Saturday’s editorial takes a look at the pair joining the South Carolina Hall of Fame next week. Parts of it may look familiar to anybody reading the blog earlier this week. But this time, it comes with poetry.
On Monday, the South Carolina Hall of Fame housed at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center will induct two new members, civil rights pioneer Judge Ernest A. Finney Jr. and Declaration of Independence signer Thomas Lynch Sr.
Do they both deserve to be remembered? Certainly. But it says something profound – particularly during Black History Month – about our history as a state and how far we’ve come that one was an aristocratic slave-owning plantation owner and the other a tireless promoter of racial equality.
Lynch was born at Hopsewee Plantation and educated in Georgetown before being sent off to England to finish his education. An 1856 biography said of him that “In all the relations of life, whether as a husband, a friend, a patriot, or the master of the slave, he appeared conscious of his obligations, and found his pleasure in discharging them.” The rice plantation owner is perhaps best known for being the signer who died the youngest, in 1779 at age 30.
Meanwhile, Finney, who became the first black man to hold numerous posts in the state legislature and judicial branch, began his career by teaching school in Conway in the ’50s because he could not find a job as a lawyer. He also waited tables in Myrtle Beach, including a stint serving the then-all-white S.C. Bar. In 1960 he began his own law firm in Sumter and defended some 6,000 clients involved in demonstrations and sit-ins during the civil rights era, working with other civil rights heroes and S.C. State alumni like Judge Matthew Perry. Eventually he rose to be chief justice of the State Supreme Court.
Finney’s daughter, Nikky, a poet-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, told The (Columbia) State last year that her father’s beliefs are “very simple and very complicated” and are drawn from principles set forth by America’s Founding Fathers in establishing a nation and a guiding Constitution. “Those words matter to him,” she says.
In that love of the law Finney finds common ground with Lynch, who similarly struggled against cruel oppression and who helped craft those very principles. Both men served in the vanguard of revolutions pursuing greater justice and fairness.
Beyond that, however, it’s unlikely that this year’s two inductees would have had much else in common, one being born into the lap of luxury and the other fighting for every recognition. Whether Lynch would have even acknowledged a common humanity with Finney may be an open question. Nevertheless, they are both undeniably part of the history of South Carolina. It’s a testament to the progress we’ve made as a state and a society that on Monday we can honor both.
Ode to a beloved father
Ernest Finney’s daughter, Nikky, who won the National Book Award last year for her poetry, honored him with this poem in 1994 when he was sworn in as the first black chief justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina:
He never had it made.
Just an ordinary brown boy
from a place and people
who sweet-feet him
everything they had in double doses
just in case his man size pockets should ever
have a hole in them
just an ordinary brown corduroy boy
from a people who never had it made
but who still managed
to make whatever they were to be from scratch
an ordinary boy whose mother never got to bathe or
watch him grow
or gaze him from the farmhouse window
where he loved to sit on a summertime box
of Virginia-cured daydreams
umbrellaed by the big oak tree and in between chores
and stare away at the long dirt road
the only way in or out to grandpop’s farm
the same country road that all country boys try to
stare down in their day
wondering what or who could ever be at the other end
watching it for signs of life
maybe somebody from the city might visit
from one of those shiny ready made places
who could make magic of an ordinary brown boy’s
country fried life
maybe one of those places far away
would take him just as plain as he was
and grow him up to be something legal
maybe even handsome, even dap debonair ... somebody
who could easy talk
for the regular folk and then articulate smooth
to all the others
when those folk needed him to be
shiny as new money
just for them
He wanted to be like one of those new Black men
who came visiting from the North to the South
talking pretty at the State College of South Carolina
one of those kinds with the pocket change and shiny grey suits
with a hundred pounds of law books under their arms like
some kind of natural growth
he figured they were country boys too ... who never had it made
but who somehow ... had made it
and they walked around like nobody else ... stout with the
law on their minds
and a personal sense of justice in their hearts
maybe he could be one of those when he grew up
He never had it made
but he had a proud father and a circle of people
who kept his dying mother’s promise
to raise the boy up at their sides
and not just anywhere ... with strangers
his own mother knew he would never have her there
to do the raising herself
today is a long promise kept, Mama Carlene
this one
that one there
never had it made
he mighta’ had it sweetened and silted
chewed up and spit out
prayed over and molded around
made from scratch
in somebody’s kitchen
over somebody’s fire
beneath his grandfather’s wagon wheels
under his daddy’s stern tutelage
but he never had it made
you know the way I mean, all silverized and shiny ...
handed down
he mighta’ had it boiled up
explained and defined fryed and gravied
by an early-risin’ grandmother ... or a significant
Claflin College
he mighta’ even fished it out and washed it down himself
in scalding water ... a time or two
and I’m quite sure he soda-jerked it through and through
and baked his dreams in enough tears and high hopes
to try and make sure it was gonna happen
but he never had it made
it was never given to him on some royal platter
never promised at his birth
the making of this man’s life
came from salt water tears ... salt water sweat
from love and hard work ... and from the graciousness
of his God
he never had it made
but he always loved the law
how he always loved the law
and even when his impulsive passionate daughter argued
about history and what wasn’t right or fair
how the scales of justice never seemed balanced in her eyes
how he always with the calm of a sailor who knew the ocean
like an old and faithful well traveled road would say
“The law works, Girl”
Believing completely as if he had written every word of
it himself
and his wise old sayings steeped in patience always kept
the law alive
“a steady drop of water will wear a hole in a rock,
Daughter”
“such are the vicissitudes of life, Son”
“if you see me and the bear you go on and help the bear,
My Friend”
“it’s alright, Baby Girl, you win some and you lose some...”
“Just do the best you can with what you got everybody.”
Hundreds of old adages
always spilling from his mouth like
a Black historic fountain
He – to me – is the justice man
and he never had it made
or delivered or prepaid
from his waiting tables as a young lawyer ... to this day ...
here
no statistic ... no horrible crime
no lie no deep disappointment ... no nothing
human or man made
has ever destroyed or made him give up on the law
he believed then ... he believes now ... it is his belief ... his
faith ... that is chief
Papa – Daddy – The Justice Man
and I know you never had it made
but here you are making it
and all of us cross over with you
proud as peacocks
maybe that’s what Pop Finney ... maybe that’s what
Mama Carlene would say
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