James Gallman is the president of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP and has been one of the driving forces behind the economic boycott in the state because of the Confederate flag flying atop the Statehouse. RON COCKERILLE/STAFF

Headway on flag pleases NAACP head

Web posted May 21, 2000

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By Margaret N. O'Shea
South Carolina Bureau

AIKEN - When James Gallman sees a Confederate battle flag, his mind drifts to a night half a century ago when firelight from a burning cross cast an eerie glow on flags like that.

Mr. Gallman was a little boy, 7 or so, not sure what to make of what he saw on Sumter Street, between Richland and Barnwell. Not sure until he saw grown black men around him trying to melt into the darkness while the fire burned and the flags waved. At 58, he still does not like to say that what he saw in their faces was fear.

He never saw the faces of the men who carried those flags. They were covered by peaked hoods, holes cut for the eyes. He doesn't remember now who told him those were white men in the white robes. He doesn't remember how he came to understand that their message was one of white supremacy. He does remember that, to a child, they did not seem nice, and he would grow up knowing to steer clear of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nearly 20 years later, driving with another referee to a basketball game in Lexington County, Mr. Gallman saw an orange glow in the sky near Pelion. It looked like a brush fire ahead, but rounding a curve the two could see Klansmen circling a burning cross in a clearing. The flag was there.

``We drove on,'' Mr. Gallman said. ``It was not the place for us to be.''

By then he had heard graphic stories about cruelty and hate, and he was glad that the Klan only burned a cross that earlier night in Aiken, an event so commonplace around 1950 that it was not mentioned in the news.

Such thoughts and memories tumble when he sees that flag. Sometimes when the sun hits it just right, the red flag with a blue cross and white stars shines over South Carolina's Statehouse dome as it did in the firelight.

Mr. Gallman has been determined to bring it down while he is state president of the NAACP.

One of the proudest days of his life, he says, was when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People levied economic sanctions against South Carolina, promising to keep them in place until the flag was removed from the dome and chambers of the House and Senate and put in a place of historical context.

Another proud day came in January, when 46,000 people gathered at the Capitol to protest the flag's presence over a seat of government that is supposed to represent everyone. That day he welcomed a crowd of people who had spent the night in private homes, church fellowship halls, even on buses, to avoid spending in South Carolina.

``We would not deny any person the opportunity to celebrate his or her heritage,'' Mr. Gallman told the throngs, ``but we will not tolerate or accept the celebration of one heritage by rule of law. We do not wish to have that symbol, representing a heritage of hate, flying in a sovereign position at a place paid for by our tax dollars.''

Last Thursday, in his office at the Aiken/Barnwell/Lexington Regional Head Start Center on Beaufort Street, he had to regroup. The Legislature had voted that day to take down the flag, but the historical context lawmakers chose is on one of Columbia's main streets, in front of the Capitol, on a 30-foot pole at a monument to Confederate soldiers.

The NAACP and other anti-flag lobbies had expected the issue to come up Tuesday, giving them the weekend for prayer and persuasion. Mr. Gallman called it an insult and a slap in the face.

``This just says, `We're going to put it as high as we can - in your face,'ƒ'' he said.

In Baltimore, national NAACP President Kweisi Mfume pledged to expand the boycott, which has been aimed at tourism, sports events and the arts. The next step will be an effort to cut South Carolina's lucrative tie with the movie industry.

In Aiken, Mr. Gallman took a deep breath and said, ``They did what they wanted to do. Now we'll do what we have to do.''

Cold war

James Gallman was not always an activist.

The Aiken into which he was born in 1942 was, like the rest of the South, segregated with separate schools, separate water fountains and restrooms, theater balconies for ``colored'' and a swimming pool for whites only.

His mother, Fannie Gallman, did domestic work at the mansion now called Rye Patch at the edge of Hopeland Gardens. Her husband, Wallace Gallman, was a caretaker on the estate for $35 a week. Their five children, including the youngest, James, ``knew their place.'' They raked yards for the nickels or dimes that were left for them on an outside window ledge, never put directly into their hands. And the white children that James and his brother Wallace played with were the chauffeur's kids.

There were places that were off limits.

``To be honest, most blacks in Aiken recognized what they could and could not do. I don't know that I ever questioned it,'' Mr. Gallman said, adding - in the same words white people tend to use when asked why they accepted segregation: ``It's just the way things were.''

He started school a year early, not because he was a prodigy but because his brother was starting and there was no one to take care of him while his parents worked.

He would be the first in his family to graduate from high school and the first to go to college.

``I don't know how my mother did it, God bless her,'' he said, ``but she somehow found a way to pay the $45.90 room and board at Claflin until my National Defense Loan came through.''

