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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. Every time I visited Myrtle Beach, I went to Ms. Pat’s house, the woman who lived in Myrtle Beach her whole life. And every time I talked to her, I learned something new. Oh, Ms. Pat, you said that Charlie was a very classy man?
Patricia Burgess: Yes, he was.
Rhym: But what else do you remember about him?
Patricia: That he was white.
Rhym: White? You mean white passing?
Patricia: Uh-huh.
Rhym: He was? So he was really light-skinned?
Patricia: Yeah, my grandmama was too. She was white too. Yes, ma’am.
Rhym: I’d seen the two photos. I’d called Charlie light-skinned, but to say he passed, that’s a stretch. To me, it’s obvious he was Black. Still, almost everyone I talked to mentioned this point about Charlie’s skin. It obviously mattered. But how much? People on The Hill told me again and again how Charlie conspicuously broke the rules. They told me that when Charlie went to the movie theater, he sat in the white section. Everyone noticed, but no one bothered him. They told me he ate in white restaurants. One person said Charlie walked around the waterfront bare-chested, when Black people who were there to work couldn’t even wear shorts. At the height of summer, he would almost blend in with the tanned white bodies. I don’t know if that part is true, but it’s part of the lore. When everyone on The Hill was treading water, it’s almost like he could walk above it. Still, why Charlie? Why could he skirt the rule that everyone else had to follow? I’m Rhym Guissé. This is Charlie’s Place. Episode 3: Power Cedes to Power.
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: Herbert Riley says, you don’t forget a smell. And the smell he can’t forget is gas, coming from the trunk of his family’s old Buick.
Herbert Riley: You know, it was dangerous traveling in those days.
Rhym: In the 1950s, whenever Herbert’s family went on long trips, his parents filled jugs of gas and packed them in the trunk, because you couldn’t be sure where it would be safe to stop.
Herbert: I learned early that everybody didn’t treat everybody nice. And you had to know where you were going, and you had to be prepared.
Rhym: I wanted to hear Herbert Riley’s story because he’s sort of an expert on Charlie Fitzgerald and Charlie’s Place. But along the way, I learned about Herbert’s experience growing up. And it really helped me understand the context Charlie was living in. Herbert’s family knew that on the road in South Carolina, it was extremely dangerous to stop just anywhere. Violence against Black people was a split-second instinct for many white folk. You could get tortured, murdered, attacked by a lynch mob, and vanish. The only hope at avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time was the Green Book, a kind of triple-A guide that listed hotels, restaurants, and gas stations that had the reputation of being friendly to Black people. In the Jim Crow era South, it increased your odds of surviving the trip.
Herbert: It was more like a shield. Believe me, it saved lives, particularly in the South.
Rhym: Herbert remembers those road trips as a little kid. Because it wasn’t always clear when they’d come across the next safe place to stop, Herbert’s mom filled the car with food. Eggs, ham sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, fried chicken. For Herbert, it was fun because it was like a picnic. Most of the time, he stared out the window, counting cars. Occasionally he caught glimpses of danger on the road. Scenes he could tell were a threat without fully understanding why. He didn’t know about the horror of lynchings yet. His parents had shielded him from that. He remembers the old Buick driving through Myrtle Beach. As they got closer to the water, a huge crowd appeared ahead. It was a Ku Klux Klan parade blocking their path. The men wouldn’t let Herbert’s family through. Herbert’s dad stopped the car. He got out and walked over to speak with them. Herbert and his mother watched from the car. He prefaces the story with an explanation: that his mom was fair-skinned. She could almost pass as white. Maybe he mentioned it because it worked in their favor that day. It’s hard to say why he made that point clear. Herbert’s dad got back in the car. And they drove on.
Herbert: I remember how my mama was after that. She was shaky. They’d seen things that I hadn’t seen, you know.
Rhym: Herbert was starting to learn the power dynamics of the South in the 1950s. Starting to see the subtle and dangerous dance of finding power and using it to survive. When it came to being Black and having power in Myrtle Beach, the road was riddled with landmines. Black folks came up with all kinds of creative ways to navigate it, Charlie Fitzgerald more than anyone. But in the case of Charlie Fitzgerald, his power eventually became a threat. I wish I could have met Herbert, but he died in 2019. His interview was conducted by Candacy Taylor, who exhaustively documented Green Book sites throughout the country in her book, Overground Railroad. Anytime Candacy learned of a Green Book site, she’d go there to see what she could find. And her quest brought her to Myrtle Beach, to Charlie’s Place. Charlie’s Place was listed in the Green Book as early as 1950, although it had been in operation over a decade by then. And that’s how Candacy met Herbert. Herbert made it his mission to preserve the memory of Charlie’s Place. We spoke with Herbert’s widow, and from the sounds of it, his research almost seemed like an obsession. He could feel its importance.
