Abbeville County getting attention for wrong reasons

Is ‘deathbed of the Confederacy’ a hotbed of modern extremism?

June 17

, 2006

BY VIC MacDONALD
Index-Journal regional editor

Why Donalds?
It is a question residents of the usually quiet northern Abbeville County town could be asking this week as the national media swept in, hot on the trail of the story about a mother and daughter being reunited 10 years after her abduction from her home in Tempe, Ariz.
Might the man at the center of the abduction case have been drawn to an area whose county seat is advertised on the 43 Places Web site, and elsewhere, as the “birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy,” and has a recent history of anti-government activities by some people?
It’s the third time since 2003 that an international spotlight has shone on Abbeville County.
First, there was the shooting incident in which two lawmen died at the hands of people who court documents described as extremists. The shootout and 13-hour standoff with law officers stemmed from a road-widening dispute.
Then, white and black ministers tried to forge a forgiveness pact for the sins of slavery, lynching and black oppression. While many saw the move as an olive-branch act of reconciliation, others considered it divisive and argued that people can’t offer forgiveness for something they didn’t do.
Then, Tuesday night, a child missing for a decade was taken out of the clutches of a man described on a Web site posting as having “anti-government sentiments.”
Rebecca Ann Braun, now 12, was taken into protective custody Tuesday night from a manufactured home on Setters Lane in Donalds, where she lived with a woman, Lillian Pitts, and father Danny Moran, who was working in Roanoke, Va.
Moran and Pitts have been arrested and charged in connection with Rebecca’s 1996 abduction. Moran is scheduled for a hearing Monday in Roanoke, Va., said Deborah McArley, spokeswoman for the Phoenix office of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The S.C. Department of Social Services had custody of Rebecca following Pitts’ and Moran’s arrests but would provide no details of her condition. Agency officials would not confirm details of a reunion between the girl and her mother, but The Associated Press learned the two were to be reunited Friday night at an undisclosed location in South Carolina.
Virginia Williamson, general counsel for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, said the agency is “taking care of the child right now.”
A profile of Moran on the North American Missing Persons Network Web site says the man who is charged with custodial interference in Rebecca’s abduction and kept her away from her mother for a decade has “anti-government” sentiments.
Could that have contributed to his decision to settle in Abbeville County?
“I really can’t say. They lived in various locations, including Columbia and Seneca, and most recently here, and they lived in Iowa,” Abbeville County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Marion Johnson. “I hope not, but it sounds like it.”
Abbeville County has a recent history of violence related to what has been described in court documents as anti-government sentiments. Abbeville residents Steven Bixby and father Arthur are charged with the December 2003 slayings of two Abbeville County lawmen over a road-widening dispute at their home on S.C. 72, a main highway through Abbeville.
They are facing murder charges, and Rita Bixby, Steven’s mother and Arthur’s wife, faces accessory charges in connection with the incident. The state is seeking the death penalty against Steven and Rita. The State Law Enforcement Division has taken over the Bixbys’ security detail, complete with bomb-sniffing dogs that patrolled the Abbeville Square when a recent hearing was conducted at the courthouse.
The county sheriff’s office has a monument in front of the office to the two lawmen who died before the standoff, which SLED Chief Robert Stewart said was the most intense gunbattle in state history. The standoff received international attention and became the subject of TV programs and magazine articles.
Abbeville County’s connection to anti-government and white supremacist groups was profiled in a 2004 issue of “Intelligence Report,” a magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala.
The county is promoted to Civil War enthusiasts as “the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy” — a link that continues to appeal to South Carolina’s “rebel” spirit. The first secession meeting was conducted in Abbeville in November 1860, and the last meeting of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ war cabinet was May 1865 at the Burt-Stark Mansion, one of the town’s major landmarks.
In contrast to some of the possible white extremist sentiments the county might have encountered, a Detroit-based church bought about 1,300 acres near Lowdnesville, which is in the county, in May 1999 to establish a farm and summer church camp.
According to Internet research done by The Index-Journal at the time, the organization that bought the land, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, is part of the Black Christian Nationalist Movement. The article said, “The church teaches Jesus Christ is the Black Messiah sent to ‘rebuild the Black Nation Israel and liberate the Black People from oppression, brutality and exploitation of the white gentile world.’”
The church eventually bought 2,600 acres in Abbeville County for a place called Beulah Land Farms, according to the National Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The church members have a vision for the farm that includes a learning center where inner-city children and missionaries from across the country can experience rural life on the farm,” a Web site posting for the agency says.
In July 2001, a United Nations flag was burned on the Abbeville County Courthouse steps as part of a rally. The man who burned the flag, Dennis Belm, of Lawrenceville, Ga., said the action was to protest U.S. government and U.N. efforts to take away Americans’ rights in favor of a “dollar-less” global economy, The Index-Journal reported. More than 60 people attended the rally, and many carried Confederate flags.
