Talking about race, building a relationship

Meet Sarah McCrory. She is 94 years old. She is white, raised in Columbia society. She has been coming to the meetings of the Columbia Luncheon Club — established in the 1960s to bring black and white people together for lunch and conversation — since the early 1980s.

McCrory doesn’t mince words when it comes to race relations and her own experiences growing up in the segregated South.

She recalls being a student at Hollins College in Virginia. She and fellow students had traveled to a black woman’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, to attend a YWCA convention. She had to use restroom and showering facilities at the school.

“I felt terribly uncomfortable. I had a roommate from Belgium. She couldn’t understand why I was acting the way I was acting. She thought it was disgraceful.”

McCrory calls herself “a racist.”

“If you’re born white, you’re already a racist because you have all these privileges because you are white. … My mother and father were not in favor of integration, but my daddy did a lot for black people. …When I saw Bull Connor on television shooting those black children with the hoses, that did it for me. … People know where I stand on integration and racism.”

Powerful words from a woman who lives in a well-heeled retirement community, whose gray hair is pulled into a bun at the back of her head, who uses a cane to get around, and who, in her younger years, helped establish seven daycare centers for low-income children in the Columbia community, including one at Saxon Homes and another at Gonzales Gardens.

McCrory also helped to create a written history of the Columbia Luncheon Club, which she calls the “best kept secret in Columbia.”

“In 1963,” she said, “there was nowhere where black and white people could socialize, have a meal together. Nowhere. No club, no restaurant, no nothing. (University of South Carolina President) Tom Jones offered a place where they could eat at the university.”

That place was most likely a private conference room on the second floor at the Russell House.

“They” was a group of black and white civic leaders in Columbia, including Hyman Rubin Sr., a Columbia City Councilman who became a beloved state senator.

“Rubin’s intention was to gather prominent local leaders from both racial communities for casual monthly luncheons,” notes the history of the luncheon club. “The primary aim was to establish positive racial harmony within Columbia, as well as South Carolina.”

Rubin told McCrory he “wanted to assemble influential men, black and white, who could quietly and effectively make a difference.”

The luncheon club history notes that “the greatest obstacle to Rubin’s plan was securing a regular venue. The Wade Hampton Hotel managers positively declined to allow such an event to be held within their building. Similar refusals were issued by the owners of various major white downtown eating establishments. The respective owners simply were afraid of alienating regular white patrons.

At that point, President Jones intervened decisively in the matter. Jones orally invited Rubin to convene these luncheons at the University of South Carolina. … Knowing the Board of Trustees, as well as many influential alumni would not approve of these gatherings, this invitation apparently was never placed in writing.”

Columbia attorney Hemphill Pride II, a black man, was among the original diners at the luncheon club.

He, like McCrory, brought to the table his experiences of growing up in the segregated South and segregated Columbia.

Pride recalls growing up near Valley Park — now called Martin Luther King Jr. Park — near Five Points.

Blacks were strictly prohibited from the park. City policemen wielding billy clubs made sure they knew that, Pride said.

One afternoon, Pride and his buddies were trying to teach a friend named Peter how to ride his bike. They were at the top of a hill on Oak Street, near the park, when, “The bike got loose from us and we couldn’t catch it or Peter.”

Peter careened down the hill and crashed inside the park.

“Peter broke his leg, but he knew as a Negro that he didn’t belong in that park.”

So, Pride said, despite the injury, the child dragged himself and his bike out of the park.

“It had been ingrained in us that we did not belong there.”

Fast forward to the 1960s, when Pride was a young attorney attending the first meetings of the luncheon club.

“I was very young, very hard-headed.”

While, Pride said, there were “many whites and some blacks who disagreed about the concept,” then Columbia Mayor Lester Bates and Rubin were “determined it could work. … The theory was to get us (blacks) on the inside so that we could be heard and work together (with whites). It was contentious. There was a litany of complaints about the police department. That was the Number One issue as I recall. We tried to discuss things in an orderly fashion and we tried to get some solutions. We were just a group of people who decided to sit down and eat and work out problems.”

And so, from those origins, the Columbia Luncheon Club, now operating under the auspices of the Community Relations Council, continues convening on the first Friday of the month at 12:30 p.m. at the Columbia Chamber of Commerce.

The next luncheon will be held March 4. The Rev. Jim Abbott, former pastor at St. Martin’s in the Fields Episcopal Church in Columbia, will speak. Abbott also pastored a predominantly black Episcopal church in Asheville, North Carolina.

And McCrory will be there to hear him speak.

“I think it’s important,” she said.

“People in the luncheon club have known all along that racism is not dead. I’ve gotten to know several people on a pretty deep level. We don’t really have an agenda. We just want to get to know each other. There’re no rules, no constitution, no nothing. It’s a ‘You just come if you can’ kind of thing. Nobody’s ever turned down. Anybody can come.”

Salley McAden McInerney is a local writer whose novel, Journey Proud, is based upon growing up in Columbia in the early 1960s. She may be reached by emailing salley.mac@gmail.com.