-a-half, and about three or four times during this hour-and-a-half, they stopped. And I heard them say, ‘This is too public. Too many civilians passing.’ Lots of the driving was done on bumpy, dirt roads. When they finally stopped, I did not know where I was.”
Charlie tells the FBI agents that the leader told the men to take off their hoods and put them away. He says, “When I was taken out of the trunk, I was between two cars, and the only light was the taillights of these cars. I saw that I was encircled by men. I lay on the ground face down. Someone stood on each hand, and someone stood on my feet, and somebody else stood on my neck. At this time, my wrists and ankles were cut as a result of their standing on them. The men then took turns in beating me with what felt like a bullwhip. I counted over 80 licks before they began to ask me anything. I heard them say, ‘Come on now, it’s my turn,’ and say, ‘You haven’t hit him hard enough. Hit him.’”
Charlie says they asked him about his connections to the county sheriff, his connections to the chief of police, Carlisle Newton. They asked about the police officer who was shot at his place earlier that night. He heard somebody say, “He couldn’t have done it, as I had him covered.”
The men searched him. He had a men’s diamond ring, eyeglasses, and $235. They took his belongings. Then Charlie said, “They asked me to swear that I would go to church every Sunday, and I would take an oath to leave South Carolina, and not even go back to my place, not go back to my wife, and leave now.”
“Don’t go to Georgia, because we got Ku Klux men there,” one man said.
“He better not stop in North Carolina,” said another.
That’s when Charlie says they decided to mark him. Somebody said, “We ought to swing him to a rope.” Charlie heard a guy say, “I’ve got a penknife, just the thing. Let’s notch his ear.” It was something Klansmen were known to do.
Charlie says he looked up at the man, and that he had a small badge pinned inside his shirt pocket, and a revolver in his holster.
He says, “When the man saw me look up, he kicked me on the side of the head, which still swells, and still requires medical attention. When the man notched my left ear, it apparently bled, and I had an opportunity to jump up, and I jumped toward a nearby ditch. The ditch was about four-and-a-half feet deep. I carried two men with me into the ditch. In the scuffle, I got away and rushed into the nearby bushes. I fell behind a log in the bushes. As I was escaping, they shot 15 or 20 times in my general direction. I then heard them say, ‘Let’s go.’”
The Klansmen left Charlie for dead. But later that night, one of the drivers from his cab company spotted him on the side of the road and picked him up. From there, Charlie got in touch with Police Chief Newton, who told him that he never got the message to send help. Newton called the doctor. The doctor came and gave Charlie a shot to put him to sleep. Then the county sheriff came by to see him, a man named C. Ernest Sasser. Many people call Sheriff Sasser, this white officer, a friend and an ally to Charlie during this time. Charlie once said about Sasser, “I’ve never known a straighter white man in my life.”
Sasser told Charlie it wasn’t looking good. The Klan was after both him and Charlie for the death of a police officer. The robed officer who had been shot at Charlie’s Place earlier that night had died. Sasser said the best thing for him to do was lock Charlie up until he could get it straightened out for his own safety. For over a week, Charlie was moved around to different jail cells throughout the county.
Meanwhile, Sasser went on the radio to try to clear Charlie’s name. In the broadcast, he said Charlie had no part in the shooting. Sasser instead blamed the Klansmen who, “Left him on the ground to die.” Sasser continues. He dispels the prostitution rumors.
“That’s not why the Klan attacked Charlie’s place,” he says. Instead, he suggests another reason. He says, “To my knowledge, some white men and women do go to this place on special occasions to hear the orchestra and watch the colored people dance. I have, on many occasions, told them it was not a good policy.”
Sasser then tells listeners that the Klan has threatened to blow up the Myrtle Beach radio station if they reveal any information about Klan members. The very station where Sasser broadcasts this message, but then quickly adds, “I happen to know a few men that are members. Some are from good families. They were led into this unfortunate thing with no intention of committing a crime.”
This is so revealing. County Sheriff is a political position. Sasser can’t completely denounce the Klan if he wants the votes. They’re that powerful. But he also can’t stand for what they did to his friend. He has to say something. And he’d pay for that. Sasser lost his seat as a County Sheriff in the next election—by a lot. He lost to a known Klan sympathizer. There was one area, though, where Sasser dominated. He carried the precinct known as the Race Path, which included The Hill neighborhood. The Black residents there voted 343 to 6 for Sasser.