Mary Riley: I have actually seen him just stay up all night just writing papers so that he could attend a meeting the next day to actually know what he’s talking about, to be affluent with the knowledge, you know. I’d be like, Herb, just get some rest. You know, but he was just remarkable when it came to Charlie’s Place. He had a real passion for it.
Herbert: I’ve been fighting for a long time. Everything’s got a term on it, and that’s just a part of life. You have to accept it. So I got a little fight left, but I can’t do what I used to do.
Rhym: Where this drive came from, I don’t know. Herbert was only four years old when Charlie died, so many of the stories he tells about Charlie don’t come from his own recollection. There aren’t a lot of people still alive who have that firsthand knowledge. Yet here Herbert was in this recorded interview, telling us from beyond the grave what he had gathered. His obsessive work gave me more pieces to the puzzle, because that’s what this project was: a puzzle. People shared stories through the foggy veil of personal memory, and they didn’t always agree. I pieced together the memories to learn what I could from those who were alive and those who were dead. But how many ghosts would I need to talk to before this story would be complete? The stories of Herbert’s family gave me a picture of the power dynamics Charlie Fitzgerald was up against in Myrtle Beach. For much of Herbert’s life, his parents lived in two places: his mom in North Carolina and his dad over a four-hour drive south in Myrtle Beach. They hadn’t divorced, they hadn’t separated. It was simply because his mother was disgusted with South Carolina.
Herbert: And she’d say, I’m never going back there, you don’t know what they did to your cousin. I said, what did they do?
Rhym: Herbert’s cousin was a well-known reverend in South Carolina. He advocated for equal education for Black children. But using his power in that way angered some people in the community. His house mysteriously burned down. He received death threats. And finally, a group of white men drove him out of South Carolina.
Herbert: They took him to the border, they took a shotgun and went, boom, boom, boom, run, n****, run, don’t you ever come back. I remember that to the day I die, you know. This is what we lived through. And my family really lived through a lot of stuff because they were involved in a lot of things, you know.
Rhym: Herbert’s reverend cousin would never come back. And he would die homesick. It makes sense Herbert’s mom didn’t like South Carolina. But Herbert’s father made the place work for him, even under the narrow constraints of the time. And so Herbert grew up in Myrtle Beach. He knew there were two worlds in Myrtle Beach. First, there was The Hill. The Hill was where Black people lived and had fun. They ran their own restaurants and shops, clubs and a barbershop. It’s where Charlie’s place was. If you stood on The Hill and faced the ocean and started to walk, you eventually hit Ocean Boulevard, the last street before the ocean. Just you and sand and then thousands of miles of water. Ocean Boulevard was the main attraction for white tourists on vacation. And it was full of grand oceanfront hotels.
Herbert: The original tourist trade in Myrtle Beach, the hook was this antebellum type lifestyle. If you look at pictures of the old large hotels like the Ocean Forest or Patricia, you’ll see these columns like you see in Gone with the Wind. And Black people were all the chefs. Black people were all the waiters. Black people taught the rich down here adequately because you had to be that way. You had to know how to carry yourself any place to be working in some of this. You’re working in white dinner jackets, sometimes white gloves. You know, the stuff that we see and we kind of get offended in a way when we see it. But then when you realize the elegance, the dignity that these men and women had to carry themselves.
Rhym: And that’s a tension that a lot of people in Myrtle Beach felt. Of course it’s offensive. And I’d say more than that, deeply disturbing. Seeing these rich white tourists being served by Black people in buildings that remind you of Gone with the Wind. But Herbert also understands that workers felt a certain dignity too. They moved with the elegance and white gloves this wealthy world required. There was pride in that. A power in that. And this is how Herbert’s dad made Myrtle Beach work for him. He was a maître d’ at one of the grand hotels on Ocean Boulevard.
Herbert: A maître d’ made more money than doctors at that time. A good maître d’. Dad would have a bed full of money on Sundays. And he split it with all the waiters. He’d take it apart. But he split it with all the waiters. It wasn’t enough, he’d give that to them. And because of that, he won great respect.
Rhym: As a maître d’, Herbert’s dad ran the dining room at The Patricia Inn.
Herbert: The Patricia dining room was famous. They say every millionaire in the South ate there. Richard Nixon ate there. Strom Thurmond used to be there all the time. All the segregationists used to eat there.
