Racism In America: South Carolina Governor Urged To Quit 'Segregated' Country Club

One day after the Senate confirmed South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Donald Trump, her replacement, former Lieutenant Gov. Henry McMaster, came under renewed public scrutiny for his affiliation with a country club accused of racial segregation.

At least 840 people have signed a petition demanding that McMaster renounce his 30-year membership at the Columbia-based Forest Lake Club, which the petition’s organizer claimed “has yet to accept a black member.”

McMaster’s press secretary Brian Symmes told the Charleston Post and Courier that the club “has no policies of racial discrimination,” and that “if it did, Governor McMaster would not be a member.”

But McMaster's former Democratic opponent in the 2014 race for lieutenant governor, Bakari Sellers, called for McMasters to leave the club back in 2014, alleging at the time that it “continues to accept no African American members,” according to the Charleston paper. Sellers is the son of a prominent civil rights leader in the state and a CNN commentator.

While the club’s press office did not answer phone calls from International Business Times seeking comment, a 1987 Washington Post story counted it as an example of segregation in the state’s capital, citing “confirmed reports” from the Army that, against the custom for commanders of nearby Fort Jackson, a Jewish general had not been granted honorary membership. More recently, a 2008 Salon piece highlighted former state GOP leader Katon Dawson’s decision to quit the club—where he had been a member for 12 years—before running for the Republican National Committee.

While Jim Crow-era cases of blatant segregation are rare, and, thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, illegal, today, traces of it still linger within American institutions. In May, for example, the Government Accountability Office published a report that found U.S. public schools to be increasingly segregated by race and class.