All this time, parents in Myrtle Beach had tried to shield their kids from the details of what happened to Charlie. Ms. Pat said years passed before the adults began to talk about it. So the kids were left with a lot of assumptions.
Dino: We had heard different stories. Some people said he was dead. Some people said he was beaten to death. As a child, I heard his ears were cut off. And I remember one day, I don’t know, eight months later, nine months later, he walks into The Kozy Corner.
Rhym: Dino had grown up watching Charlie eat club sandwiches at his dad’s restaurant, The Kozy Corner. Dino thought Charlie was gone for good. And now here he was, walking through the door as if nothing happened.
Dino: And I remember everybody, everybody knew him. The Black cook came out to see him. And the waitresses all knew him. And I remember I was staring at him because I thought his ears had been cut off. And I think he knew what I was doing. And he swooped me up and he said, “You looking at my ears, boy?” “No, sir. No, sir.” And he said, “I got ears.” And he did. You couldn’t tell, you know, that his ears were cut at all. I’m sure it affected him and changed his thinking and perspective of life. But he seemed normal. When I would sit, watch Dad sitting, shooting the breeze, and he still came in The Kozy Corner. He still went to the Broadway theater, sat in the white section. He still did what he wanted to do.
Rhym: Eventually, five Klan members were arrested for the 1950 attack on Charlie’s place, including the Grand Dragon, Thomas Hamilton. If anything, these arrests only emboldened the Klan. They continued to rally around the Carolinas. And they ditched the hoods. They stopped hiding their faces. No shame. No fear of being recognized. And almost immediately after Charlie leaves jail, he’s picked up again for having a gun and an obscene film. Not that it really matters, but Charlie said the film wasn’t his. It was collateral for a $3 loan he had made to a friend who was short of cash. But the gun was for protection. Charlie spoke to the newspaper that covered his arrest.
He said, “I know it was against the law to have that gun, but it was right in my conscience because my life has been threatened and I’m still in danger.” He added, “I’m a free man, and I’m not a free man. I don’t know who is or who isn’t a member of the Klan.” It’s this last line, “I don’t know who is or who isn’t a member of the Klan,” that sticks out. I think that’s a strategic lie on Charlie’s part. I think he was trying to send a public message to his attackers that he wasn’t their threat. All five Klansmen are cleared of all charges. Charlie left Myrtle Beach for a while. He spent time with friends in Philly and New York. He went to D.C. and gave that testimony to the FBI, but nothing came of it.
And eventually, Charlie came home. Even though Dino couldn’t see the difference, Charlie had changed. Some said he got a little meaner. Some say he faded into the background. The club may have been called Charlie’s Place, but it was as much Sarah’s place as it was his. Sarah had always had a hand in its success. In all of their business, they were true partners.
Herbert: After the Klan raid, until that place closed, she had to manage that place. He was there often, but he wasn’t the same. Everybody says Charlie wasn’t the same. But she had to be tough in a man’s world. So, she didn’t take no foolishness.
Rhym: When Charlie took a back seat, Sarah kept it going, and she booked some of the most famous music acts the club ever saw.
Herbert: And she ran it with an iron fist under velvet gloves, so to speak. Ruth Brown and those, they loved her. Bill Pinckney, the last of the original Drifters, he loved her. When Otis Redding and cats like that were coming, that was Ms. Sarah doing. She had Charlie’s old contacts. There was some guy down in Texas. They called him the Peacock. I think he was a gangster, Black gangster. But he controlled all the top Black artists. And he was a friend of hers, so I’m thinking she got it through him. But she had all the artists there. She told me the only person that she didn’t get there to play, and he’d come there, but the only person she didn’t get there to play was James Brown. Everybody says James Brown was there, and they’d see his bus outside. The bus, he’d park the bus there, and I think some of his players would stay there. James would most likely go up to Atlantic Beach because you could be oceanfront up there. But she said James would come, said he was just as nice as could be. He’d sit down, we’d talk and talk. But he just wanted too much money, and I couldn’t afford him. Sarah came and handled all of that.
Rhym: I think the fact that Sarah rebuilt the club and ran it as long as she did helped solidify Carver Street in the minds of its residents. 1950s Carver Street is the symbol of the glory days for many in Myrtle Beach. The people on The Hill remember it as this thriving time when Black people ran their own businesses—for Black people. The fact that Charlie’s Place survived and lived on, even after the KKK attack in August 1950, the fact that the big artists kept coming, it meant that the Klan’s terrorism wasn’t the end of the story. Instead, the attack was a moment of defiance, of resistance, a testament to the strength of the community. Professor Bobby Donaldson says Charlie Fitzgerald’s actions sent a message.
