A FORGOTTEN STORY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

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GREG PALAST - South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear
facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In
the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of
the protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for
conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are
black. The prosecutor: a white, Bible-thumping Attorney General running
for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - white versus black. .
.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest
there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their
own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of
lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital
while the longshoreman faced Southern justice. But maybe there's more to
South Carolina's story than black and white. . .

At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 was not so much
black versus white, but union versus non-union. It was a battle between
those looking for a good day's pay versus those looking for a way not to
pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict between the
movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.

The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down
the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see
their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss
their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.

The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a "most
favored nation" in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to "make
change our friend."

But "change," apparently, wasn't in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford
Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it
in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock
Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon
pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.

http://www.gregpalast.com/south-carolina-primary-colors-black-and-white/

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