Community leader wants local youths
to take advantage of opportunities

February 27, 2006

By JACKIE R. BROACH
Index-Journal staff writer

In honor of Black History Month, The Index-Journal has printed a series of weekly articles, each telling the story of one area resident who played an integral role in civil rights locally. To preserve that history and their place in it, we shared their stories each Monday in February. This is the fourth and final in the series. Joe Patton grew up in a world much different than the one his four grandchildren are coming to know.
He was raised in Spartanburg in the 1940s and ’50s, when “separate but equal” was the law of the land, and he came of age during the civil rights movement when marches and sit-ins were a daily routine.
There were a great many rights and freedoms taken for granted today that were unavailable to Patton when he was growing up.
He was limited in the career paths he could take, the schools he could attend, even in which water fountain he could drink from or which restaurants he could eat in.
While America and the world may have a long way to go as far as equality among races, it has already come a long way, and Patton played a part in that transformation.
Patton, 63, is CEO of GLEAMNS in Greenwood and is a community leader who encourages young people to take advantage of the many opportunities available to them.
Each of those opportunities is one that someone fought for and they should be appreciated and utilized, Patton said.
He worries that progress in civil rights has been stifled as people have grown lazy and become comfortable with where they are.
He’d like to see that progress continue, but that can happen only if the masses — people of all races — stop profiling and stereotyping each other, he said. He tries to impart that bit of information to others when he can and said he’d like to see more people of his age providing positive guidance to young people, and keeping the dreams of civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., alive.
“I feel like people have gotten comfortable when we need to keep pushing to dismantle all signs and institutions of racial injustice,” Patton said.
Growing up the son of a businessman and a teacher, Patton remembers ordering hot dogs and Coca-Cola at the end of a luncheon counter with his mother, then they would go through the neighboring shoe repair shop and sit on a bench to enjoy their purchase because they weren’t allowed to sit at the luncheon counter.
In theaters, members of the black community entered through separate doors and sat in the balcony. They went into the white community to pay utility bills but, for the most part, handled the rest of their business in their own communities, Patton said. The black community provided for itself, he said. It had its own schools and churches, doctors and stores, mortuaries and services. Distinct rules of etiquette and boundaries were laid out for Patton. His grandmother sat him down when he was young and and gave him special instructions about how to treat white folks in public. He was told not to treat them with familiarity, especially white women, because the consequences could be dire.
“That sort of thing wasn’t good for your health,” Patton said. He recalled at least one man was lynched for whistling at a white woman.
In private, however, many of the black families had close bonds with white families they worked for or with, and their children spent many afternoons playing together. Racism is rarely a problem with children, he said, which gives him hopes for future generations.
Though Patton remembers his mother dragging him in the house and locking all the doors when the Ku Klux Klan would ride through town, he said he never realized the level of oppression members of his race faced when he was growing up. He remembers people as being “reasonably content,” at least in his community.
“I didn’t realize that much of a difference, because we didn’t venture into the other world that often,” Patton said. “We had to rely on the white establishment for necessities like utilities and financing, but everything else was contained in the community.”
The injustices were made crystal clear to Patton when he enrolled in Knoxville College in Tennessee, he said. He’d heard the oratoricals of some of America’s great civil rights leaders and was motivated to join in on a number of the sit-ins that took place in the early 1960s.
Patton wanted all opportunities open to him, he said, and he wanted to be part of the movement to make that happen. Though he’d always known he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother and grandmother to become an educator, he wanted to know all options were open to him. He wanted those options to be available to his children.
After one year in school, the military called. He continued to involve himself in the civil rights movement, calling leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall his role models. He favored their peaceful approaches to gaining equality, he said. King’s approach, he described as “Ghandian” and Marshall chose to fight the battle in court.
One of the men who most impressed him, however was Matthew Perry, who was South Carolina’s first black federal judge. Perry lived in Spartanburg for a time and actually fought alongside Marshall in court. He was, in fact, known as the Palmetto State’s Thurgood Marshall, Patton said.
Patton remembers himself as a man who carried himself in dignity and was never rattled. Patton never wanted to be a lawyer, he said, but in character, he wanted to be just like Perry.
He’s striven for years to be an admirable community leader and a good role model, like Perry, he said. Patton is considered by many to be all of those things. He’s traveled up and down the East Coast working in health and human services, finding ways to assist as many people as possible.
Prior to coming to GLEAMNS, he served as executive director of several health and human services organizations, including DHEC. He’s a dedicated husband, father and grandfather, and he said he thinks his parents would be proud of what he has made of himself.

Reforming property tax: What’s best way to go?

February 27, 2006

Property tax, or property tax reform, continues to be debated by South Carolina lawmakers. Whether anything will be changed this year is debatable, though.
The House of Representatives recently approved a measure that would swap most property taxes for an increase in sales taxes. The Senate, however, has many members who disagree with what the House proposes and it is likely the Senate will come up with its own plan.
There’s something else. Many South Carolinians who have expressed support for a change are now beginning to wonder whether the cure might not be worse than the disease. Nevertheless, the debate goes on.

COMPARABLY SPEAKING, property taxes in this state, for the most part, are not not all that high ... except in some places. Ask people who have moved to the Palmetto State from other places and it’s likely they’ll wonder what all the fuss is about. For them, the property taxes here are well within reason.
Before, or if, anything is done, all of the ramifications should be clear before South Carolina jumps out of the proverbial pan into the proverbial fire. Actually, when you get right down to the problem, it doesn’t appear to be the property tax system itself that concerns taxpayers. It’s the reassessment factor that very often piles on huge increases for homeowners without any elected officeholders having to vote for a tax increase, and no one can be held accountable.
FOR SOME, THE NEWLY assessed taxes are so unreasonable sometimes that no one could honestly say they are anywhere near being fair. For many others, new assessments mean tax increases on homes that can force people who’ve owned their homes for years to have to sell or lose them. That’s because they don’t have the money to pay the increased taxes, and they have no choice.
Considering everything, maybe the Legislature should be working to revise and improve the reassessment system. That might be more reasonable to everyone in the long haul, not to mention avoid a few problems that a comprehensive tax swap might create. Surely, it would help a lot of South Carolinians who are being hurt by the present way of doing things.