Rhym: Strom Thurmond was a governor of South Carolina, one of the most famous cheerleaders for segregation of all time. These were people that controlled everyone’s quality of life. And the people they seemed most eager to control were Black people. But they couldn’t control everything.
Herbert: They couldn’t get a good seat if daddy didn’t give it to them. You know, that’s what power is about. If you’re not rich, it’s who you know, not what you know. You know, if Strom Thurmond wanted to sit beside the window at Patricia, he had to go to my father. And he wasn’t coming in there unless he had his coat and towel. And he wasn’t going to act no fool when he got in there. Nobody was.
Rhym: Finding your place in this white tourism economy was one of the few choices if you wanted to thrive. And I heard stories of thriving in spite of the racism. People who worked during the tourist season at these hotels went on to become doctors. One of the people who worked at the Patricia Inn later became the first Black chief justice of South Carolina’s Supreme Court.
Herbert: They didn’t allow obstacles to get in their way. They didn’t cop out. They had to deal with a situation that, be thankful that we don’t have on our shoulders.
Rhym: But still, the power was lopsided. Extremely so.
Herbert: Can I tell you a quick story? There’s a beautiful lady there named Clea Robertson. And she was what they called a coffee girl. You know, she served coffee. And one of the caucasians made a very lewd remark, which I’m not going to say, to her. And she was insulted. And she walked away from him. And he said, can’t you hear me? I told you I want to such and such and so and so you. How much will it cost? She told my father. And the guy came to my dad when he saw Clea talking to him and asked him something to the point, like, well, what’s wrong? I’m trying to give that little n**** girl some money. Next thing he knew, daddy’s hand was upside his head. Daddy knocked him down. Dad was fired after 39 years. And his honor meant more to him than a few dollars. And the owner was basically a good guy. But that’s just the time we lived in, you know? But that’s a true story.
Rhym: A vacation is a getaway, an escape from work, from cold weather, general hustle and bustle. But the way Herbert paints it, in Myrtle Beach, the people came to return to something that they didn’t want to let go of. In the heat of the South Carolina sun and on windswept, whites-only beaches, they clung to these parts of the past, these very ugly parts.
Herbert: What used to fascinate me, the white folks, they’d come down here and get as dark as they possibly could. Sometimes they’d get burnt, like, they’d turn red, you know? If anybody’s colored, white folks were colored, by the way. They’d turn all kinds of colors. Sun did strange things to them.
Rhym: I went to Myrtle Beach many times over the course of reporting this story but I never once had time to go for a swim. I’d get as far as the boulevard and I’d stand there and look at the water and let the breeze hit my face before running to my next interview. Of course I could have gone in that water if I wanted to—and I wanted to. It was so inviting. This momentary longing I felt must be nothing compared to what the people on The Hill would have experienced. To walk by that water, day in and day out, on their way to work, past white tourists and know you weren’t allowed to swim in that water? To touch it? I can’t imagine. But I eventually learned of a place up the coast where Black people could experience the balm of a seaside summer. A place that could touch the water. It was called Atlantic Beach. Its nickname was the Black Pearl. The way locals talked about it, it almost sounded like a mirage.
Denise Holloman: So think of a carnival with a Ferris wheel, the twister, the carousel. You’ve got an oceanfront, you’ve got dining. And think of that with people who look like you from wall to wall.
Gretta Gore: Wall to wall.
Denise: With sandy toes where they’ve been in the beach. It is a feeling that says you belong. This is home.
Rhym: Atlantic Beach was more than a dozen miles from Carver Street. But this home, this oasis, was worth the trip when you could catch a ride. Because it was run by Black people, for Black people. There were big orange ropes that extended out into the ocean. They sectioned off Atlantic Beach from the neighboring white beaches. But inside the ropes, you could ignore all of that.
Betty Powell: You know, you get tired of working for the other guy. And so you was happy to see a number of Black people in business. Give you a pride, sense of ownership, happiness, freedom, and peace. And you love to see your Black people having fun. You know, everybody deserve a vacation. Lest you might get sad.
Rhym: How Atlantic Beach came to exist is its own wild story. It was a collective effort. Black people in the area pooled their money together. Some who had started working in kitchens in Myrtle Beach. They chipped in and bought land on the shore. And I learned that Sarah and Charlie Fitzgerald were two of its biggest investors.
Herbert: Atlantic Beach was jumping before integration. They say his money did that.
