This is an incredible article by Roddie Burris at The State.
Telling it like it is: elected as a firebrand, Patterson retires as a statesman
After 34 years in the S.C. Legislature - all but 10 as a state senator - Columbia’s Kay Patterson is retiring from an institution that, he says, no longer fits him.
“It’s uncomfortable - for me,” said Patterson, who was swept into office in 1975.
Patterson was one of 13 black lawmakers seated in the House of Representatives that year, a record-setting number for modern times.
“When I started … working up here was very pleasant and you could get things done, and I enjoyed it,” said Patterson, who was among only the second class of black lawmakers since Reconstruction elected to the Legislature.
But times have changed, Patterson says.
“You have little boys coming up here now, don’t hardly know where the restroom or the outhouse is, (and they) chair a committee,” the outspoken lawmaker said with a degree of indignation. “Here I am a hundred years old.”
Not quite, though Patterson is 77.
Patterson, a Democrat, said the General Assembly - the House much more so than the Senate - has become too partisan.
“Since (the Republicans) took over,” Patterson said, dignity, senatorial courtesy and respect in the General Assembly have given way to meanness, ill-tempered tones of voice and disrespect among members.
“I said now, ‘I don’t have to put up with this. I’ve had enough of this.’”
‘FIREBRAND … EVOLVED INTO A STATESMAN’
Patterson’s departure will leave an elocutionary void in the sausage-making drill that is S.C. politics, friends and colleagues say.
Over the years, Patterson’s use of black dialect, often laced with well-placed invectives, has helped him to make his point and needle his opponents.
“They would call that ebonics in this day and age,’ Patterson said. “But we didn’t have that terminology back in those days.”
Those who know Patterson and agree with his politics - such as his seatmate of 34 years, state Sen. John Matthews, D-Orangeburg - say Patterson’s departure will leave “the little man” voiceless in what they say are the increasingly hostile halls of the General Assembly.
“I think what Senator Patterson will probably be known for, as he departs the Senate, he’s clearly been the conscience and the voice of the unelected, the unsophisticated and those who did not have a voice,” said Matthews, who was elected alongside Patterson.
“That has been his primary role, to make sure their concerns were taken into consideration as we debated education, economic development, health care or whatever the issue.”
You won’t find a stack of legislation Patterson has sponsored over the decades. But “his impact on the legislative process was probably the greatest of any African-American I know,” Matthews said.
That’s because Patterson was so keen on picking out and stopping legislation he thought could have a negative impact on African-Americans and the poor, Matthew said.
Patterson and Matthews, the two most senior African-American lawmakers in the General Assembly, are the last of the so-called “Famous 13″ black state lawmakers elected in 1975.
Not all of Patterson’s peers in the Legislature agree with his politics or his view of the General Assembly.
“We’re both Marines. We’re both Episcopalians. That’s about where our similarities end,” said Republican state Sen. John Courson, who also represents Richland County.
But Courson added, “We have developed a good relationship and friendship together over the years. I have tremendous respect for him, and I’ll miss him.”
Courson says he sees a different Patterson nowadays.
“Sen. Patterson came to the Legislature as sort of a firebrand and sort of evolved into a statesman. He doesn’t speak (on the Senate floor) that often, but when he does, people listen.”
‘I OUGHT TO BE PRESIDENT!’
A former social studies teacher at W.A. Perry Middle School, Patterson came into the Legislature like a gangbuster.
Thirteen of the General Assembly’s 170 lawmakers were African-American that year, all of them House members elected as the result of passage of the Voting Rights Act 10 years earlier. That historic piece of legislation led to single-member districts in the state for the first time since Reconstruction.
“I never really thought of being in the Legislature,” Patterson said, recalling he taught eighth-grade social studies at Perry to Columbia attorney I.S. Leevy Johnson, elected to the Legislature in 1970.
“I said, ‘Damn, I taught I.S. If I.S. can get elected to the House of Representatives, I ought to be president of the United States!’
“That’s what got me in the Legislature,” Patterson said, laughing.
Patterson went on to be a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus and the first African-American on USC’s board of trustees.
His House seat barely warm, Patterson introduced a measure in 1977 to remove the Confederate flag from several positions at the State House - outside, atop the dome; inside, in the front of the Senate and House chambers; and in the first-floor lobby.
