So Good a [Lost] Cause (Part 2)

I read (too much of) So Good a Cause (so you don't have to).

CW: Racism, white supremacy, racially-motivated terrorism and murder, racist language.

After all, the populists didn’t want to destroy blacks, they merely wanted to disfranchise them.

-Richard Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race (1985)

Last week, I wrote about Palmetto Promise Senior Fellow Oran P. Smith’s connections to Richard Quinn, the SC political kingmaker who pled guilty to corruption this year after an eight-year investigation that implicated some of the most powerful elected officials in the state. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I would start there. This piece will delve more specifically into the book Smith edited for Quinn’s Southern Partisan magazine.

While Smith might like to minimize his work with the neo-Confederate magazine today, Richard Quinn was careful to express just how important Smith’s contributions were, in his introduction to the book: “First among equals is Charles Hamel… Next is Oran Smith, whose association with the magazine over the past …