The Importance of Being Ernest

Ernie Hamilton Is Sharing Stories Of Segregated Black High Schools That No Longer Exist And It's A Damn Good Thing, Too

Ernie Hamilton graduated from Beck High School in 1969, a year before the public schools here in Greenville, South Carolina finally integrated with then-Governor Robert E. McNair conceding that, in their resistance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the state’s public school systems had finally “run out of courts.” This was only seven years after future Charlotte, North Carolina mayor Harvey Gantt became the first Black student at Clemson University, just an hour south of here.

Desegregation came slowly to the Palmetto State - and grudgingly. Just as public swimming pools were filled in or sold off to private concerns once integration was inevitable, South Carolina lawmakers spitefully repealed mandatory school attendance laws - and even considered dissolving public schools altogether - if the “supreme law of the land” since 1954 was adopted as the “law in South Carolina” in 1970. (Any similarity to the right-wing efforts to undermine and defund public schools today is purely intentional and not at all coincidental.)

This bit about closing schools is central to Ernie Hamilton’s own story because, when Greenville schools were finally integrated in February 1970, they shuttered all of the Black high schools. Black students had to change schools and their sports team records and achievements were basically obliterated when that happened. Not that the state recognized the athletic records as official state records before integration…but with no surviving entities to maintain the schools’ archives and preserve the statistics, the stories of these students would be lost.

Ernie, being a stellar defensive end in high school ended up having to leave the Deep South to get a fair shot at playing at the next level. He landed a spot on the roster of the Michigan State Spartans, did his thing there, and then - to my amazement - he returned home. In a short time, he became a lawyer and, eventually, since 1991, he’s been the blood, sweat and tears of the Piedmont Athletic Association (PAA) Hall of Fame, an organization that remembers and celebrates the athletes of Greenville’s five Black high schools, all of which closed with integration.

Ernie Hamilton had the kind of career that would earn him a spot in a typical sports hall of fame, but it’s his non-athletic resume that makes him the kind of candidate deserving of induction into the Piedmont Athletic Association Hall of Fame.

One of the keys to understanding what’s going on with the PAA Hall of Fame is to look at the massive numbers of inductees, approaching 250 at present count.

This is not your usual Hall of Fame, in which a secretive panel is exceedingly stingy about dishing out compliments and honors. There are alumni who, looking at the inductees, may notice a classmate who they only vaguely recall having made the roster of, say, the girl’s basketball team. That classmate may not have been a regular starter, let alone a standout whose athletic feats astonished coaches, fans and teammates alike. Yet, even for the students whose position on a team was to “ride the pine,” the legend lives on - because stellar athletic feats are not the only stuff of legend that must be preserved.

I caught up with Ernie this afternoon at a college fair for HBCUs - an event he attends annually to promote the PAA Hall of Fame. He has an elaborate and extensive collection of materials, all for the high school students attending the college fair to look over. The event started at 2 pm and the person in charge of the venue told me that Ernie was already there at 9 am. It’s the one time each year we see one another and it’s a damn good thing for Greenville - and the state, for that matter - that he’s there.

I realized the importance of his work as he was offering the hefty proceedings of the PAA Hall of Fame to a representative of the mayor’s office - in hopes of having it preserved in the city’s official historical archives.

The PAA Hall of Fame hasn’t merely preserved Black history. It has recovered and exhumed it. These are the origin stories of people who are at the heart of the community. They come from a slice of Greenville history that, left to the devices of city leaders, would be blotted out, as this history otherwise has no home. After all, exactly where are the records and archives of the Black high schools that all got shut down in 1970?

But, why is this so important?

Ernie Hamilton is tirelessly preserving and recovering Black history by bringing the Piedmont Athletic Association Hall of Fame to the county’s Black residents.

There are some obvious answers, like keeping the history alive, taking pride in events that can be easily forgotten, or for the sake of nostalgia.

I believe something more vital than all of that is at stake.

As Ernie pitched the annals of the PAA Hall of Fame for inclusion in the city’s official archives, my thoughts turned to a lecture at Fuller Seminary called “The Art Of Traditioning” delivered by Hak Joon Lee, a renowned scholar on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which I’ve heard retold by the writer and artistic theologian, Alexus Rhone.

