$380K raised to change former KKK, neo-Nazi meeting place in SC into diversity center

The Redneck Shop was a black eye on South Carolina.

Located in Laurens, S.C. — a county named after slave-trader Henry Laurens — the Redneck Shop was a meeting place for neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members that sold Confederate Flags, Klan robes and other racist paraphernalia.

As recently as 2007, the largest American group of neo-Nazis held a nationwide meeting at the Redneck Shop, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Today, The Echo Project, which seeks to transform the former Redneck Shop, is on its way to making it a diversity center. It’s more than just an idea. In the last year The Echo Project has collected more than $380,000, according to its gofundme page.

“We’re doing this for real,” said Echo Project Executive Director Regan Freeman, 24.

“We think we can do something massive,” Freeman said.

The Echo Project comes from the name of the building, the Echo Theatre, which was a segregated movie theater before it was the Redneck Shop. The theater is owned by Rev. David Kennedy, a Black pastor at New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church in Laurens. He acquired the theater from a man named David Burden whom Kennedy let stay at his home after Burden left the KKK.

While Kennedy and Freeman jump-started The Echo Project, they’re not the only ones guiding the restoration. The project has a board of directors and a board of historians who will determine what the actual Echo Theatre will look like once it is complete, Freeman said.

David Walker, the vice president of construction of Soxedo, an international, multi-industry corporation best known for providing food service, is a Laurens native who is overseeing construction on the Echo Project.

Walker remembers when he first heard about The Redneck Shop. He was serving in the U.S. Navy, deployed in Japan, and remembers seeing the Japanese news media report on the Redneck Shop in his hometown.

“One thing that’s always kind of stuck with me is I always felt some shame that the place I grew up in was reported on in such a negative way” on the other side of the world, Walker told The State.

Turning the site of the former Redneck Shop into a diversity center “is a way to set the record straight, but it’s a way finally to recognize our history that is not adequately recognized today,” Walker said, noting half the population in Laurens County at one was slaves.

Walker said the Redneck Shop was “a monument to hatred” and is happy to be replacing it.

“I saw an opportunity to do something not only for the place I grew up, but a place that will stand as an icon to fairness and equality,” Walker said.

Construction has not begun at the Echo Theatre, but could begin within two to three weeks, Walker said in a Thursday interview.

The Echo Theatre will “deal head-on with topics like diversity and inclusion,” Freeman said. But like the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam — which includes a museum and creates educational materials — Freeman doesn’t want to shy away from the building’s racist past and may display some of the racist paraphernalia, propaganda and other items that were associated with the Redneck Shop.

“We need to tell the truth before we can talk about diversity,” Freeman said.

Freeman sees the revitalization of the Echo Theatre, from a hub of racism to a center for reconciliation and healing, as a microcosm of what America needs, especially following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“To deal with this head-on, I think that’s what this country needs,” Freeman said.

One of the advisors on the project is Nicholas Gaffney, the director of the University of South Carolina Upstate’s Center for African-American Studies

Asked what working on the project meant for him, Gaffney said, “It means everything.”

One thing the Echo Project could do is “Humanize the African Americans who were on the other side of that hate” and “create opportunities for ways for them to express what that place meant to them.”

While racism is often depicted by its most visual atrocities, such as a burning cross in a Black family’s yard or a firebombed church, the Echo Project could be a way to explore the more personal scars of hatred, Gaffney said.

To do that, Gaffney proposed interviewing local Black residents and compiling an oral history of how having the Redneck Shop in their hometown made them feel. Doing so would give insight into the psychological traumas caused by that symbol of hate, such as “the tears running down a little kid’s face because they’re scared to sleep at night.”

Gaffney is “optimistic” about reforming the former Redneck Shop and notes that the reformation could provide a road map to transforming other symbols of hate throughout the country — especially those in small towns and rural areas, he said.

Once the project is complete and historians look back on how the Redneck Shop became a diversity center, “I think it will end up being one of the great, American stories,” Gaffney said. “It’s an extraordinary project.”

Donations

While Freeman is happy about the money raised so far, he stresses “this is a work in progress.”

Estimates vary, but it will likely cost $500,000 to renovate the broken-down theater, Freeman said. But after that, the theater will still need funds to pay exhibit designers and build an extension to the theater for office space, lecture halls and more, Freeman said. Once that’s all done, it could cost up to $2 million, Freeman said.

The money has come from more than 4,000 donors in all 50 states and even 20 countries, Freeman said.

“Thank you for your work healing America,” donor Janet Reyna wrote on The Echo Project’s gofundme page.

A donor who listed his or her name as “Your Friend in Colorado” and gave $100 wrote “In memory of too many to name.”

Marianne Robin-Tani donated $100 to the Echo Project, saying, “As a Jew, I can’t thank you enough for doing this!”

The Echo Project saw a surge in donations following the May 25 death of George Floyd and the DVD release of the movie “Burden” on June 1, which is based on the real-life story of Kennedy and the Redneck Shop. The movie includes a “call to action” urging viewers to support Kennedy’s restoration of the former Redneck Shop, Freeman said.

Following Floyd’s death, “more than any other time in my life, people were having candid conversations about race,” Freeman said.

Freeman, who put off going to law school for the Echo Project, led the project despite a 2020 that was especially brutal to him.

Shortly after “Burden” was released in theaters in February, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Then, in March, Freeman’s mother died from breast cancer, he said.

“I think what gives me solace is she was so incredibly proud of what I was doing,” Freeman said of his late mother.

This story was originally published January 20, 2021 at 2:22 PM.