Brittany Counts on Participating on in the BIL Project

AH: Okay, so why did you agree to be a part of this project?

BC: I was recommended by Dr. [Consuela] Francis and if she thinks that it is a good idea then 99% of the time it is a great idea and I thought that it was a great way to leave my mark at the College of Charleston, if there is nothing else that shows that I here, I can come back here in 20 years possibly and show my family or children, this is what I did when I was here, this is, this was my life up until this point.

Brittany Counts on Social Justice

AH: I think that I want to ask you about social justice, civil rights, working with youth you are obviously on the front lines about the kinds of issues that they talk about within the Charleston area. Although you are fairly new to Charleston, have you come into contact with issues that are facing Black youth here in Charleston? How do you feel, what is your role in that to possibly improve social justice, civil rights here in Charleston?

BC: I hear a lot, especially from the boys in the program about they cannot walk along, how they cannot walk from their house to a convenience store to get something to drink without often being stopped and questioned by police and they have asked me to take them to DMV so that they could get if not a permit at least a state authorized identification card so that maybe it can help a little bit, when they tell the cops that they are not doing anything, I am just going to get something to drink that is it. They suffer from racial profiling a lot and with the, all of the media attention on the Trayvon Martin case, it hit home for me, because when they were like he was walking with his Arizona tea and a Skittles in his black hoodie, I instantly saw so so many of my male students because they do that so so often. They love their Arizona drinks and they wear their hoodies not necessarily black ones, they have purples ones, it is just a part of their daily outfits even in the summer time you can count that they are going to have that hoodie and it just scary to think that it could have easily been one of my students, and it hit me hard enough as it was and just that thought made the impact, so, so much worse. And so when the College of Charleston decided to have demonstrations and marches for, to let people know the injustice that the Martin family had, was dealing with. I participated in all that I could, I discussed it with my kids to see how they felt about it, and what their families, their friends are saying about it. And they don’t, it has not necessarily hit them yet, that social injustice happens on a daily basis, it is just that when, you have to have people who are willing to bring it to the light and is often, is been referred to as a case very similar, the Emmitt Till case, and my students don’t know who Emmitt Till is, they don’t know what has happened to him and as we get into this discussion I realize that so much of African American history has been left out in their school books, in anything. I remember learning of Emmitt Till in elementary school, he is not even mentioned anymore, it is just like every year it gets less and less and eventually there is a fear that Black history will not be taught as a part of history classes at all. And so, my, the way that I see it is, how can these kids be expected to work hard to prevent something that they never knew happened in the first place. And so we focus on every week bringing something from African American history to them, whether it is something as sad and heart jerking as the Emmitt Till case, or as celebratory story, of how, of the Civil Rights Act and when it was finally passed or how African Americans have come together in times of need and that tends to be a constant throughout history, that whenever one of us is suffering, we are all suffering and we are all there to help. And through, through that, students have found newer motivation and so I feel by inspiring my students, my eight students, if they go out and they share that with one friend, that is sixteen people impacted by my work and my goal of making sure that they know that there is more to what they are being told. That it is not simply this cut and dry, this happened here and this happened here and that got us where we are today. Making sure that they know the big stories that were in the media and some of the stories that weren’t, that way they can have, they can be educated on the facts, and not just on the things that happened in schools, but the things, the problems that they may face in work and make sure that if something comes up and there is a chance of social injustice towards them, we make sure that we prepare them, so that there is nothing that person can say, without coming straight out and saying well, I am doing this because you are African American. They cannot say because you are unclean and unkempt because we train our kids to know that when they go to job, when they have a job interviews, whether it is McDonald’s, or Wal-Mart, or to be assistant in an office in the neighborhood, you are dressed as if you are going to church on Easter Sunday and it is that simple. We prepare them in all of the things that we lacked preparation for ourselves and in all other areas that we feel that because of where they live they do not get exposed to.

Brittany Counts on Working at Metanoia

AH: You said that you work as a counselor for eighth grade girls, what school do you work with?