Bobby: So here is someone whose business is riddled with bullets. Here is someone who is thrown in the back of a car and kidnapped, who is stripped and beaten. Here is someone whose ear is slashed with the knife of a Klansman. And I guess an ordinary person would say “To hell with it. I’m going to the promised land. I’m going elsewhere.” But Charlie was not ordinary. And I think the defiance is probably what motivated him to stay right there, that he had already built a business and he was going to rebuild and stay. And he did. And so Charlie Fitzgerald returns to the very space where he defied the Klan and stayed there until his death.
Rhym: It encouraged the community to defend their home at all costs. Clyde Foster gave me an example of this. He’s lived in Myrtle Beach his whole life, where everyone knows him as Frankie.
Clyde: Almost everybody owned businesses on that boulevard, they know about me. You know, because I’m that type of person. I’m a public man.
Rhym: Frankie hadn’t been born when the KKK attacked Charlie’s place in 1950, but he heard the story. His family members and friends had been there, and he saw how it had traumatized them. Frankie’s aunt never let a white person enter her house again after that night. So Frankie grew up expecting that there would be a time when he too would have to fight, when he’d also have to defend his community. And in the 1970s, he thought the time had come. It was a night when The Temptations came to town to play on Carver Street. A rumor got out that the Klan was planning an attack. Frankie was a teenager, and he and his friends wanted to be prepared.
Clyde: We were young. On Carver Street here, almost all the young people, we were in trees and stuff, waiting on them. We had Molotov cocktails. We were young. We weren’t going to let that happen again. We said we would never let them come through here. The older people, they couldn’t do it. They already went through that experience. We was in trees and in the woods on Carver Street, waiting on them to come. We were going to destroy them. We were going to blow them up.
Rhym: But Frankie says the word got out that these kids were ready. He thinks the store where they bought bullets let the Klan know that the community was armed.
Clyde: And the way we figured out, they warned them, said, “Don’t go back in that neighborhood. Them people are ready for you.” And they didn’t come. They did not come back.
Rhym: Charlie died on July 4, 1955, five years after that night in August. He had lung cancer.
Leroy: Because we used to go over there, and he used to be in the bed. He had a tank. He used to walk around with the breathing tank, you know, and stuff like that.
Rhym: According to his death certificate, he died eight months from diagnosis. He returned to Toccoa, Georgia, to be buried, where he was born. He returned home as Lucious Rucker.
Leroy: And Sarah cremated him.
Patricia: She was devastated. And she cried a lot. But she tried to keep the place open. And a lot of Charlie’s friends made sure she had the support for the whole family, the whole yard, but nobody could get her out of that languish she was in. Because she was upset.
Rhym: Finally, in 1965, Sarah decided it was time to close Charlie’s Place. Then she took what seemed like a hard pivot. She left the nightclub life and became a Jehovah’s Witness.
Dino: Ms. Sarah found religion, and she not only gave up that life, but she didn’t want anything to do with it. She never wanted to talk about it. I remember I tried to chat with her, and everybody told me, she will not talk about it. She walked away from that part of her life and never again spoke of it or involved herself in it.
Leroy: And she closed the business down, and a few years later, she tore it down. And people were really upset with her for tearing the building down.
Rhym: But no one who had been there, including Ms. Sarah, would forget. Herbert says Sarah told him that she knew exactly who was in the KKK in town and who raided their club that night. But she would never tell for fear of being taken.
Herbert: She told me something that stuck with me. She said, “You know what? I’m not going to die until I know every last one of them is dead.” And she wasn’t playing, because I got a picture of her with me. She was 94 and still eye candy. And she died about three years later than that. She was working the day she died. She didn’t have to work. She had money, but she liked to work.
Rhym: In the ocean, time is long. The Atlantic Ocean has existed for over a hundred million years. The thundering waves and friction beat rock and glass into pebbles, and eventually into sand. A human life in the scheme of things is a blip, like a grain of that sand. But all those grains add up to something. Still, the physical geography of Myrtle Beach is fragile. The beach erodes. In 1954, Hurricane Hazel hit Myrtle Beach and wiped out 80 percent of its oceanfront properties, virtually erasing the shoreline. Charlie and Sarah Fitzgerald were once fixtures of Myrtle Beach. But decades after they died, people started to forget.
