Erased By Design: Technical Documents and Historical Oppression

This new project rests at the intersection of technical, cultural, and public rhetorics, examining the impacts of a nuclear weapons plant on a small, primarily Black tenant farmed land. 

On July 8th, 1876, an armed white militia entered the town of Hamburg, South Carolina, a freedmen managed town on the banks of the Savannah River. The leader of the town was a judge named Prince Rivers, a renowned orator and administrator (Budiansky, 2008). Formerly in bondage, Rivers made his escape to Union lines where he joined forces for the liberation of those enslaved across the state (Budiansky, 2008, Poole, 2005). The men who attacked Hamburg–largely defeated Confederates–were members of the paramilitary group who eventually came to call themselves “Red Shirts” (Rothstein, 2017). This group, and the many like them, mushroomed all over the defeated south and were invested in white rule, white grievance, and the total subjugation of non-white citizens. Their immediate goal was to dis-arm Black peace keeping soldiers and undermine Black sovereignty and ambition for even the most basic freedoms. Their message was not only for Black citizens, however. According to the journals of one of the organizers, Martin Witherspoon Gary, their aim was also to intimidate and to undermine white support for Black freedom, to peel way local white support for the rights of Black citizens (Budiansky, p. 223). Longer term, their aims were to roll back national Reconstruction programs by reinstating white dominance through terror campaigns, enacting systematic Black disenfranchisement, and ending humanitarian and self-governance gains, each of which emerged through a vicious struggle and resulted in advances towards Black freedom, though a more thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.

Populated by freedmen/women, Hamburg, SC, was a keen target for white rage (refer to Anderson, 2001 for a discussion of the exigence and implications of white rage). A site of a former market trading on the potential of Black children, women, and men, Hamburg was now occupied with prominent Southern Black leaders. Alongside Prince Rivers, famed leaders included Samuel Jones Lee, the first Black speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives (Budiansky, p. 225), Samuel B. Spencer, a successful businessman (Budiansky, p. 226), and Charles D. Hayne, delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868 and elected member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and Senate. 

This project draws on critical race theory and Black Feminism concepts to examine the technical rhetorics at the heart of white supremacist rage and struggle against Black freedom projects. The goals of this project are to amplify the actions of stakeholders and allies--historical and present day--with the goal of materially supporting them and bridging polarization that has taken root over the last 150 years.