BC: I work with, my program is not housed in a specific school. I have girls who attend Morningside Middle School in North Charleston; Military Magnet in North Charleston, and yeah, those are my two schools, they all stem from Chicora Elementary and our program is there because the Chicora-Cherokee area of Charleston is the poorest sector of Charleston and these kids had nowhere to go during the hours that were most dangerous for them, which would be between 2pm and 6pm, which are the functioning hours of our program. It is during these hours that kids, teenagers, seem to make the choice as to whether go home and do homework or to go stand on the walk with your friend who is selling drugs or to could be forced into robbery or things like that. And so we take them and we give them a safe haven, a lot of them do not constant people in their lives, people who they can depend on, they have people just come through and say that that they are going to be there and before they know it they are gone again. So we teach them skills that need to make it past all of the statistics that say they are going to in Chicora-Cherokee doing the same things that their parents do and that is as far as it goes. We teach them entrepreneurship, and character, we develop their character, we teach them how to deal with their emotions and our program runs from first grade through high school and I work on the high school program. And we are the only program in South Carolina, who has a program for high school students because they tend to be very different because they are growing up, they are defining themselves and that can often lead to attitudes and rebellions when you tell them to do certain things, but we work hard and we let our students know that if they need anything they can come to us.

AH: And so the funding for that program comes through the state or private funds?

BC: We are a non-profit so all of our funds are donated, we have fundraising activities, we have people who are annual donors and then we have the donors who if we need anything we can call them and it is just like they snap their fingers and it is done, but and we host, our biggest fundraising event is Jubilee, which takes place in December and its’ where we showcase what the kids have been working on and our high schoolers have two business, the boys work on the Hodari Brothers [Screen Printing Co.] screen printing and they make mugs and T-shirts for local community organizations and businesses and the girls have a business called the Isoke Sisters [Jewelry] and they make jewelry and they showed off, they showcased the jewelry, they sell the T-shirts and it just a chance for the donors to come together and they can donate money, they can meet the students, they can see what we have been working on, the progresses that we make here and where we are aiming to go in the future.

AH: That is great, how long have you been involved with that?

BC: I am a Bonner Leader and as a Bonner Leader I am committed to serving at least 300 hours of community service a year and Metanoia, which is the name of the program is my work site through my program, through Bonner. It also qualifies for my federal work-study, so I often refer to it as my job as opposed to my work site.

BC: I have been, my first year I worked with sixth grade girls and I am into my second year now, where I moved up to seventh grade and I also have eighth grade students as well.

Brittany Counts on Inman High School

AH: What were some of the major issues that happened at school, I know that some schools had fights and racial tensions, where there anything like that happening in Inman?

BC: Lets’ see, we had people who, it is a really, really small country town, its’ like I mean if you drove through this town, you would think, oh, time has stood still, like we still have the local ice cream shop, where you can like get three scoops of ice cream for $0.95 and a hot dog for like $0.50 and a lot of ways the thoughts of the people has stood still too even more so than the town because it was the way that they were raised and so they raised their children that way and there was a huge, huge problem when President [Barack] Obama was running for his first term, it got so bad that we were not allowed to wear anything supporting him, if we had it on our cars we had cover it up or take it off if we could because of fear that it would cause issues, race issues, there were people who would wear shirts portraying him as a monkey or just other animals and there were lots and lots of racial slurs that we never pointed directly at me, but they were put toward some of the African American friends that I had and whenever an individual would get in trouble or get caught yelling these everyone in the group, but me. They would be like, “why are you singling her out?” “Well she doesn’t count,” and so that was a big issue for me because how I can be sitting here and I am the one that doesn’t count? “Oh well this applies, they are ghetto and you are not” and so that was a huge huge thing people always constantly tell me that “you don’t count when we say this because everybody elese they are loud that they are ghetto and they do all of this and they wear all this long weave and the long nails and they just don’t act intelligent. They do not put up that façade, almost that they do not act like you so therefore when we call them this name, we are not including you.” And we never have like fights revolve out breakout because of it, we had people who were African American and Caucasian who were just kind of liked looked at weirdly because, if they had predominately Black friends, they would be like “yeah, you kind of fit in” and if you had predominately White friends, then “oh they are traitor, they are not really Black at all, they just don’t acknowledge the fact that they have Black in them at all” and so, I tried, I did my best, I had friends of all races and I am thankful for that, but at the same time it was just kind of like, when people would meet me they would get to know me really well, it was not like it really changed their views on other African Americans or the African American community in a whole, it was just kind of like, well there is Black people and then there is Brittany Counts. And so I was like, I don’t understand because Brittany Counts is Black

BC: So I really don’t understand why I don’t get put in with this category and it is like, “if we saw you no way in the world would we grab our purses or feel threatened, but if we saw so and so we would probably turn around and go in the opposite direction and cross the street.” And so that is like there were a lot of things said, but nothing genuinely carried out.