The League of the South’s state office and gift shop opened on Main Street in Abbeville three months later. This organization is classified as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But Mac McCoy, of Walhalla, who was the Upstate coordinator for the S.C. chapter, said at that time that the League of the South is a group dedicated to keeping Southern heritage alive, according to an article in The Index-Journal.
Would a person with “anti-government sentiments” seek out this corner of South Carolina thinking, perhaps, that kindred spirits there would hide him — and his daughter?
After all, Olympic Park bombing suspect Eric Rudolph, once on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list before being captured, found longtime refuge in the mountains of North Carolina, and Murphy, N.C., law officers suspected Rudolph received food and shelter from people in the area who were sympathetic with his anti-government and anti-abortion feelings, according to published reports.
The North American Missing Persons Network Web site profile of Moran says, “He is anti-government, refuses to pay his taxes and associates with anti-government groups that file lawsuits against the government. He is probably home-schooling Rebecca.”
“He certainly did not throw a dart at a map and decide to come somewhere near Greenwood, South Carolina,” said Sgt. Dan Masters, of the Tempe Police Department, the office that has been most directly involved with the Rebecca Ann Braun abduction for the past decade. “I wouldn’t bet against you (on the possibility Moran targeted Abbeville County for anti-government philosophies). If you move your family someplace, you do research. We all do it.”
Masters said Helen Braun described Moran’s demeanor as “god-like,” but the mother told investigators that she did not fear physical or sexual abuse on Moran’s part.
While officers were searching for Rebecca after the initial missing child call, Moran called the police to say he had the child and they would never see either of them again, Masters said. Moran said he had developed a network of people throughout the nation who would care for the girl until she turned 21 if he could not, Masters said.
Moran’s major complaint against his wife, Masters said, was that she smoked in front of his daughter. Moran hired a private investigator to track down his wife before the abduction, Masters said.
“He definitely was methodical,” Masters said. “And he was very successful for 10 years. We had tips, leads, sighting and psychics — none of it panned out, until now.”
Masters said that, in Arizona, there is not a great deal of white supremacist or survivalist anti-government activity, but some conflict has arisen with the recent national debate over tightening immigration policies. “There are occasional leaflets left at people’s doors and at synagogues,” he said, “and there are some race gangs, but not white supremacists.”
Mark Potock, director of The Intelligence Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, said those groups are alive and well in South Carolina. In the organization’s listing of states with the largest number of “hate groups,” California is first, Florida is second and South Carolina is third.
“Considering that South Carolina is smaller than Florida, per capita, South Carolina could be number one,” he said. “It is certainly true that Upstate South Carolina has a long and rich history of extremists. But that’s not to say most people there are haters.”
In fact, in July 2005, white and black ministers came together at the Friendship Worship Center in Abbeville in a fences-mending endeavor. Called the Reconciliation Service, the worship had white ministers acknowledging the sins of their forefathers and black ministers offering forgiveness for those sins. The descendants of a man who was lynched 90 years ago in Abbeville — Anthony Crawford, a black farmer — attended the worship service.
The descendants were extended a formal apology by the U.S. Senate in June 2005.
“This is not a story about someone a long time ago,” said Pastor Johnson Dorn, a member of Friendship Worship Center and son of the late former U.S. Rep. William Jennings Bryan Dorn. “It’s a story about me and you and our families. Tonight, I need deliverance from that history (of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow Laws and Reconstruction).”
South Carolina has, throughout its history, been one of the most conservative of the Deep South states, Potok said, and its extremism dates to the Colonial Whiskey Rebellion that opposed efforts to stamp out bootlegging. “And, in South Carolina, it (extremism) is often mixed up with racial ideologies,” he said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked some of the region’s anti-government roots through a Western North Carolina analysis called “Hills of Rebellion” in connection with the Rudolph case. Its analysis of the Bixbys following the 2003 shootout was titled “The Abbeville Horror.”
“A lot of these groups, such as tax protesters, are a network — not to house fugitives, but a subculture,” Potock said. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if this guy (Moran) didn’t meet some people with common interests.”
Two reporters from The Index-Journal who toured the manufactured home where Rebecca lived said there were canisters of spices and other elements of home medicine there, perhaps a signal that Moran took on a survivalist mentality in keeping his daughter in relative seclusion in a home at the end of an undeveloped road.
The landlord of the home that Moran and Pitts were renting said they were going to be on the move with Rebecca soon. Many of their possessions already were at a new location in North Carolina. Moran owned a computer business in Roanoke, Va., where he was arrested, and was commuting to Donalds twice a month.
Whatever Moran’s motive for moving his daughter to Abbeville County, the arrests and reunion between mother and daughter have put the county on the international map — again.
“I just got a call from the U.K. (United Kingdom) about it,” Johnson said. “It took a while ’cause it was hard to understand him.”
Even with fielding print, radio and television media inquiries, and coordinating cooperation with the FBI in taking Moran and Pitts into custody, Johnson said the bottom line of the incident is the girl.
“I’m just glad it had a happy ending,” he said.

