Legislative manual depicting Thurmond angers black senators

The cover of the 2003 Legislative manual features an image of former senator Strom Thurmond. e-mail this story

Standing at the podium on the floor of the state Senate, Sen. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, said he had no problem with Thurmond's career in the past two decades, but the 100-year-old Republican's image remains too much of a reminder of the earlier years when Thurmond ran for president on a segregationist ticket.

The Legislative Manual is published by the General Assembly, under the supervision of Sandra McKinney, the clerk of the House of Representatives. McKinney said she chose the cover design in consultation with House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville.

Sen. Darrell Jackson, a black Democrat from Columbia, said he had told his staff to leave the manuals in the boxes in which they were delivered because he did not feel he could distribute them.

McKinney threw up her hands and said, "You can't win. Like John Courson said, he was the man of the century. We just felt like he needed to be honored by the state."

Sen. John Courson, a white Republican from Columbia and a former treasurer of Thurmond's campaigns, said he was angered by the recurring complaints about Thurmond's past. Courson raised $200,000 to erect a monument to Thurmond, the nation's longest-serving U.S. senator.

"I'm tired of Strom Thurmond being the whipping boy," Courson said, slamming the manual down on the speaker's stand. "If the senator from Richland does not want the manuals, he can send them over to my office, and I'll distribute them."

Thurmond appears on the front cover in a portrait from his elder days as a U.S. senator, an artist's painting that hangs in the state Senate chambers. On the back cover are photographs of Thurmond as a soldier and as a child.

The Legislative Manual, a directory of the 46 senators and 124 House members, also includes information about state agencies, the judiciary, and the state's members of Congress. It usually is adorned with innocuous themes, such as the state flower (the yellow jessamine), the state dance (the shag), or the state tree (the palmetto).

But it sometimes causes a stir.

In 1999, for example, the manual had the Confederate flag on its cover, precipitating protests from the same black lawmakers, who wanted that book reprinted. It wasn't. The state had just emerged from a bitter debate, tinged with racial themes, over how, where or even whether the flag should be displayed.

"If we send this out to our constituents, I mean they are going to really think we are crazy, have lost our minds," Ford said in 1999.

And problems with the manual sometimes get personal.

Former Greenville Rep. Dell Baker's picture and biographical summary were inadvertently left out of the 1992 South Carolina legislative manual, and the slip-up wasn't caught in any of the multiple proofs of its pages.

The reason: Baker's entry was under that of former Rep. Ken Bailey in the 1991 manual. Bailey was struck from the 1992 handbook after he was convicted of vote-selling that year, and Baker's entry went as well.

The omission was remedied, in part. House staff members taped Baker's picture and biography into every manual in an empty space under Rep. Roger Young.