Brittany Counts on Race Relations

AH: Was that, has that historically been true in that community, in that town, or was there a period where there was a predominately Black upper class community?

BC: To my knowledge there was never a time where there was a predominately Black middle class. My neighbors were White for the most part and from the time that I can remember. Originally, when I was born we lived in the Black side of town and my mother and my grandma, we moved quite a lot around Inman and it seemed like we were always surrounded by White neighbors, I do not know if it was intentional or if was just where we could move, at times it was not as if they were any higher, in terms of financial status, but they would still look down on us. They could live in the trailer right next us the same single wide trailer, same size, but for some reason theirs would be better. I was called a nigger for the first time by my neighbor and until then, I had never heard the word in my life and it never occurred to me that I was one, until we were sitting on my front porch playing with my Barbie dolls and I asked her, why her older sister didn’t like me and why I couldn’t come to her house and she looked me dead in the face and said, “because you are a nigger and my daddy won’t let niggers in the house” and from that day forward it was just kind of like something switched in me, I knew of the word, I knew it was a bad word, but no one had ever said it directly to me and made me feel like I was less than I was because of the color of my skin. There were people who would like meet my mother and they had a hard time believing that I was her real daughter because my mother is really, really light skinned and we had variations in skin tone but most of the family seemed to stick within the same variation and my family is just kind of all over the place and so they were like “this is your real mother? Not like a cousin who is taking care of you?” and I am like “yes, this is my real mother” and because, there were people who said “your mother is so, so pretty” and when I looked in the mirror I did not see anything that looked like my mother so I am like, “am I not pretty?” because my father is very dark skinned and she would always tell me that when they first started dating, everybody was like “why are you dating him?, he is so dark skinned and you can do so so much better” meanwhile his friends were like patting him on the back and they were like “you got a light skinned girl, that is great” and so it was like I don’t know which way to go, I am closer to my dad’s skin tone and I look like my dad and so does that mean not only am I not attractive I am not considered a person either? Have all of these people I have been around my whole life calling me a “nigger” inside of their head and this little girl was the first one not to see anything wrong with saying that to me? And I never told a soul about that day until like two years ago, it just randomly came up.

AH: You didn’t go to your mom afterwards?

BC: No I didn’t, it was just something kind of like, I thought it went away after a while, but it just kind of like stuck with me and just dug deep into me and it never really left me. And I do not think that I brought it up willingly until I was ready to address it and not be drug down by it.

Ronald Anderson on Upward Bound

AH: For those that don’t know what Upward Bound is, can you explain it?

RA: Upward Bound is a program that prepares you for college and your future.

AH: Is that a College of Charleston program?

RA: Yes

AH: And who runs that?

RA: Mr. [Larry] Lewis

AH: And is there a local contact at, here at St. John’s [High School]

RA: Yes

AH: What is her name?

RA: You can contact Ms. Smith I guess, if you cannot contact him, you can contact her I guess

AH: Okay, how did you get involved in Upward Bound?

RA: You have to be, not referred, what is the word? I am going to use referred. You have to be referred to, by a person who sees potential, who sees potential in the student in the future.

AH: Okay, so what kinds of activities do you guys do?

RA: We have tutoring; we have volunteer work around downtown, around the College of Charleston. We also stay on campus, one whole month to have the college experience, for free, it is free. And we also travel to places such as New York, Florida, DC, Georgia, and we also have international visits like go to France, Italy, and Japan, sometimes and also we went on a five day cruise to the Bahamas. That was fun and to Newport [Rhode Island], that was awesome and that’s it.

AJ Johnson on Participating in the Black in the Lowcountry Project

AH: So why did you decide to do, participate in the Black in the Lowcountry project?

AJ: Because I feel like every voice counts and that only through the understanding of different people and through only, by me putting my voice out there hopefully I will be able to reach somebody else with some kind of understanding, or some kind of spark for intellectual thought and only through that can we really raise our consciousness like only through that can we all grow from each other, so