#sumter

[mother-lee]

sumter & everywhere

[unteriors]

Green Swamp Road, Sumter, South Carolina.

[unplaces]

Franklin Ln, Sumter, South Carolina.

[rebelyells]

January 9, 1861 the Star of the West was fired upon by the Citadel as it reinforced Ft. Sumter as a show of aggression against states rights! The first shots between North/South

[benandstevesposts]

Community members raised concerns that attacks are attempts to erase its history and gentrify its neighborhoods.

The calmness of the wind reverberated across the burial ground as Beverly Steele motioned to her mother’s grave in Oak Hill Cemetery. Three months ago, they buried her here, just 12 days shy of her 102nd birthday. 

It’s not uncommon for residents in the majority-Black, unincorporated community of Royal, Florida, to live past 100 years old. The Rev. Matthew Beard, the oldest resident in the community’s history, lived to be 115. 

On a recent February afternoon, Steele, dressed in her Sunday best, peered out at the acres and acres of land surrounding Oak Hill Cemetery, also known as the Royal Cemetery. As she reminisced about her mother, she also remembered her aunt, who was called on as the community’s local historian. She could recall who had the first brick house, the first postmaster, and the three founding families—Hollies, Picketts, and Andersons—of the community.

The sounds of large trucks chugging down the narrow road near the cemetery snap Steele back to today’s reality. Mere miles away from the site is Interstate 75, which split the community of Royal in half 50 years ago. A few miles from there is the old Monarch Road cemetery, or old slave cemetery as the locals call it. It, too, is split in half by a paved road. A family lives on the primary site where most of the headstones can be seen. It is the cemetery where Steele’s great-great-great-grandfather — and one of the community’s co-founders — is buried. 

Tucked away, 55 miles north of Orlando, Royal’s estimated 1,200 Black residents still live on the inherited 40-acre plots from the Homestead Act of 1862. The close-knit community is located in the city of Wildwood, which in the past two decades has grown in population to 150,000. The 77-year-old Steele and other Royal residents say the rapid growth of The Villages, a retirement community that borders Wildwood, is part of the constant development efforts upending their lives.

Recent plans for highways, affordable housing units, and industrial use projects are disrupting their peace and comfort. In some cases, residents have been pressured to sell their land. Several community members raised concerns to Capital B that these attacks are attempts to erase its history and gentrify its neighborhoods. They also fear the increased traffic and industrial pollution from the projects will cause detrimental health effects in its community, primarily elders. 

This isn’t the first time Royal citizens have come up against efforts to build in their community.

Residents and Sumter County commissioners rejected a plan in 1988 to construct a turnpike through Royal. In 2019, state lawmakers approved a bill to create the Northern Florida Extension, or turnpike project, to build three roads across rural central Florida, including Royal. Read more in the complete report here!

[bricksxbooks]

I support this product idea on LEGO Ideas, and you should, too!

[thedailycounternews]

Attorney General Alan Wilson announces Camden woman charged with stealing thousands from vulnerable adult

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced that his office’s Vulnerable Adults and Medicaid Provider Fraud unit (VAMPF) has arrested Jannie C. Johnson, 74 years old, of Camden, S.C., for Exploitation of a Vulnerable Adult {43-35-0085 (D)} and Breach of Trust with Fraudulent Intent, value $10,000 or more. Johnson was booked into the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center on…

[cdntennis]

Palmetto Pro Open 2024 (Sumter, United States)

Canada's Carson Branstine won earlier today the biggest singles title of her career so far with a 7-6(6), 6-7(6), 6-1 victory over Sophia Chang at the ITF W75 in Sumter. This is the fifth ITF singles title of her career, her second this year, having won back in January the ITF W35 tournament in Monastir, Tunisia. With the win, Branstine should be ranked a career-high of No. 344 in tomorrow's new rankings.

(Picture : © Carson Branstine)

[clbphotography3]

Sumter

Sumter worked 3F in :36.60.

[pauldragomd]

Paul Drago MD - An Accomplished Physician | Goodreads

With Yale training, Dr. Paul Drago excels in anti-aging medicine, cosmetic surgery, and caring for patient interactions.

[usnatarchives]

Fort Sumter 🏰

Before Fort Sumter became a symbol of the Civil War, it was a feat of engineering. Built on a manmade island in Charleston Harbor, the fort was designed to protect the U.S. coastline after the War of 1812, but construction was slow, spanning decades.

By the late 1850s, Fort Sumter still wasn't finished, yet its walls would soon be tested. In April 1861, Confederate forces opened fire, marking the first shots of the Civil War. The unfinished fort was now at the center of a national crisis.

Explore original engineering drawings, correspondence, and rare visuals of Fort Sumter's construction from the National Archives' holdings in this deep dive on the Unwritten Record blog: https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2018/04/06/building-fort-sumter

[unplaces]

27 Harrison St, Sumter, South Carolina.

[yz]

Sandbars where the ocean meets the sky off of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. December 2024.