Herbert: Ms. Sarah, I miss her to this day. I thank Ms. Sarah a lot. I told her, I said, “One day I’m going to do something with that property.” I made her a promise, and I was determined to keep it. I pushed and pushed and pushed, and the biggest problem was getting people around here, the younger people, the ones that’s 40, 50 years old, getting them on board, because they didn’t know anything about it. That Klan raid scared Black people, so this is what terrorism does. This is how terrorism wins. It’s not about killing somebody. It’s about putting fear in somebody, and it frightened the people in this community so badly that they didn’t tell their children, because they felt like their children, some of them, may have wanted to retaliate, because they knew who did what. Don’t think they didn’t know who did what. They knew who did what. So when I started talking about Charlie’s Place, nobody knew what I was talking about. None of the young ones, the 40 and 50 years old.
Rhym: In 2016, all that was left of Charlie’s Place was the house Sarah and Charlie lived in. The city decided to knock it down.
Herbert: They were having a demolition party at Charlie’s Place. They billed it as a demolition party. That’s valuable land up there.
Rhym: City Councilman Mike Chestnut says he had a sledgehammer in his hand when he got a call from a neighbor who said, “Don’t you know the history of this place?”
Michael Chestnut: And my phone started ringing off the hook, you know, hey, y’all don’t need to tear that place down. Y’all don’t really know what you got there. We need to save it. And, you know, talk about the history, you know, the early Black community here in Myrtle Beach. And I kid you not, we stopped the demolition that day.
Rhym: He halted the demolition and fought to preserve the building instead as a landmark, which they did. Today, there’s a small business incubator in the old inn. And the Fitzgerald’s house still stands as a museum. A love letter to that time. And every year, jazz and R&B artists from all over come here for the Myrtle Beach Jazz Fest, in the exact same spot where the Whispering Pines once stood.
On my last trip to Myrtle Beach, I went to Jazz Fest. I looked up towards the sky full of stars, at those pine trees swaying above me. I thought about Billie Holiday and Count Basie, Sarah and Charlie. And I noticed the crowd, people from all walks of life, hundreds of people just soaking in the music together. It can be hard to pinpoint how Sarah and Charlie left their mark, beyond the lessons and memories they left with the people that knew them personally. But on nights like this, it’s clear. This is what Charlie and Sarah fought for. A place where everyone could experience the music, no matter who you are or what you look like, in Myrtle Beach. These grounds remain a special place. An echo of what they built is here, for anyone who wants to come and experience it. I thought to myself, “If Charlie and Sarah could see it, they’d really be pleased.”
There’s a memory of Charlie that Roddy Brown shared with me. It’s how I pictured him at the end. It surpasses the cut earlobes and the breathing tanks. Roddy remembers seeing Charlie. It’s an image of him on the beach, the sun kissing his skin. To me, it’s an image of defiance.
Roddy Brown: When I came here in 1951 in December, when we moved in, Charlie was back on the beach. Charlie was going strong. Charlie was doing fine.
Rhym: Roddy had never known Charlie before the Klan attack. He only knew this version after. And to him, it looked good. It’s interesting what’s lost to history and what remains. I had to go digging to find the fragments that were still there. The stories people held onto all these years. The story of Myrtle Beach. And in Roddy’s case, the memory he was left with was a lone Black man on a crowded white beach in summer, flagrantly defying the rules. An image of what might be possible, what they all deserved. As for Ms. Pat, she’s still here too. I feel so lucky to have spent time with her and hear her stories about Myrtle Beach and her life.
Patricia: It was nice growing up in Myrtle Beach. And I never wanted to leave home. Everybody left home and went to New York and went to Florida. I love Myrtle Beach. I love Myrtle Beach all my life. You know, I go visit, but I love my home. And everybody says why don’t you—I don’t want to leave.
Rhym: You can find her in the same spot in Myrtle Beach, like a beacon, just inside her front door in her La-Z-Boy, ready to call out to visitors, waiting for whoever wants to come in and hear a story about a time gone by.
Patricia: Thank you for listening.
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Charlie’s Place is a production of Atlas Obscura and Rococo Punch, in partnership with Pushkin Industries and presented by Visit Myrtle Beach. It’s written and produced by Emily Forman. Our story editor is Erika Lantz. Our team at Atlas Obscura is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Llobell, and Emily Yates.