Rhym: I knew the Fitzgeralds were rich. They had multiple businesses. There was the hotel and the club and that high-stakes poker game in the back. They also had a cab company. I just didn’t know how rich.
Herbert: A lot of the white businesses downtown, Charlie had money in them. Some of them he owned and had white people frontin’ him like white people usually do with Black folk. He helped people, he loaned people, he wanted to be paid back. He wasn’t to be trifled with. And he had to have this strong demeanor.
Rhym: More than eating in white restaurants, more than sitting in the white section of the movie theater, this detail shocked me. When I learned that Charlie loaned white people in town money, this changed my perception of those lines and the ways in which Charlie made them bend in his favor. He seemed to be moving according to a roadmap of his own making. But if Charlie intended to stake a claim in Myrtle Beach, it didn’t hurt to have a little muscle to back him up. Herbert says Charlie always had guys around him, his enforcers. And long after Charlie died, they kept watch over his wife, Sarah.
Herbert: Guys like Kidnapper Goings, Porkchop Hemingway, all these guys had nicknames, you know. These people were nobody to mess with. Porkchop would put you in the ground. And Reuben was strong as an ox. Kidnapper was a lover, but he knew how to get things done, you know.
Rhym: There was something else from Herbert’s conversation with Candacy Taylor that stuck out to me about Charlie.
Candacy Taylor: You know, I hate to compare him to, like, Omar from The Wire, but he’s got that kind of swagger and that, you know.
Herbert: Omar was bad, wasn’t he?
Candacy: He was. He was on the fringes of, you know, he was a bootlegger.
Herbert: Yeah, he was a bootlegger.
Rhym: Dino Thompson, the Greek kid who loved to dance, said Charlie was a bootlegger too. And even though this was after Prohibition, there were still a lot of ways to bootleg, to manufacture and sell liquor illegally, mostly tactics for evading taxes. I don’t know if that was what Charlie was up to, but Herbert says he had a special arrangement with the police chief to sell liquor his way. The police chief was a guy named Carlisle Newton.
Herbert: Carlisle was supposed to be Charlie’s buddy. Charlie was paying Carlisle so Charlie could sell his liquor, you know.
Rhym: What’s more powerful than bribing the white police chief and getting away with it? And no matter what it was, Charlie was great at recognizing a need. And that brings us to Whispering Pines itself. Back to Charlie’s Place. Charlie wanted to give Black people who came to work in Myrtle Beach a place to hang out, a place to have a good time after work. So that’s why Charlie built his club.
Herbert: A nice club, not some rinky-dink hole in the wall, where you’d be safe, where you could take anybody. Even in those days, too many people told me that was not to be true. You could take anybody you care as long as you carried yourself in a civilized, upright fashion and minded your own business and didn’t harass women and things, which was normal at that time, you were treated with dignity and you could have a good time. But he took advantage of the fact that there was a market down here because there was no place else to go.
Rhym: So Charlie had given them a place to go, but there was another need: a place to stay. Because all season, there were famous Black musicians coming to town.
Herbert: I mentioned the Ocean Forest Hotel a while ago. That was the first million dollar hotel in the South. It was built in the ’20s. And because of that, you have the elite of the elite staying at the Ocean Forest. Now, they had some white entertainment, but they wanted the best entertainment. So they’d have Basie or they’d have Ellington or they’d have the Mills brothers, who were like Temptations when I was growing up. Groups like that, you know, and they couldn’t stay there and they couldn’t socialize there.
Rhym: Because they were Black. Herbert said he knew of one exception, Sam and Dave, the original singers of the song “Soul Man.” They were the only Black artists that he had heard of at the time who stayed at the Ocean Forest Hotel. But with a caveat: They had to use a special hidden elevator to come and go so the white patrons wouldn’t know they slept there. These kinds of limitations on Black artists weren’t unique to Myrtle Beach. This was all over the South. There were only a handful of places where Black performers could stay during Jim Crow, and stay safely.
Herbert: So some of them would go up to Atlantic Beach. Maybe Duke would go up to Atlantic Beach because—get an oceanfront room. But many of them wanted to stay down here. So Charlie built the hotel.
Rhym: Charlie built an inn next to his nightclub. Now, performers could stay just a walk away from their gigs instead of 12 or 15 miles.
Herbert: They’d be playing, after they finished playing the Ocean Forest, they’d do what we call nowadays a Midnight Special.
Rhym: They’d do a second performance.
Rhym: They’d do a Midnight Special at Charlie’s place.
Herbert: The word got out to the wealthy elite that were coming down from the North and the South that, oh, man, guess who’s playing over at Charlie’s place? So and so. Duke Ellington’s over there.
