Progressive Club Overview
Located along River Road on Johns Island, South Carolina, are the ruins of a cinder block building that was home to the Progressive Club, a center of civil rights activism in the Lowcountry from the 1940s to the 1960s. The Progressive Club was founded in 1948 by Esau Jenkins and Joe Williams, two African American Johns Island residents, in an effort to empower the island’s Black community to combat racial injustice through education and social action. [1] From serving as a central meeting place for important civil rights demonstrations like the MUSC Hospital Workers Strike in 1969, to housing a Citizenship School for essential adult education, the Progressive Club played an integral role in local African American community life, and the regional civil rights movement for decades.[2]
Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the ruins of the Progressive Club were once a part of a one-story cinder block building constructed c. 1963 and characterized by its iconic painted signage.[3] The irregularly-shaped building was made up of four distinct sections designed to accommodate the needs of the local African American community and the national Civil Rights Movement. The Progressive Club provided space for recreation, education, a fuel station, a co-operative grocery store, and a mutual aid organization, while also functioning as a Citizenship School, and a dormitory for visiting civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).[4]
Founding the Progressive Club
In the decades prior to the founding of the Progressive Club, Esau Jenkins and Joe Williams promoted uplift in the African American community on Johns Island in numerous ways.[5] Jenkins, for instance, provided free bus rides from Johns Island to downtown Charleston for students and workers.[6] In the 1940s, a series of racially-motivated acts of violence, spurred the Johns Island community to action, leading Jenkins and Williams to organize a mutual aid society in 1948, called the Progressive Club.[7] According to Jenkins, they hoped to “help the people to be better citizens, give them a chance to get a better education, and know how to reason and look out for themselves, and take more part in political action.”[8]
That same year, a landmark decision handed down by Federal Judge J. Waties Waring allowed Black citizens to vote in the previously all-white, South Carolina Democratic Primary, creating a need for greater political education. In one of the first initiatives of the Progressive Club, Esau Jenkins and his wife Janie used the daily bus commute from Johns Island to downtown Charleston as an opportunity to prepare passengers for discriminatory literacy tests required by the state of South Carolina for voter registration.[9] What began as an informal effort to help Black citizens overcome obstacles to exercising their right to vote eventually became a full-fledged Citizenship School focused on adult education and empowerment.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Progressive Club met every third Sunday at Moving Star Hall, a small historic praise house used as a central gathering place for African American Johns Island residents.[10] Along with monthly dues, voter registration was required for all members, and those who could not read and write were encouraged to learn.[11] Esau Jenkins realized the potential voting power of Black residents on the Sea Islands was about two times greater than that of whites.[12] The question was how to advance voter registration, when nine out of ten African American adults on Johns Island were illiterate.[13]
The Progressive Club Citizenship School
In 1954, Septima Clark, a Johns Island school teacher and civil rights activist, brought forward an innovative solution in the form of a Citizenship School. Clark’s inspiration was drawn from her experience at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, an integrated school for adults, focused on addressing community issues through cooperative problem solving and education. Esau Jenkins attended his first workshop at Highlander in 1954 and met with the organization’s leader, Myles Horton, at Septima Clark’s urging.[14] Subsequently, Horton offered financial support to facilitate the purchase of the Progressive Club’s first permanent home, the former site of Mt. Zion Elementary School.[15] The old school housed the Progressive Club’s co-operative grocery and supply store, as well as the Citizenship School.
With a permanent facility secured, Clark and her cousin Bernice Robinson, the School’s first teacher, soon launched the Citizenship School’s first training program for educators. Between 1961 and 1965 about 1,600 Citizenship teachers from across the South were trained at the Progressive Club.[16] The program grew so large that, in 1961, Progressive Club leadership transferred operations to the larger Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As a result, the Progressive Club’s revolutionary Citizenship School model was spread throughout the South.[17]
The Progressive Club’s New Home
The Progressive Club quickly outgrew the old Mt. Zion Elementary building and in 1962, the one-story, wood frame school building was demolished for the construction of a larger space, completed by March of 1963.[18] The new building allowed the Club to transition to its new and larger role as the Progressive Club Sea Island Center, serving communities from Charleston to Beaufort County.
