EDITOR’S NOTE: Former State Sen. and firebrand Tom Turnipseed of Columnia passed away last week at age 83. As a tribute, we offer an excerpted profile from 1994 by Becci Robbins that was published in The Point. We appreciate her permission to share with you.
By Becci Robbins, republished with permission | Tom Turnipseed is nothing if not intense. “It’s a family trait,” he explains, ticking off a list of relatives remembered for being high-strung.”My people wear their emotions up front. …”
He first began making headlines in the mid-’60s, when he was a director of the Independent Schools Association, then a loose-knit group of academics whose primary purpose was remaining all-white. Turnipseed built the ISA into a full-fledged power in South Carolina, adding over 20 segregated institutions by the time he left in 1967 ro join the staff of Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
Had he lived to see it, Big Daddy [the nickname for Turnipseed’s father] would have been proud of the young Turnipseed, who at age 32 was running Wallace’s national presidential campaign. Turnispeed believed in the governor’s agenda, admired his spunk, thought the man had no choice but to stand in that school house door. Someone had to challenge the outsiders who for over 100 years had been telling Southern folk how to run their business. …
That same year, Turnipseed moved to Columbia to open a law practice and begin mapping his own political career. By 1973, he had launched his first campaign for statewide office in a bid for attorney general. One of the first public issues he chose to take on was the regulation of utility rates. When SCE&G took advantage of a state law which allowed utilities to implement rate increases without even a hearing before the Public Service Commission, Turnipseed filed suit to have the law declared unconstitutional.
“We were taking on the power structure, and the allies we needed to help us build a coalition were the working class poor,” Turnipseed remembers. This is how he found himself, for the first time in his life, talking with black people, going into their neighborhoods, addressing meetings of the NAACP. …
After three decades of raising eyebrows, hackles and holy hell across South Carolina, most people around here have heard of him. They’ve seen his television ads. They’ve read about him in the newspaper.
Over the years, the press has used words like “mercurial,” “flamboyant,” “fiery,” and “explosive” to describe the 58-year old former senator. They have called him “a rabble rouser,” “a thorn in the side of the South Carolina establishment” and “an affront to the more traditional-minded Statehouse inhabitants.”
Somebody called him “a latter-day Huey Long, crazy as a damned bedbug, but crazy in a smart way.” Another writer described his stint in the Senate — from 1976 to 1980 — as “four years of eye-rolling, obstreperous and bellicose ranting and raving. …”
After four years, Turnipseed gave up his Senate seat to run against U.S. Rep. Floyd Spence, who narrowly won reelection in spite of outspending the senator five to one. (Turnipseed had refused to accept corporate campaign contributions.)
By then, Turnipseed leaned decidedly left. In a 1980 article that ran in the alternative publication Harbinger, he read like a non-rhyming Reverend [Jesse] Jackson.
“Think of the tremendous power that people have if they just get together,” he said. A photo shows him gesturing from behind a lectern hung with a painting of [the Rev.] Martin Luther King Jr. “We can’t let money rule us,” he said, “just absolutely rule every phase and aspect of our lives.”
Asked whether he would go so far to describe himself as a revolutionary, he said, “I’m as revolutionary as Mark Twain, Dickens and Jesus. No one has ever put down money and greed like Jesus. He spent his whole life trying to help oppressed people.”
Turnipseed switched political allegiances long before it became fashionable. The years he has spent redefining his ideology have lent him a strange political alchemy that gives him an edge. Because he used to be one of them, he can relate to conservatives, bigots and racists in ways other liberals cannot.
“When I hear Rush Limbaugh,” he says, “I’ve heard it all before. I used to say it …”
“Tom is always involved, engaged, active, changing,” [his wife] Judy explains. “He is never satisfied with things the way they are. Sometimes it wears me out.”
“Tom is a tireless worker for the people,” says [the late] Merll Truesdale, a Columbia activist who has known Turnispeed for 26 years. “He is a rabble rouser, yes, but he fights for the right things. I wish there were 10 more Toms and things might actually get done.”
Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D-Orangeburg), who served with Turnispeed on the board of S.C. Fair Share, a consumer, environmental and workers’ rights organization, says he has long been committed to fairness and decency. “He is a real intense, passionate person who has a burning desire to see justice and equality for all people, regardless of their station in life,” she says. “He fills a vital role. I liken him to a washing machine; unless it agitates, nothing gets clean.”
She says his appeal is that he can relate to anybody: rich or poor, young or old, redneck or radical. “I think he has been misunderstood as this person out in left field. I don’t see him that way. I see him as a person real committed to the things he believes in.”
Columbia writer Becci Robbins is communications director for the S.C. Progressive Network.
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