Work begins to turn racist South Carolina store into harmony site

Regan Freeman had spent more than a year organizing a project to tell the story of a Black South Carolina pastor who reached out to Ku Klux Klan members who wanted him dead because of his race.

Freeman thought he knew the story well.

Then came a tweet that led to two grey storage tubs of some of the most racist newspapers, flyers, posters, photographs and other material Freeman had ever seen.

And the struggles the Rev. David Kennedy went through and his patience, love and caring for all men, even those with the most evil in their hearts, came into sharper focus for the young man born three months after The Redneck Shop and World's Only Klan Museum adorned with

Confederate flags and with the swastika painted on a back wall, opened in Laurens.

Under Freeman's leadership, the Echo Project has raised more than $300,000 to renovate the rundown and in danger of being condemned historic Echo Theater, a segregated movie theater for decades before becoming a store filled with racist t-shirts and other merchandise with a large meeting hall where dozens of hooded Klan members met in the back.

An architect and construction firm has been chosen with work beginning soon and Freeman plans to relaunch the project's website to expand its reach.

He wants to collect stories of Black people around Laurens whose ancestors struggled through slavery and segregation and maybe take on other projects like putting up historical markers at the site of each of the more than 150 known lynchings of Black victims in the state.

And that led Freeman to grey plastic tubs.

He saw a posting on Twitter in October where a woman who now owns the land where Redneck Shop owner John Howard lived when he died randomly let the Southern Poverty Law Center's account know she had a ton of his stuff.

The woman didn't respond, so Freeman drove up himself and after a unannounced visit, some negotiation and $500, he had decades of stuff marking Howard's racist life.

There are negatives of cross burnings. Posters of Adolph Hitler.

A "Klan Rally Instructions" manual. A flyer called "A Boat Ticket To Africa" with horribly offensive Black caricatures and stereotypes.

A business card a Klan member would leave to intimidate Black families that said this was a social visit and "don't make the next visit a business call."

This stuff isn't from 100 years ago. Some of it is maybe from the last decade or two, according to Freeman.

Freeman plans to have historians at the University of South Carolina help him look through the items with an eye toward preservation and displaying the ones that best tell a story at exhibits at the theater.

"But our plan is to take this theater and to turn it into a place where you kind of really understand what happened in the building, you know, to take the history of the Echo Theater and of this struggle for justice, not only in Lawrence County, but to pair it with this longer story and this larger history across the country," he said.

A Klan member named Michael Burden, who was once considering killing Kennedy, sold the theater to the pastor in 1997 after Kennedy helped him out when he and Howard had a falling out.

But Burden's deal let Howard keep leasing the theater for The Redneck Shop.

Kennedy finally won a 15-year court fight and shut the shop down. The story became the movie "Burden" released earlier this year.

Now Freeman is leading the project to turn the old theater into Kennedy's dream of a community center where racial reconciliation and harmony is at the forefront.

Freeman grew up in nearby Clinton, and while at the University of South Carolina, felt pulled to talk to Kennedy about his work. Kennedy asked him to lead the project and Freeman gave up a law firm job for his new calling.

The project has an architect and construction firm helping out.

The first bit of work for the companies? Scraping off a Confederate flag sticker on the marquee for decades and putting up "The Echo Project" and its website.

(Image Credit: AP)