Fujifilm X-T50 with XF 18-55 F/2.8-4 lens.

[hazellvsq]

frank turning into a dragon in the mark of athena evacuation when it was the beginning of the book and when it wasn't even his pov, even though we as readers and camp jupiter as a collective had no clue he could DO that...you really had to be there. even annabeth was like HUH. later books have people fixating on his ability to be a swarm of bees but where has frank seen a dragon before that he could imitate? he'd never shapeshifted in his life until the day before and offpage decided to do a mythological creature as opposed to an animal. he just came up with that!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jeff Singer at The Downballot:

Former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100, and in keeping with our focus at The Downballot, in the piece that follows, we take stock of his early electoral career in Georgia that set the stage for his dark-horse White House bid in 1976. Carter was elected twice to the state Senate in the 1960s before winning the governorship on his second try in 1970, a victory that came after he employed tactics to appeal to supporters of segregationist politicians. But the new governor would shock the political world just months later with an inaugural address declaring, "The time for racial discrimination is over."

The Politics of the South

Carter grew up at a time when southwestern Georgia, like most of the South, was a one-party region run by pro-segregation Democrats. A central pillar in upholding white dominance was a rigged voting method called the "county unit" system, an Electoral College-esque scheme that gave small and predominantly white rural counties like Carter's native Sumter County massively disproportionate influence in the all-important Democratic primary. The politics of the South suffused Carter's own upbringing, too: The future president's father and namesake, James Carter Sr., was an ardent supporter of Gov. Eugene Talmadge—who stood out even at the time for his virulent racism—and of Eugene's son and successor, Herman Talmadge.

Jimmy Carter had left Georgia in 1943 to enroll in the U.S. Naval Academy but resettled in his hometown of Plains after his father died in 1953, just a few months after the elder Carter had been elected to the state House as a Talmadge ally. The younger Carter took over not just the family's struggling farming business, but as Jonathan Alter details in his Carter biography, "His Very Best"—which was an indispensable source for this obituary—Carter exceeded even his father's prodigious habit of joining local organizations, connections that would prove fruitful as he began his political rise.

One of these groups was the Sumter County Board of Education, an appointed body his father had served on. Carter was already known locally for personally opposing segregation, but Alter writes that when it came to actual policy, he'd never have been allowed on the board if "he had been considered unreliable on school desegregation." And while Carter made enemies for being the only prominent white man in Plains to refuse to join the White Citizens Council, he remained quiet about the injustices inflicted on Black residents by local officials like Sheriff Fred Chappell, whom Martin Luther King Jr. would call "the meanest man in the world."

[...]

1966: A Surprise Bid for Governor

That House duel, though, never took place. Callaway announced in May 1966 that he would run for governor, and despite the many hours Carter had spent planning out his congressional bid, he quickly followed Callaway into that contest. Alter suggests that Carter would have easily won the 3rd District had he stayed the course (Democrat Jack Brinkley decisively won the general election after a close primary and never faced any serious opposition during his 16-year career), but his change of heart proved to be an important decision. As one ally in the legislature later put it, "You'd never have heard of Jimmy Carter outside of Georgia if Bo hadn't switched." But for months, it appeared that few people inside Georgia would ever hear of Carter, much less vote for him. The unquestioned front-runner in the September Democratic primary to succeed Gov. Carl Sanders, who was barred by state law from running for a second consecutive term, initially was the popular former Gov. Ernest Vandiver, but he dropped out following a heart attack. The new favorite was former Gov. Ellis Arnall, an anti-Talmadge politician elected in 1942 who had infuriated segregationists by refusing to fight court rulings to desegregate primaries.

[...]

After thinking it over, Rabhan made Carter initial a pledge, written on a flight map, to say in his inaugural address, "The time for racial discrimination is over." Carter was reluctant to make that kind of declaration while on the same platform as Maddox, who was about to be elected to the powerful post of lieutenant governor, but he assented. Carter did indeed utter those fateful words in January of 1971, a move that shocked the Georgia political world. Alter summed up the reactions of Carter's friends and foes alike by citing the response of one civil rights activist: "He said whaaat?" A dozen conservative Carter allies in the state Senate protested by walking out. The governor, though, backed up his declaration with deeds, and he soon graced the cover of Time Magazine with the caption, "Dixie whistles a different tune." That was some of the first national exposure Carter, who just four years earlier had been an afterthought in campaign coverage, would receive before beginning another improbable ascent—one that would take him to the White House.

The Downballot’s Jeff Singer gives a detail of the late Jimmy Carter’s pre-Presidency career.

[rebelyells]

April 12-14 1861 Fort Sumter was fired upon. Protective Tariffs that oppressed the South were the cause of the war. Greedy industrialists in the North wanted the cotton for their factories in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. No mention of slavery was found in the Tariff Act seen below. Take note of the Seven Star First National flag at the Fort!