I cannot do the full lecture the kind of justice here that Lex Rhone offers in her retelling of it, but the pull quote for our purposes is this:

“If you don’t know your formative narrative, you will adopt someone else’s story, where the heroes look like them, and the villains look like you.” - Hak Joon Lee

This year, as South Carolina’s state legislature presses for legislation this session that restricts the practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion” at state institutions of higher learning - operating on the unsupported (if not utterly preposterous) premise that Black students are denying spots to more worthy white students on account of “DEI” initiatives - we can see this nefarious “we’re the heroes, you’re the villains” storytelling unfold.

The PAA Hall of Fame showcases some 250 heroes from the county’s five Black high schools. They do not necessarily rate among the greatest athletes in these parts, but they do rate among the area’s heroes by the many other measures used to define the heroes of a community.

Without people like Ernie Hamilton pushing and pressing and just being all-around persistent in naming and celebrating the many Black heroes of Greenville who faced segregation - and many of whom also went through the tribulations of integration, too - the DEI story being told by white lawmakers at the statehouse might sound credible:

What business do Black folks have taking away seats (and other opportunities) from the white people who are most deserving of those spots?

If you think about the underlying premise here for just a moment - the idea that the people who excluded Black people from the schoolhouse are the ones who are operating on a merit system - the racist hubris will slap you hard in the face.

I’m dating myself in sharing that I’ve written on onionskin paper that has more depth than the level of scrutiny, the amount of supporting evidence, and the richness of data that policy makers rely upon to affirm their predispositions that white people have more merit than their Black neighbors.

The funding disparities among schools and school districts based on the uneven geographic distribution of wealth are ignored - and sustained whenever possible, yet somehow, lawmakers jump straight to the idea that it’s Black students who are getting an unfair advantage. At no point do the lawmakers bother to interrogate all the ways that their presumption of white superiority is not supported by the data, beginning with their commitment to entirely writing off the highly differentiated circumstances that Black students, in the year 2024, have to match up.

We cannot be satisfied by relying on benchmarks for access to future opportunities that optimize outcomes for people who look like those who presently wield power - people whose own success is directly attributable to growing up in an environment where their own opportunities for success washed over and anointed them regardless of any merit. These people have leaned heavily on their own affirmative action programs - which are largely invisible because there’s generally no name or label attached to the status quo. After all, when things don’t have a name, they tend to fly under the radar and evade scrutiny and criticism.

When we try to make corrections for the inequities that the status quo is proliferating, there’s a predictable and immediate backlash from the powerful. The story they tell is that the bad guys are the ones who are trying to level the playing field. The downhill path the empowered class travels, with the wind at their backs, must be preserved because that’s their formative narrative.

As a community, state, or nation, we’re never better off when opportunities to thrive and succeed are funneled off to people who have to do the least to claim them. As I often lament, I don’t want to be operated on by the best surgeon who looks much like me. I want to be operated on by the best surgeon. Hard stop. If finding the most promising talent means taking into account the hardships, hurdles and “degree of difficulty” points that come from growing up Black in a world designed to shut down success, then it’s in my self interest, as a white man, to take these factors into account.

And if making the case that the Black people of Greenville County are “Hall of Fame” caliber people squashes the false narrative that those who find success by running downhill with the wind at their backs are the most deserving people, then it’s in my self interest, as a white man, for Ernie Hamilton to squash that false narrative.

As the South Carolina state legislature enacts bill after bill that shapes and reframes the formative narratives of the people of South Carolina and what gets taught in schools and what gets circulated in public libraries, Hak Joon Lee’s warning is prophetic: the legislature is intent on ensuring the only acceptable narrative is one where the heroes will look like them and the villains will look like the 250 or so members of the PAA Hall of Fame.

If the likes of Ernie Hamilton aren’t out there sharing all the Hall of Fame stories from the Black communities across South Carolina, the state legislature will finally get away with the crime that their Jim Crow-era predecessors couldn’t quite pull off.