As civil rights activism in Charleston continued, the Progressive Club served as a central meeting place for the 1969 MUSC Hospital Workers Strike. Many of the Club’s members actively participated in the struggle; some like William (Bill) Saunders even took key leadership roles in the demonstration.[19]
The Progressive Club’s Legacy
Following a tragic automobile accident, Esau Jenkins died November 1st, 1972.[21] In the wake of his death, Progressive Club activity and membership began to dwindle.[22] However, the Progressive Club building continued to serve as a community center until 1989, when Hurricane Hugo hit the Lowcountry, severely damaging the c. 1963 building. While the extent of the damage made repair unfeasible, plans are currently in the works to rebuild the Progressive Club, and reestablish the organization’s presence as a center for community uplift on Johns Island.[23]
In 2013 the Progressive Club partnered with the Preservation Society of Charleston to erect a state historic marker at the site as a part of the Society’s Civil Right Era Historic Markers Program.[24] Further elevating the history of the Progressive Club, the rear panels of the Jenkins’ 1966 Volkswagen Type 2 T1 Deluxe Microbus, on which are printed the words: “Love is Progress, Hate is Expensive,” are now installed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The bus was also listed on the national Historic Vehicle Register as one of the first vehicles added in connection to the Civil Rights Movement.[25]
The Progressive Club’s legacy is one of empowerment. As Bernice Robinson said: “On Johns Island you see the results now really, the aggressiveness of the people and the confidence they had in moving forward […] All this is an outgrowth of people feeling empowered by being able to read and write and understanding how to go about pressing for things like that.”[26]
Click the images below to explore the Progressive Club gallery.
[1] US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: The Progressive Club, by John Laurens and Leigh Scott (April 2007), 13, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/118997424; “The Progressive Club, Johns Island: Remembering Individuals, Remembering Communities: Septima P. Clark and Public History in Charleston: Lowcountry Digital History Initiative,”https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/septima_clark/virtual-tour/the-progressive-club; Steve Estes, Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C.: UNC Press, 2015), 17.
[2] Stephen Hobbs, “John Is. Club Was a Center for Civil Rights,” The Post and Courier, March 24, 2019.
[3] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 2-5.
[4] David J. Thompson, “The Co-Op That Changed the South | Co-Op Grocer Network,” Cooperative Grocer, 2014, https://www.grocer.coop/articles/co-op-changed-south; Dave Munday, “‘It Was Tough’: Site Recalls a Civil Rights Landmark,” The Post and Courier, September 9, 2013; US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 16-17; “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 9.
[5] “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 7.
[6] “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 7; Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 38, 149; Emily Williams, “A Ride to Remember,” The Post and Courier, September 18, 2019.
[7] Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 145-146; US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 13.
[8] Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?: The People of Johns Island, South Carolina – Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (Athens, Georgia: Brown Thrasher Books, University of Georgia Press, 1989), 146.
[9] “The Progressive Club, Johns Island: Remembering Individuals, Remembering Communities,”; Williams, “A Ride to Remember,”; William V. Moore, “Elmore v. Rice,” in South Carolina Encyclopedia, accessed June 24, 2020, http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/elmore-v-rice/,; Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 149.
[10] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 13.
[11] Hobbs, “John Is. Club Was a Center for Civil Rights,”; Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 154-155.
[12] Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 150.
[13] Estes, Charleston in Black and White, 18.
[14] Winfred B. Moore and Orville Vernon Burton, Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina During the Twentieth Century (Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 228; Estes, Charleston in Black and White, 18.
[15] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 15; Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 150; “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 8.
[16] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 15; Preservation Studio Spring Term 2015, “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 8; Townsend Davis, “South Carolina: Charleston/Johns Island: The Citizenship Schools,” in Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 323.
[17] Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 198-199, 203-204.
[18] “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 9.
[19] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 17.
[20] Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?,132; US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 6; Paul Bowers, “From Occupy Charleston to the 1969 Hospital Strike,” Charleston City Paper, July 3, 2013.
[21] Damon L. Fordham, True Stories of Black South Carolina (Arcadia Publishing, 2008), 133.
[22] Hobbs, “John Is. Club Was a Center for Civil Rights.”
[23] US Department of the Interior, The Progressive Club, 19; “The Progressive Club, John’s Island South Carolina,” 10; Hobbs, “John Is. Club Was a Center for Civil Rights.”
[24] Munday, “‘It Was Tough’: Site Recalls a Civil Rights Landmark.”
[25] “Volkswagen of America Remembers a Civil Rights Pioneer Through Preservation of the ‘Jenkins Bus,’” Targeted News Service (USA), September 12, 2019; Williams, “A Ride to Remember,”; Hobbs, “John Is. Club Was a Center for Civil Rights,”; Skyler Baldwin, “Charleston Civil Rights Hero and Transportation Advocate Remembered,” Charleston City Paper, February 19, 2020, https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/charleston-civil-rights-hero-and-transportation-advocate-remembered/Content?oid=30704348.
[26] Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, eds., Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?, 206.