Greg Deal, St. Claire Donaghy, Megan Varner and Bobby Harrell of The Index-Journal staff contributed to this report.

Father, daughter found shot to death in Abbeville

June 17, 2006

From staff reports


ABBEVILLE — A father and daughter were found shot to death Friday night behind the Advance Auto Parts store at 608 W. Greenwood St. in Abbeville.
The shooting happened about 7 p.m. on Sawmill Road in a community behind the store.
Abbeville Chief of Police Neil Henderson said Steven Tinch was charged in the deaths of Robert O’Neil and daughter Shirley Demore.
Tinch was arrested on Highway 823 in Abbeville and charged with two counts of murder.
Henderson said he thinks it’s a domestic issue.
Authorities said O’Neil owns an auto repair shop near where the shooting occurred.
A police official told WHNS Fox Carolina that Tinch was well known in the area.
Abbeville City and County Police and the South Carolina Highway Patrol responded to the shooting.
No other details of the shooting were available at press time.

Obituaries

Edward Gordon

Edward Ray Gordon, 71, of 228 Briggs Ave., died Friday, June 16, 2006 at Magnolia Manor.
Born in Abbeville, he was a son of Alma Cannon Gordon and the late Warren Carter Gordon. He was an Abbeville High School graduate and retired from South Carolina Department of Transportation. A member of Frasier Presbyterian Church, he was also a member of the Adult Sunday School Class.
Survivors include his mother of Greenwood; a brother, Kenneth E. Gordon of Edgefield; and a sister, Mrs. Charles (Eloise) Walker of Hodges.
Graveside services are 3 p.m. Sunday at Greenwood Memorial Gardens, officiated by the Rev. Shauna Kelly. Visitation is 6-8 tonight at Blyth Funeral Home.
The family is at the home of his sister, Eloise Walker, 102 Hollandy Drive, Hodges.
Blyth Funeral Home & Cremation Services is in charge.
Online condolences may be sent to the family at www.blythfuneralhome.com

Mable Robertson Martin

PLUM BRANCH — Services for Mable Robertson Martin are 1 p.m. Monday at Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, Parksville, conducted by the Rev. Ernest M. Gordon, pastor, assisted by the Revs. R.C. Holloway, M.L. Gordon, Chuck Smallwood, Willie Simpkins and Carrie Adams. Burial is in the church cemetery. The body will be placed in the church at 12.
Pallbearers are Joshua Chamberlain, Kevin Chamberlain, Jamar Harrison, Levisco Harrison, Jeffery Martin, Jonathan Chamberlain, James Chamberlain and Jamison Chamberlain.
Flower bearers are granddaughters.
The family is at the home, 110 J.P. Martin Road.
Walker Funeral Home, McCormick, is in charge.

