HOPE IN Clinton St. Quarterly South Carolina: Baptists By Paul Loeb Illustration by Robert Williamson Although Florence could be said to have a particular relationship to the time we’ve fairly casually termed “the nuclear age,” otherwise it differed little from its quiet rural neighbors. The bomb came, went, and was largely forgotten. Situated 110 miles up-country from Charleston and eighty east of the state capital in Columbia, this community of 30,000 went about its ordinary way, paying scant attention to grand and distant global issues. Its citizens paid the resulting costs, accepted the resulting consequences, and fell into line with the rest of the culture. Dissenters only appeared as exotic fodder for TV news. Therefore, it was unexpected when sixty respectable local residents engaged in a “protest march”—a fundraising walk for the national Freeze campaign. In all, 200 people participated by marching or signing pledges, contacting the press, baking cookies, serving ice tea, or performing the myriad other tasks that made the walk successful. Starting out on a clear October Saturday from Poyner, a former high school now used as an adult education center, they headed east out of town, past the black neighborhood’s crumbling porches, rusting tin roofs, and glass-littered ground. They reached the pale stucco courts and dried-up swimming pools of motels left behind when a new interstate bypassed Florence: the Treasure City Bingo Jamboree, a’parlor as large as a Safeway store, promising $400,000 jackpots beneath an Imperial Margarine crown; and then the Florence Air and Missile Museum, where Saber jets, Titan missiles and B-17s stood sentinel on cylindrical posts. Quaintly obsolete, no longer up to high-tech standards, they cast echoes of past military glories on walkers carrying signs reading: “No Winners Nuclear War,” “End The Arms Race,” and" ‘Come Now, Let Us Reason Together’”—this last with chapter and verse citation from Isaiah. Another sign began “Blessed Are The Peace Wishers,” with “Wishers” crossed out to “Thinkers,” and finally changed to “Blessed Are The Peace Makers.” The six-mile march was to end at the atomic bomb site. But the property owners backed out after receiving threatening phone calls. The marchers walked as close as they could—to the campus of the 3,000-student Francis Marion College, a commuter school named after the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution. For the marchers and for the town, such public dissent was a first. For almost everyone involved, this day marked entry into a country of new vulnerability and exposure. SoTn^walked past oaks, pines, and popTSre,' lightly timid but proud, while neighbors watched from the Midas Muffler shop, Piggly Wiggly superf wenty-five years after an atomic bomb fell just outside J- its city limits, Florence, South Carolina had a peace march. A B-47 lost the weapon in 1958 when a lock broke on it bay doors, and the bomb dropped 15,000 feet before landing outside a modest farmhouse. Fortunately, the plutonium and uranium did not go critical. Three years later, two more bombs fell 130 miles away in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and an atomic blast was prevented only when, after five safety devices failed, the final one held. Instead, the first bomb’s TNT trigger, detonating on impact, dug a hole 100 feet across and thirty-five feet deep, sheared off surrounding trees, and caved in the adjacent house as if a giant had kicked in its side. The blast wounded three children playing in the yard. The family fought for years before getting the barest of settlements.
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