Jerry Dean Pate is a retired trade association president and executive who spent thirty years lobbying the Congress and state legislatures. He holds a BA in Journalism and Master of Public Administration degrees from the University of South Carolina.
A South Carolina native, he also worked twenty years in radio and television as a reporter, writer, producer, news anchor and news director covering the state legislature, the Civil Rights and women’s movements from the mid 1960’s onward.
Pate grew up in a segregated small SC town, was raised on false beliefs about the Civil War and annually marched with classmates to a monument to honor Confederate soldiers. He was taught American Exceptionalism as part of WW-II propaganda and an America is the Greatest history which didn’t include the Trail of Tears, and the near genocide of Native Americans and little about the devastating effect of slavery on African Americans.
He witnessed the rise of Christian Conservatives, and the use of falsehoods and character assassination as a staple in conservative politics. He saw black Democrats get duped into giving Republicans control of Southern state legislatures in exchange for minority-majority districts at the expense of votes needed to trigger compromise.
His views about what he was taught changed as he began reporting on the civil rights and women’s movements and saw how bad beliefs and attitudes about African Americans, textile workers and labor unions affected the state. He worries that the current political assaults on truth and fact threaten America’s ability to govern itself.
More Books by
Jerry DEAN Pate
False beliefs are always more powerful than truth.
In the South, speaking the truth can have dire consequences.
Small town newspaperman Vernon Covington knows firsthand the corruption that fueled the 1934 textile strike. For publishing truth supported by facts, his newspaper is foreclosed, he is run out of town, and his spirit nearly broken.
Nearing the end of his career and drowning his demons with alcohol, he shares a desk with Betsy McCall a feisty young reporter who herself gets tossed out a United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting for challenging the myth of the Lost Cause. Together, they are determined to cut through the fraudulent history of the South and expose how those wanting to remain in power manipulated whole generations into accepting half-truths and lies as common knowledge.
They discover that whites seized control of the South Carolina legislature from Black officials and forced a US President to topple a governor so a Confederate General could take his place.
Vernon tells Betsy how racism was invented to keep poor whites and blacks apart politically and that Betsy’s aunt was murdered because she was a woman – a bold woman – at a time when men didn’t like bold women, especially one daring to lead a union drive and a protest about the brutal working conditions and low pay at Crowell Textile Mill.
This vivid and unforgettable account of a South Carolina town stretches from the heyday of slavery, through the Civil War to the Great Depression. It reveals what happens when communities embrace false ideas and provides background for how America’s democracy is at risk because even today there is a plague of bad beliefs.
Plagued by Bad Beliefs
Jerry DEAN Pate
How a whole state was misled to protect slavery, stoke racism and keep out labor unions.
Book Excerpt or Article
Chapter 1 – The UDC – Haigler’s Crossing, SC - 1936
Every community has customs and beliefs. Some are good as they ensure the normal behaviors of daily life. Some may be just quirks, harmless in their effect. But then there are beliefs, grown out of lies, that lead otherwise good people to join in or stand aside and watch . . . as great harm is done.
Some Boy Scouts didn’t believe the weather warning one night and went to the pond anyway. One of them slipped on a log, hit his head and drowned just as a bad lightning storm blew in. His playmates, afraid of the lightning, were too scared to jump in after him, abandoned their encampment, and ran home for help.
Days later his mutilated corpse was found among a thick growth of cattails and lily pads some distance from the log. The sheriff said it looked as if some animal had dragged it toward the shore and ate on it. Some believed it was an alligator, but duck hunters and fishermen swore there were no gators there. That’s when the rumors started about the boys, their scoutmaster, and Lura Mae McCutchen’s ghost hacking at the body with her butcher knife.
More Articles and Excerpts by
Jerry DEAN Pate
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