Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford (review)

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• Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford
• Margaret Lynn Brown

Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. By Susan Crawford. Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023. Pp. xii, 371. $28.95, ISBN 978-1-63936-357-5.)

“Experience the timeless charm and unrivaled hospitality only found in Charleston,” a December 26, 2022, New Yorker advertisement proclaims, with “a stirring sense of history.” Full-page spreads like these attract “seven million mostly white tourists” every year to the city’s “luxury hotels . . . for care-free indulgence and relaxation,” according to author Susan Crawford (pp. 6, 7). Tourism contributes $10 billion a year to the regional economy. Little wonder why leaders of the coastal city will not utter the words “sea level rise,” [End Page 604] especially if to do so implies that climate change and human activity have something to do with increased flooding. “[I]f you were planning for the Charleston region of 2050 and beyond, you would not build there and you would not want people to move there,” Crawford writes. “Tick off the dangers: storm surge, sea level rise, chronic flooding, groundwaters rising, risk to drinking water—it’s all about to get much more dangerous” (p. 258).

Susan Crawford’s Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm juxtaposes the shortsighted view of civic leaders with the city’s long history of privileged development and racism. Like Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written a foreword to the book, Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School, and the book often adopts the tone of a polemic with grim statistics and frightening forecasts. “Forty years ago, the city flooded ten times a year. The city flooded eighty-nine times in 2019, almost once every four days, sixty-eight times in 2020, and forty-six times in 2021” (pp. 10–11). Historians—always more comfortable with measured statements focused on the past—may not read this book. Perhaps they should. Crawford describes how modern development rests upon “creeks and marshes,” filled in with “trash, rubble, dirt, [and] offal” and covered with sand and dirt, work that had been done using slave labor (p. 34). “Today,” she writes, “much of Charleston is sitting on landfill. Floating on trash” (p. 35).

The most engaging part of Crawford’s book, though, is a series of interviews with members of the African American community, including Rev. Joseph A. Darby, a Columbia, South Carolina–born pastor who led the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston for fifteen years. Darby describes how, when the Arthur J. Ravenel Jr. Bridge was built between 2001 and 2005, African Americans were displaced: “‘The city,’ Darby says drily, ‘created a few college scholarships to compensate for that’” (p. 77). Through in-depth interviews with Black leaders like Darby, Crawford describes race relations and development patterns in all the major sectors of Charleston. Each of these interviews is presented at length, creating a full portrait of the person and their life story. Quinetha Frasier, a Gullah Geechee descendant who left Charleston for Atlanta, for example, blends insights into the city’s racial atmosphere for young professionals, from observations about housing losses caused by overdevelopment to reactions to the shooting of the Mother Emanuel Nine. All of Crawford’s sources seem well acquainted with the threat of climate change. As for the city, though, even taking land elevations into account when zoning “will become a political firestorm if developers decided to mount substantial objections” (p. 281).

Crawford leans heavily into scientific literature, planning documents, and interviews to make her case, missing some excellent work by historians, such as Steve Estes’s Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2015). For a deeper understanding of Charleston’s long history with filling up swamps with questionable materials, see Christina Rae Butler’s Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2020). Still, Crawford’s highly readable work with strong voices may get the attention of those who need to hear the message. [End Page 605]

Margaret Lynn Brown Brevard College Copyright © 2024...