Pelosi Orders Removal of Four Portraits

[SCantiGOP]

27. One of my Senators from back then

Fritz Hollings was a good example of how someone could overcome racism and be a major force for good later in his career.
He was born in 1922, so there were still Confederate veterans alive to share their personal stories of the Civil War.
He said that he didn't really question the Jim Crow racism of his youth, but had a defining moment as a young man near the end of WW2.
He was at a restaurant in South Carolina when a small group of soldiers brought in several dozen Nazi prisoners, who were performing chain gang type work while being held at a camp in SC. They were ushered into a room in the back of the restaurant with a couple of white soldiers, but he noticed that the black US soldiers had to go around the back, order through a window, and eat their lunch on wooden tables out in the cold.
It hit him that these soldiers, who were serving their country and willing to fight and die for it, were not treated with the same humanity and respect as the Nazi prisoners who had tried to kill Americans and would have overthrown our country if able.
He said he never viewed race issues the same after that incident.

Near the end of his life Hollings requested that the Federal Courthouse named for him in Charleston be renamed for Judge Julius Waring.
Waring, who was appointed by FDR in 1942, had ruled in favor of clients (their attorney was Thurgood Marshall) in a 1951 civil rights case in SC. That decision became the foundation for the US Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, which ended school desegregation in the United States.
It is the only known case of a person asking to have his name removed from a federal courthouse in the US. Hollings said that Waring's courage and lifetime work made him deserving of the honor.