For him, the turning point came at Claflin College in Orangeburg. He was a freshman in 1960 when a group of demonstrators in Greensboro, N.C., sat down at a white lunch counter and demanded to be served. Sit-ins swept the South, and Mr. Gallman joined a group of fellow students determined to integrate the luncheonette at Woolworth's.

``We never got inside,'' he said. ``We were on our way to Woolworth's when the police came. There wasn't room for all of us in the jail, so they put us in a fenced-in area and turned hoses on us. I don't think I ever was so cold in all my life.''

It made trying to integrate the Buffalo Room at North Augusta years later seem easy.

The Rev. I. DeQuincy Newman, then a top leader in the state NAACP and later a legislator, drove from Columbia and paid the students' fines and court costs, exacting from all of them a pledge to join the organization.

Two years later, when the Legislature raised a Confederate flag over the Statehouse to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, Mr. Gallman remembered that chilly water.

``It was an act of defiance,'' he said. ``Whatever they chose to call it, it was their way, at the height of the civil rights movement, of saying white supremacy was the law in South Carolina.''

Mr. Gallman was an active member of the NAACP through his college years at Claflin and the University of Tennessee, where he earned a master's degree in math.

But coming home to Aiken to teach in all-black schools, he found his job could be jeopardized by belonging to the civil rights organization. Had it been church, he'd have been called a backslider. He dropped out but returned around 1980 and was quickly elected an officer of the local branch. He was first vice president in 1988, when the president stepped down because of pressure on his job.

Nine years later, he became state president.

The idea of sanctions against South Carolina because of the Confederate flag on its Statehouse had surfaced in 1994. That year, flag opponents marched past hundreds of grim-faced, flag-waving whites in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head Island, shouting, ``Red rag! Red rag!'' Nothing happened.

Last year, Mr. Gallman and others persuaded the national NAACP to follow through. The boycott officially began in January.

Taking action

When Gov. Jim Hodges arranged a series of private talks between key players on both sides of the flag dispute, Mr. Gallman was encouraged. He said he went into the talks trying to understand how anyone could see the Confederate flag as anything but a symbol of slavery, oppression and hate.

``I realized there were good, decent people who really did seem to believe that their ancestors were honorable men who fought bravely,'' he said. ``But their cause was not honorable. Their attempt to maintain slavery was evil. Their attack on the United States of America was treason. And that flag they were trying so hard to keep in a place of sovereignty didn't belong there. This is not the Confederate States of America.''

He was impressed with June Wells, the diminutive president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who almost always wears a hat and gloves. She suggested that the battle flag, a soldiers' banner, represented the Confederacy less than the Stars and Bars, and that that's what should fly on the Statehouse grounds.

The Stars and Bars was the only one of the CSA's three national flags that did not include the St. Andrew's Cross, which was used for the battle flag. Mr. Gallman had to admit that he saw nothing in the Stars and Bars that reminded him of burning crosses or hate.

He told Dwight James, the NAACP's executive director, ``I think I could live with that.''

But the NAACP was gradually cut out of talks about the flag resolution.

Some lawmakers were angry that the NAACP, after the Jan. 17 rally, stopped talking about any place of historical context except a museum and started insisting that a Confederate flag should not fly anywhere on Statehouse grounds.

In the Statehouse, flag supporters were not about to ``bury'' the banner. Many privately believed it didn't really belong on the dome but refused to say so, not wanting to create the appearance of buckling under NAACP demands.

House Speaker David Wilkins said the organization ``is no longer a player at the table.''

Sen. Glenn McConnell, a Charleston Republican who owns a Confederate art gallery and re-enacts Civil War battles, said the NAACP ``chose to charge and fight on the wrong ground. Now they're cast in the position of being in opposition to what a majority of South Carolinians want, black and white.''

Mr. Gallman wasn't surprised by the criticism, but some of it hurts - especially claims that the NAACP is stirring up the flag controversy just to get national publicity, new members and donations when it should be concentrating on problems such as crime and teen pregnancy that plague black communities.

Those problems, which also affect whites, take the bulk of his time and energy, the NAACP president says. And the program he's proudest of is one that recognizes young black people for achievements other than sports.

At week's end, he couldn't dwell on the Legislature's snub, however. The NAACP's annual Freedom Fund dinner - a major fund-raiser with plates at $75 and corporate tables at $5,000 - was Friday.

National NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, civil rights campaigner and former Georgia lawmaker, spoke, then flew back to Baltimore to honor the boycott.

He told the crowd of 1,500 people, ``When the defenders of the flag distort history, when they tell lies and say it's nothing about slavery, they help perpetuate the myth that racial prejudice has disappeared. They have rewritten the past. Now they want to rewrite the present.

``Where else on the face of the earth do the losers get to fly the flag as if they'd won the war?''

James Gallman applauded. And braced for more battle.

Reach Margaret N. O'Shea at (803) 279-6895 or scbureau@augustachronicle.com.