Along with fellow members of the Black Caucus, Patterson called on then-State House committee chairman Rep. Rembert Dennis, D-Berkeley, to take the flag down and took his argument to the House floor.
“Your admiration for y’all’s flag is not shared by us descendants of that peculiar institution of slavery, which is the epitome of man’s inhumanity to man and all the evils appertaining thereto,” Patterson said in April 1977, according to a press report.
Patterson kept up the drumbeat, introducing a bill to have the flags moved nearly every year afterward.
They were, nearly a quarter of a century later, in 2000.
Patterson is thought to be first lawmaker to take on the Confederate flag.
“I don’t think (Patterson) gets the credit he deserves on that subject,” said U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-Columbia.
Clyburn, then on the State Human Affairs Commission, said he joined Patterson in his call to remove the flag.
“I got some real nasty letters. I got some real threats,” said Clyburn, who, in a book he is writing, ranks the fight over the Confederate flag as the third-most defining moment of his political career.
Clyburn thinks it may have been worse for Patterson. The deaths threats against Patterson led to an arrest, Clyburn recalls.
Ironically, Patterson and Clyburn were blackballed by the state NAACP in 2001 for criticizing a tourism boycott that group organized after the flag was moved to its current location on the State House grounds.
“All of this was before the NAACP ever opened their mouths about the Confederate flag,” Clyburn said, “and … they ended up black-balling me and Kay, which is just crazy stuff. We were out there and not a peep from them. Then, all of a sudden, they became holier than anybody else.”
RACISM IN BLACK AND WHITE
Over his career, Patterson has been an equal opportunity offender and defender.
He has been criticized by opponents as a racist and a poor role model for black children for his “plantation-style” of talk.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Patterson penned a newspaper column in the local black press called “Spressin’ Myself.”
Characterized by crude language and sensationalism for effect, Patterson routinely used the column to attack the white establishment and politicians - black and white - for positions on issues with which Patterson disagreed.
Patterson won his way into the S.C. Senate by defeating Democrat-turned-Republican Frank Washington in a 1985 special election, brought on by the resignation of the late Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman, the first African-American elected to the S.C. Senate in the 20th century.
Washington, who was president of the Columbia branch of the NAACP, accused Patterson of abusing whites in his newspaper column and of being unable to represent whites.
For his part, Patterson called Washington “the Republican Party’s newfound pet Negro.”
A year earlier, Patterson had taken political heat from the Columbia NAACP for supporting the re-election bid of a white Senate colleague over a black candidate in a newly drawn majority-black Senate district.
Patterson said he supported the late Sen. Isadore Lourie’s 1984 re-election bid over former state Rep. Mary Miles because Lourie had been one of the few friends of African-Americans in the state Senate.
In 1990, Patterson joined some white Democrats to endorse the U.S. Senate re-election bid of Republican Strom Thurmond. “It was the right thing to do,” he said at the time.
When Thurmond died in 2002, his family asked Courson to ask Patterson to eulogize the iconic Thurmond during funeral services in Columbia.
“He did an outstanding job,” Courson said.
Patterson also was known to point out what he perceived as racism.
Patterson pushed for a Senate rule in 1987 that barred the Senate from accepting official invitations to clubs or organizations that discriminated based on race.
After the late Gov. Carroll Campbell had been in office for only eight months, Patterson took him on for his appointments to state boards and commissions. Patterson accused the Republican governor of removing African-Americans from meaningful boards “with all deliberate speed.”
“Black Republicans appointed thus far, without exception, have been appointed to those commissions and boards that can be categorized as ‘nothing burgers’ — e.g. no salary, only per diem (expenses) if that, and all the coffee you can drink, with ‘Honorable’ in front of your name!” Patterson said.
“Only in America! I just wonder when the black Republicans will wake the hell up and smell the coffee!”
‘THERE’S A DEPTH’
Once he exits politics, Patterson - who says his health is good after a battle with cancer five years ago - plans to spend time traveling Interstate 95 to visit his children and grandchildren up north.
Matthews said he doubts Patterson can be replaced.
Clyburn wonders if Patterson’s detractors ever have stopped long enough to take his true measure.
“There’s a depth to Kay Patterson that a lot of people miss,” said Clyburn, a longtime Patterson political friend, fraternity brother and neighbor. “They get hung up on the rhetoric.
“They never get to the reasoning.”
