By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | If you’re relatively new to the state or under age 50, you may not know the story of Esau Jenkins.
But you should. And now, the world will know more about this incredible Johns Island civil rights leader thanks to a permanent exhibit in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture that opens Saturday. The exhibit displays Jenkins motto — “Love is Progress, Hate is Expensive” — on the back panels of a Volkswagen microbus that ferried people on the sea islands to work, school and the voting polls.
Jenkins, born into the Jim Crow South in 1910 when blacks on Johns Island were poor, uneducated and mired in poverty, had an entrepreneurial, charismatic gift of inspiring people to seek justice, education and a chance for something better that they were so long denied. He first farmed vegetables, learning enough Greek to sell to Charleston merchants in the Depression.
In 1948, Jenkins started The Progressive Club as a small, cooperative store on Johns Island. It blossomed into a center for political, social, educational and recreational activities for the area’s black residents.
“What began in that co-op was a citizenship school to teach blacks on Johns Island how to qualify to register to vote,” recalls grandson Abe Jenkins. “Later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) spread that program throughout the South. That one class in the co-op became thousands of classes in churches, schools and homes.
“In 1962, the SCLC brought in other groups that later formed the Voter Education Project (VEP). Between 1962 and 1966, VEP trained 10,000 teachers for Citizenship Schools, and 700,000 black voters registered throughout the South. By 1970, another million black voters had registered.”
Johns Island businessman Bill Saunders, who at 81 is the only surviving original member of the club, remembers how Jenkins was involved in an array of initiatives, all of which were focused on lifting up people of the sea islands.
“He was one of the ones [across the nation] who really stood out and started looking at the real bad things that were going on in our country — people not having the right to vote. Where I live on Johns Island, all of the black men used to run when they heard the police coming at night.”
Jenkins, who completed just four years of school, rubbed shoulders with social justice giants at places like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and luminaries at the United Nations. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the Lowcountry, Jenkins was a step away.
At a ceremonial send-off Thursday in Charleston for the Jenkins family to commemorate the museum opening, writer Damon Fordham of Charleston urged students to learn more about Jenkins.
“Learn how he spoke to those in power and taught those without power to take control of their own lives. Learn of how he stood up to the powerful and stood up for the powerless,” he said. “Learn of how his friend Dr. King referred to him in 1962 as one of the true heroes of the South.
“And when you learn, you will see that through his example, you will learn that no matter how weak you think you are, no matter how small you think you are, no matter how poor and unimportant you think you are, you too can rise up and reach down within yourselves to make a difference.”
Jenkins holds a special place in the heart of Columbia’s Bud Ferillo, whose film “Corridor of Shame” continues to impact public policy. As a high schooler in the 1960s, Ferillo learned about organizing from Jenkins. In 1967, Jenkins pressed a brass cross into Ferillo’s palm before he left to serve in Vietnam. He told the young soldier to wear the cross, made before the Revolutionary War by a slave, with his dog tags to keep safe. Ferillo recalled trying to give back the cross after returning safely from the war. But Jenkins told him to keep it because there was more work to do.
Ferillo closed his remarks at the send-off with this: “Let us keep on keeping on so Esau’s faith, love and progress for freedom will live on for he still has more work for us.”
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