When I think about our HBCUs, I think of icons like my mentor Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina State graduate, who fought against discrimination and segregation, and continues to champion for civil rights and equality.

Parents and teachers alike are alarmed by this top-down approach to education that wrongly ties education money for states to the adoption of academic standards that do not fully reflect the values of South Carolina.

I grew up in a small town in coastal South Carolina. Where I'm from, the people are known as Gullah people. They're some of the first freed slaves that lived on their own, without being attached to the rest of the U.S.

I grew up in South Carolina. A lot of what I remember back in the day is AM radio. When I was a kid, you could hear Stevie Wonder and Buck Owens on the same station. All the walls and lines between music were taken down for me.

Charleston, South Carolina, is about a 90-minute drive northwest of Beaufort and Parris Island. It is an old city reborn with new charm and an influx of snowbirds from the North attracted by its ease, comfort and accessibility.

We support regional generation, particularly for nuclear. It's just a large investment. We think it's something a community comes around to make those investments work, and South Carolina is very committed to nuclear generation.

If you take the more general role of going to local stations around the country in Montana or South Carolina or wherever, and start in the local news, it's a lot more difficult to get to the stories that you want to really cover.

I know that my grandfather is 92 years old. And he has seen this country evolve in amazing ways. He looks at South Carolina and he says, wow, what an amazing state that we have the blessing to live within because of the evolution.

In 1987, I had no idea who Steven Isserlis was. We met at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It was originally just an Italian summer festival, but for the past 14 years, there's also been a spring festival in America.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

Am I a Democrat? Yes, I'm a Democrat. But at the end of the day, when I take the oath as a senator it won't be to do the bidding of the Democratic Party or a president in the White House. I will be there to fight for the people of South Carolina.

I was raised in a strict Southern household in Lexington, South Carolina, and I remember sneaking off to watch 'Pet Cemetery' as a kid. After seeing those animals reincarnate, I screamed and couldn't sleep for weeks, but watched it again and again.

I made a point to have 'mini-adventures' on the road. In Tucson, that meant swinging by a massive airplane graveyard. A quick detour through the Grand Tetons was a Wyoming highlight. We stopped for cheese in Wisconsin and barbecue in South Carolina.

The realities are, there are - you can be entertaining and you can be fun, and you can say things that actually appeal to people. You still have to figure out a way to get to 270 electoral votes. Get votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

Our coaches want to be a part of South Carolina football when they win it for the first time. When they win the division, when they win the SEC, win a major bowl game, etc. The opportunities to do it all for the first time here make it extra special.

I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.

I was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, lived there a couple of times. My dad was in the Navy. So, we lived in Mississippi and South Carolina until I was 11, and then I moved to California, went to, you know, high school there in the Monterey Bay area.

Hollywood is run by people who sit up in their executive office, who are not connected to Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, South Carolina. They know nothing about that, they don't go to church, and they make their decisions about what they think is right.

Since the announcement that Boeing was going to open a plant in Charleston, South Carolina, Boeing has actually created 2,000 new jobs in Washington state. So it's hard to say you are retaliating against the union when you create 2,000 members to their role.

I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country...We don't have unions in South Carolina because we don't need unions in South Carolina...And we'll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome.

I never know what South Carolina thinks of a measure. I never consult her. I act to the best of my judgment, and according to my conscience. If she approves, well and good. If she does not, or wishes any one to take my place, I am ready to vacate. We are even.

The Bible that I will take my oath on reminds me of the 100th anniversary of the end of the war to end all wars. It was a Bible taken into battle by my wife's grandfather who had probably never ventured beyond three or four counties in North and South Carolina.

My family's support and the negative environment of the day toward blacks in South Carolina became the forces that led me out of the South - first to New York, then to Philadelphia, where I found opportunity in the form of a PAL gym and my trainer, Yank Durham.

South Carolina is one of the most racist states in America. John C. Calhoun is the name of a building at our school and he was a slave owner. Clemson, the name Clemson itself, was like a guy who was a slave owner. South Carolina, their whole history is messed up.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

As a Democrat following the 2012 presidential election closely, I was happy to see that South Carolina voted overwhelmingly for Newt Gingrich, a candidate almost too easy for President Barack Obama to beat in the fall. I was not, however, surprised at the state's gaffe.

In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood.

Why did we go to war? Why did we pick people from South Carolina, California, and all the places in between to go to a foreign land and risk their lives and have some die? To make sure that Saddam Hussein could do no more damage to the region or us than he has already done.

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there.

People still knew me as Charles, so when I came across Charlemagne in a history book, that sounded good: Charles the Great, a warrior who used his power to spread religion and education. He was the head of the Carolingian dynasty, and with me being from South Carolina, that clicked.

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.

Many of you may remember that I supported Mike Huckabee for president in 2008. He was doing great, beating out Mitt Romney, when some shenanigans were pulled by bringing in Fred Thompson as a candidate to compete against Mike for the evangelical and conservative votes in South Carolina.

Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why we did not go to South Carolina; and, when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, - Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war, we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.

When a black church is hit in South Carolina by someone with hate in their spirit, that's something that touches all of America, but as a person of color, I see that story even through a deeper prism of, 'Gosh, that takes us back to a time when black churches were targets in this country.'

Once school let out every year, my siblings and I would get packed into a station wagon to drive to South Carolina to see my grandparents for summer vacation. If school let out on Friday, we were probably in the station wagon no later than Sunday morning, and we would make stops along the way.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Cold weather probably played a bigger role in bringing back the hat, but sadly, the hat common to New Jersey guidos, South Carolina rednecks, Idaho potato farmers and Los Angeles gang bangers is the ubiquitous 'tractor hat,' which is derived from the cheap baseball style cap with the adjustable plastic tab.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.

Where I'm from in South Carolina a lot of my friends, a lot of my family members have locks, what we call them. So, you know, it's more of a way of life, where we from, not a hairstyle. We really don't care to have it neat or you know too pretty it's just you know grow your hair. And I wash my hair everyday too.

I grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, which has the proud distinction of being the home to two of the eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the state: South Carolina State University and Claflin University. When I was a kid riding around town with my grandfather, we often drove by the colleges.

The diminishment of southern contests is the kind of veiled racist rhetoric that Bill Clinton deployed memorably in South Carolina in 2008, and which does not look any more attractive on Bernie - the guy whose campaign is centered on the premise that he plays cleaner and more progressive politics than his opponents.

The American Dream is alive and well for some, but not all Americans. Here in South Carolina, rural hospitals are closing, schools are underfunded, and our coasts are threatened by offshore drilling. We need a Senator who's fighting to improve the lives of South Carolinians rather than focusing on interests in Washington D.C.

I went to college at University of South Carolina and dropped out of chemistry, and to fill a class, the only spot they had left was a theater class. It was so annoying, but I took it and then I thought it was the greatest thing; the most socially creative. I dropped out of school immediately and moved to New York to start acting. I was 19.

South Carolina, as a matter of compromise, displays the Confederate flag on a flagpole in front of the state capitol. Because I grew up in the South and believe that the Confederate flag is a very divisive symbol, I have stated publicly a number of times that I believe that South Carolina should remove the flag from the state capitol grounds.

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