Susan Williams '77 By Rachel Mclemore '12
On August 31, 1886, a massive earthquake struck the eastern coast of the United States. Centered near Charleston, S.C., the quake reached from Maine to Florida and as far west as the Mississippi River.
Today, the Charleston earthquake has all but disappeared from American history and memory.
Dr. Susan Millar Williams, class of 1977, and her co-author Steve Hoffius have just published a book intended to change that and illuminate this great disaster and its far-reaching after-effects.
Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow was released by University of Georgia Press on June 1, 2011.
“At first, our quest was simply to tell the story of an important but nearly forgotten natural disaster,” says Millar. “But then it became so much more.”
What started as the tale of a natural disaster became the story of Francis Warrington Dawson, a British expatriate living in Charleston.
Cover of Upheaval in Charleston, published by University of Georgia Press Through Dawson, the editor of Charleston’s major newspaper and disaster relief leader, Williams and Hoffius are able to impart not only the immediate impact of the earthquake, but also the tenuous and volatile race relations in the post-War South.
Williams not only graduated from Hendrix College but is also the great-granddaughter of A.C. Millar, a former president of the college, who, like Frank Dawson, was an outsider in the South. He was, according to Williams, occasionally out of sync with his peers in Arkansas, but he steadfastly refused to debate the war and the treatment of African Americans. Williams said she initially didn’t understand his predicament, but after researching Upheaval in Charleston, she was able to grasp what it was like to live in the South in the post-Civil War era.
“For me, and I hope for our readers, the story of Frank Dawson and the great Charleston earthquake offers a way to make that leap of the imagination,” she says.
More information about Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow can be found in a WICN radio interview or on the University of Georgia Press website.
Rachel McLemore is a senior history major from Marion, Ark. She is a student writer in the Office of College Relations and a member of the Office of Admission’s Hendrix Experience Ambassador Team (HEAT).