Jaime Harrison’s Senate loss proves that South Carolina wants to cling to its past

I have issues with anxiety.

When things were normal before COVID-19 I had to find ways to cope or avoid stressful environments.

Now add Election Day 2020 to my nervous system.

My friend tried to help by taking me to a place where the possibility of being surrounded by-election results wouldn’t be an issue: a hookah spot.

I was wrong.

As soon as I walked in CNN was on mute, showing the incoming presidential and Senate election results.

There’s nothing like receiving lousy news while drinking vodka sodas and inhaling some dangerous blueberry and mint tobacco concoction.

A sinking heart

A hookah joint is where I found out that even before all of the ballots had been counted, Jaime Harrison had lost his bid to win a Senate seat.

My heart sank.

A few days before Election Day I had written an editorial about how proud I was of my state — South Carolina — for being on the cusp of electing Harrison.

I even talked about the progress that had been made in this state.

Well, sadly, my words were in vain.

Fighting history

Before the election Harrison broke records for the amount of campaign money raised in a quarter.

His historic rate of fundraising made incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham appear to panic to the point of begging for campaign donations on various Fox News programs.

But despite Harrison’s fundraising, Graham was still too close to him in the polls.

When my friends would ask me why, I would always give them a simple response:

Lindsey Graham was running against Jaime Harrison.

Jaime Harrison was running against history.

And Harrison touched on this reality during a campaign speech at Benedict College.

He acknowledged that the Senate seat he was seeking was once held by Strom Thurmond, John C. Calhoun and even Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman — someone who, as Harrison noted, would go to the floor of the U.S Senate and “talk about the joys of lynching Black folks.”

We are five years removed from having the Confederate flag taken down from State House grounds in Columbia after the murder of nine souls in Charleston.

Yet we still have streets, monuments and even university buildings in South Carolina that bear the names of Confederate figures and segregationists.

Family memories

During times like these I reflect on my family’s history for perspective.

Election Day 2020 was held three days after what would have been my grandmother’s 93rd birthday.

My mother has told me about going to a segregated high school before being bused for forced integration — and about the disdain that the teachers had for Black students.

She has told me how my grandmother grew up with her great grandmother — an enslaved woman.

She has told me that while my granny was always excited about going to vote, she did so during an era when Black people “had to be quiet” about actually possessing the power to vote.

Has anything changed?

And now I wonder:

How much has really changed from when my granny was my age?

My grandmother was 37 in 1964 — the same year that one of the senators in her state, Strom Thurmond, abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican Party because of the Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act to end segregation.

And despite a history that included running as a Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948 with racial segregation as the main plank of platform, Thurmond kept his Senate seat for nearly 50 years until he retired in 2003.

The man who succeeded Thurmond? Lindsey Graham, a senator who has openly supported a racially divisive president like Donald Trump.

A mirage

After the Election Day results were known, people filled my timeline asking me this question: How did Harrison lose?

But the truth is that while we were enjoying one of those rare moments when South Carolina was enjoying widespread exposure — something that filled me with pride — all of the national attention on Harrison was actually misleading.

The truth is that cities like Columbia are blue bubbles in a too-red state where even presidential elections are usually called early for the Republican candidate, which happened yet again with Trump on Election Day 2020.

The noted author Ta-Nehisi Coates has said that voting is “civic hygiene — both essential and insufficient.”

But I don’t want to fight over elections. I want to fight for changed behavior.

I pray that South Carolina can be as great as we imagine it can be.

But the fact is the will of its people re-elected a senator who boasts about his alignment with Trump.

Despite everything against him, Harrison did a fantastic job.

So do moral victories count?

Maybe.

But at this moment it feels like South Carolina is more interested in clinging to the past than looking toward the future.

Preach Jacobs is a contributing Columbia opinion writer, artist, DJ and founder of The Negro League Podcast. He earned second-place honors in the South Carolina Press Association’s 2019 “Column Writing” category.