Rhym: Charlie built it for Black people, but it drew in white people from all over, too. Everyone wanted to go to Charlie’s place.
Herbert: Mills Brothers, Ray Charles, although Ray was playing backup for this other guy in those days. So they’d want to come and they’d come over. Any old person in this community, any old person, they will remember this. I can barely remember because I was a child at the heyday of this stuff. But from one end of Carver Street to the other end—and the Carver Street was a dirt road then—you have Cadillacs and Packards. On Saturday night, Friday night, men, white men in tuxedos, white women with jewels and gowns will come out there. And, you know, Black folk, I don’t care how down and out we’ve been, we’ve got our hands on a couple of dollars, we’re not about letting somebody outdress us. So the Black women will come out dressed like that. And you can look at pictures in those days and you can see my father and all his friends many times in tuxes, white tuxes. They were sharp. They carried themselves good. Old spice was out there to be wearing the old spice. And they had a good time.
Rhym: Herbert’s description matches what a lot of people said about Charlie’s Place in his heyday. Even the few people who saw it firsthand brought to mind similar images. But no one described it as vividly and enthusiastically as Herbert. In his mind, it is so alive and on a pedestal. A lot of people talked about Charlie’s Place this way. It reminded me of something we say in French, le poc, which is like a time you romanticize back in the day. But in Herbert’s case, he’s nostalgic for a place he never really knew. And one of the romantic lines I heard about this time in Myrtle Beach was “Segregation by day and integration at night.” Jim Crow era theaters and clubs were divided inside. It was usually done with a rope or a balcony. The rope sectioned off Black people from the main action, where white people were able to move about more freely. Charlie’s Place intended to keep the lines drawn according to the rules. He had a balcony, but his balcony was for white people. Charlie flipped it.
Herbert: He had a section up in the balcony area, you know, like they used to put Black folk in the balcony in theaters when I was a kid. You didn’t have to go through that. But we did. And he’d have a section for them. That was for them. But they wanted to get down on the floor because that’s where the party was. He flipped it on them. The whites are the ones who really integrated the place now because Charlie had a segregated section for them, but they wanted to get down where the action was.
Rhym: The music was so good and the dancing so intoxicating that eventually the lines began to blur. This was an important moment when the white people came down from the balcony and stepped on the dance floor. It would be the legacy of Charlie’s Place, a symbol of unity, a surprising image to associate with the Jim Crow era South. Segregation by day, integration by night. But it would come at a cost. Years after Charlie died, after his father’s heyday at Patricia Inn, Herbert would join the tradition of Black waiters working on the Boulevard. He was working as a bellhop at the Ocean Forest Hotel; like the smell of gas coming from the trunk of his family’s Buick, there would be another thing that he would never forget.
Herbert: There’s one character I’ll never forget. His name is Carlisle Newton.
Rhym: Carlisle Newton was a police chief in Myrtle Beach from 1948 to 1974. The same police chief that people speculated Charlie knew well and paid off to bootleg. And every Wednesday, according to Herbert, Carlisle came by the hotel. He’d leave with a manila envelope. A lot of the staff noticed that. They knew that Carlisle, the police chief, was there to pick up his payoff. One day, Herbert was on a shift and saw Carlisle come by, just like every other Wednesday.
Herbert: I can remember that vividly. He’d come by every Wednesday and he’d leave with a manila envelope.
Rhym: Herbert says somebody he was with said something along the lines of, there he is going to get his money. Carlisle overheard that.
Herbert: We didn’t think he even heard us. He came back by. We were standing beside a brick wall. This fellow took me, I guess, he’s going to make an example out of somebody. Slammed me against the wall, pulled out his weapon, big gun, looked like a dirty Harry pistol or something, you know, jammed it in my stomach and said, n****, if you ever tell anybody you saw me do anything, I’ll blow your goddamn brains out. That sticks in your mind for the rest of your life.
Rhym: This just makes me marvel at how Charlie Fitzgerald made a man like that, a man willing to shove a gun in a boy’s stomach, work for him. How long would this last before Charlie became a target? Eventually, they won’t want this Black man to have this much power. From the moment white people stepped foot on Charlie’s dance floor, it would set something in motion. And there would be a limit.
Herbert: Power cedes to power, and that’s it. And Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.
Rhym: Next time on Charlie’s Place …
Bobby Donaldson: He comes under fire. He comes under attack. And that was a story because everyone knew Charlie. And if Charlie’s intimidated and threatened at this moment, then we would know clearly what that terror meant for other people.
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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.