Joann Moorhead

ANDERSON – JoAnn Meredith Moorhead, 67, of 313 North Street, wife of Michael Guy Moorhead, died at home Friday, after a long battle with cancer.
Born in Fair Play, she was a teacher, educator, and Level II Psychologist in Anderson District 5 for 14 years and Abbeville County for 17 years. She was a member of First Baptist Church, Anderson. Before her illness, she was very active in the community and church.
Surviving in addition to her husband of the home are daughters, Alison Phillips and husband John of Abbeville, Anne Marie Armstrong of Anderson; sister, Carolyn Todd and husband Ben of Loris; grandchildren, Madeline Phillips and Travis O’Sullivan.
She was preceded in death by her parents, James and Mary Hughes Meredith and her brother, Bob Meredith.
A memorial service will be held at 4 PM Sunday, June 18 at First Baptist Church conducted by Dr. James R. Thomason and Danny Shaw. The family will receive friends from 3 until 4 PM at the church. The family is at the residence.
Memorials may be made to the Cancer Association of Anderson, 215 East Calhoun St., Anderson, SC 29621 or the JoAnn Moorhead Memorial Scholarship Fund c/o Capital Bank, P.O. Box 400, Abbeville, SC 29620.
Sullivan-King Mortuary, Northeast Chapel is in charge of arrangements.
PAID OBITUARY

Nathaniel Singletary

WASHINGTON — Nathaniel Singletary, 66, husband of Virginia Silver Singletary, died Wednesday, June 14, 2006 at Prince George Hospital.
Born in McCormick, S.C., he was a son of the late Gabe and Lizzie Worden Singletary. He was a 1957 Mims High School graduate, a member of Peace Baptist Church, a former member of Shiloh AME Church and retired from Ottenburg Bakery in Washington, D.C.
Survivors include his wife of the home; a son, Nathaniel Singletary Jr. of Washington; a sister, Betty A. Williams of McCormick; four brothers, George Singletary, Wilbert Singletary and Grady Singletary, all of Detroit and James Singletary of Washington.
Services are Wednesday at Peace Baptist Church. Burial is in Harmony National Memorial Park.
Hunt Funeral Home is in charge.
Announcement courtesy of Walker Funeral Home, McCormick.

Gladys Wilson

Gladys Watts Wilson, 85, of 1515 Highway 72/221 E., widow of James Twymond Wilson, died Thursday, June 15, 2006 at Self Regional Medical Center.
Born in Greenwood, she was a daughter of the late Robert Lee and Lila Jeanette Pace Watts. She retired from Abney Mills Grendel Plant and was a member of North Side Baptist Church and the Mary Martha Sunday School Class.
Survivors include a son, Jimmy Wilson of Greenwood; a daughter, Barbara Madison of Pigeon Forge, Tenn.; four grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; three sisters, Kathlene Bolt of Anderson, Margaret Sims of Greenwood and Marion South of Laurens.
Graveside services are 2 p.m. Sunday at Greenwood Memorial Gardens, officiated by Dr. Jeff Lethco.
Visitation is graveside after the service.
Blyth Funeral Home & Cremation Services is in charge.
Online condolences may be sent to the family at www.blythfuneralhome.com

Opinion

Controversy in churches may find no middle way

June 17, 2006

Two major Christian denominations once again are in the midst of discussions on a major issue that has embroiled them and other denominations in South Carolina in controversy. That’s their struggle over what to do about issues dealing with homosexuality.
Both the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) are again addressing these matters during their respective conventions.
Episcopalians, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, are considering a request from that body to the American church to call a moratorium on ordaining practicing homosexuals and blessing same-sex unions. The church in New Hampshire has, of course, already consecrated a homosexual bishop.
PRESBYTERIANS ARE ADDRESSING a report that calls for retaining the current standard for ordination, which is celibacy or heterosexual marriage. But, the report would allow some flexibility by local ordaining bodies. Some, however, see that flexibility as a loophole so that local church bodies could ordain practicing homosexuals or lesbians.
These questions have created discord within all churches that have wrestled with these issues over the years. In fact, some members in South Carolina have left Episcopal churches to form new congregations of the Anglican Church. One is in Greenwood. A number of conservative Presbyterians have rejected more liberal leanings and gone their own way, too.

MANY IN ALL DENOMINATIONS CALL for unity on the issues. They worry that any split would be devastative. These are such emotional and moral considerations for all sides of every issue dealing with homosexuality that it may be impossible to find room for compromise. Both sides have no doubt they are in the right. In fact, there are such deep-rooted beliefs on both sides that any thought of finding a middle ground is hopeless ..... or so it seems.
Under the circumstances, it appears that no matter what is done there will be strong disagreement. Both sides appear to be more adamant about what they believe than ever. Considering that, those on both sides have to ask themselves if further splits can be avoided.

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