Program
Welcoming
Kenny Carr and The Tigers performance
Thorne Compton, USC Bicentennial Executive Committee Chair
Alex English, Master of Ceremonies, USC Board of Trustees
Capital City Chorale Performing Arts Foundation performance
John R. Stevenson, former superintendent of Richland School District One
Kenny Carr and The Tigers performance
Elaina Betts, Richland School District Two
Susan Aude Fisher, WIS News
Kenny Carr and The Tigers, Kelly McGlenn (as grandmomma) and the Cross Barriers performance
Kenny Carr and The Tigers performance
Emily Dixon, Richland School District One
Capital City Chorale Performing Arts Foundation performance
Kara Monk, University of South Carolina
Kenny Carr and The Tigers performance
Angela Ewing-Boyd, Palmetto Project
Kenny Carr and The Tigers performance
We wish to acknowledge our honored teachers: Evangline Mance (Alston School, Summerville),
Michele Shamlin (Fulmer Middle School), J. Bruce Carlock (Erskine College), Carol
McAlpin (Dreher High School), Annette Walker (Lower Richland High School)
Sponsored by the USC Bicentennial Commission and College of Education's Museum of
Education with support from the University of South Carolina’s African American Studies
Program, Department of English, Multicultural Student Affairs, Women’s Studies Program,
and special funding by Dr. John Hawley.
CAROLINA SHOUT!: Thoughts and Reflections
by William Ayers, University of Illinois-Chicago
I knew I would be there from the start, because Craig Kridel had asked me to be there
and I always try to do what Craig Kridel asks me to do.
And I figured it would be different because, well, because Craig Kridel is always
and every time a bit of a surprise for me, and because he wrote to tell me that the
SHOUT would be special, and also because when he called to update me on things, the
SHOUT was always and urgently upper-case, even if he whispered it, even if he slid
it in sideways and slow. THE SHOUT.
But, CAROLINA SHOUT?
I had no idea.
It began as it should have begun—old friendships renewed, some time to catch up and
catch on, good connections remembered and remade. There was conversation, then, with
students and faculty from the University of South Carolina, with schoolteachers from
nearby cities and towns, with a few guests from far away. We were coming together
on some common ground—in celebration of teaching and teachers, certainly, and in recognition
of the ethical dimension of this most propulsive calling of callings—we were creating
a shared vocabulary to mark this moment as unique and to carry us beyond as well,
and we were—each of us, I think—wondering and wandering.
CAROLINA SHOUT!
The first happy shock for me was meeting Louise DeSalvo who is as smart and feisty
close up as she is in her many fine books, but also sassy and sexy in person. Louise
talked about writing our lives as acts of assent and affirmation, as participatory
and potentially liberatory events, as sometimes subversive but also at their best
authentic and authenticating. She talked about knowing our students to the extent
that they want to be known—no more—and about resisting the perverse and pernicious
stance of “Let me find out all about your life while I’m busy avoiding finding out
about my own.” Louise embodied for me doing education in a dangerous world—education
as emancipation. She found ways to embrace and challenge those of us around her with
a single gesture, and watching her quick and critical mind at work took my breath
away. I was entirely enthralled.
SHOUT! SHOUT!
Meeting Cleveland Sellers after a span of more than thirty years—a lot of water under
that bridge, a whole lot of water—also took my breath away. I remembered Cleve as
a brilliant and courageous field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), a teacher and an organizer who embodied a belief in the ability
of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things whenever they name the obstacles
to their freedom and join hands in a collective effort of repair. Cleve was about
simple justice then, the right of people to make the decisions that affect their lives,
the vision of a humanity united in cooperation and peace. And now here he was a professor,
an historian, but still with his mind and his heart and his eyes set on freedom. Seeing
him reminded me of the danger of looking backward with a kind of anesthetizing nostalgia—even
if the intent seems beneficent—when there’s so much more to be done, and we talked
about rejecting the construction of “the sixties” as a straightforward narrative with
a message of obvious progress and a neat conclusion. There’s so much more to be done.
SHOUT!
The evening was wet and drippy, and we ducked under newspapers or umbrellas rushing
to coffee and dinner and then off to the big event: gospel choirs, step teams, shout-outs
for teachers and teaching, soloists, and Kenny Carr and the Tigers.
Kenny Carr is a big man with a big smile and big heart. When we met, he gathered me
into a big hug and squeezed hard. My breath left me again. He was strong and spirited
and full of energy, ready to shout.
The hall was filling up and the air crackling when Craig Kridel passed me a hand-held
mic, and I delivered my well-rehearsed line: “Welcome, friends, to CAROLINA SHOUT!
Kenny… Hit it!”
The Tigers hit the down beat in full growl, and suddenly we were soaring with horns
blaring into thin air—clapping, stomping, moaning, swinging, shouting out loud. The
rhythm had a point—a celebration of teachers who changed our lives, their spirits
summoned and their lives praised—and a counter-point—art that erupts, disrupts, touches
our souls and our dreams, carries us across boundaries and borders into places we’d
never before imagined. I felt transformed, sweat mingled with tears, your slap echoed
in my head, my stomp joined with your step, and my blood quickened.
CAROLINA SHOUT!
CAROLINA SHOUT!
Thank you, Carolina, thank you.