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Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 12-2006 From the Social Margins to the Center: Lebanese Families Who Arrived in South Carolina before 1950 Elizabeth Whitaker Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Whitaker, Elizabeth, "From the Social Margins to the Center: Lebanese Families Who Arrived in South Carolina before 1950" (2006). All Theses. 6. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/6 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FROM THE SOCIAL MARGINS TO THE CENTER LEBANESE FAMILIES WHO ARRIVED IN SOUTH CAROLINA BEFORE 1950 A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts History by Elizabeth Virginia Whitaker December 2006 Accepted by: Megan Taylor Shockley, Committee Chair Alan Grubb J.R. Andrew ii ABSTRACT The Lebanese families who arrived in South Carolina found themselves in a different environment than most had anticipated. Those who had spent time elsewhere in the U.S. found predominantly rural and predominantly Protestant South Carolina to be almost as alien as they or their parents had found the United States due partly to the religious differences and partly to the cultural differences between the Northeast, where most of them had lived for at least a few years after arriving in the United States, and the Southeast. Most of these new arrivals eventually found success and some degree of acceptance, but some returned to the North, some returned to the Middle East, and some decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere in the United States. South Carolina history is usually presented in popular fora as being the history of two races, each of one of which consisted of one ethnic group, and both of which were and are entirely Protestant. This is not the case. South Carolina began with three races – American Indian, white, and African-American – and with multiple ethnic groups within each race. Most existing historical information is about the white component of South Carolina’s population, and from this historical information, the English and Huguenot whites were joined iii very early by Sephardic Jews, then by the Scots-Irish and the Germans, and later by the Irish, more Germans, Swedes, Chinese, Italians, Greeks – and Lebanese. Greenville provides an excellent case study because it has a large Lebanese community and because it became both a transportation and an industrial center shortly before Lebanese immigrants began to arrive. Like Charleston, Greenville had a large immigrant community for South Carolina, but the majority of its non-immigrant population was born in the Carolinas or Georgia. Greenville, unlike Charleston and many other Southern cities was both slow to enact legal segregation and relaxed about enforcing it. There is almost no published academic material on Lebanese Christians in the South. There is a 1940s article about the Lebanese community in an unnamed Southern town as well as an article about the Lebanese community in Birmingham, Alabama. The sole academic publication on Lebanese Christians in the Carolinas is a dissertation on the Greeks and Lebanese in the Carolinas, mainly Columbia, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina, between 1900 and 1940. iv DEDICATION Figure 1. Left to Right: Gertrude Colerider, Marion Colerider, Sam Colerider, and Pearl Colerider. Gertrude was my mother’s maternal grandmother. This work is dedicated to my ancestors on both sides who lived as white through difficulties and ridicule, and sometimes at the risk of life and limb. Marion Colerider, one of my mother’s great uncles, lost this gamble on December 7, 1900, in his late teens, near Grafton, West Virginia. Marion’s killer was never brought to trial; Marion’s father liquidated his business and moved the family to North Carolina. v I do not have any 19th or 20th century Middle Eastern ancestry, but I have spent much of my life contending with many of the obstacles faced by these immigrants and t heir children, especially since the Easter 25 years ago I was received into the Roman Catholic Church. I therefore understand and respect the experience of the Lebanese who came to South Carolina. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would not have been able to write this thesis without encouragement and assistance from Father Bartholomew Leon, O.S.B., Pastor of St. Rafka Maronite Mission in Greenville; from the members of St. Rafka Maronite Mission; from William Biediger, Business Manager of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville, who furnished me with information as well as records access; from members of Greenville’s Lebanese community who are members of St. Mary’s, and, last but never least, my committee, Drs. Shockley, Grubb and Andrew. I would also like to thank the librarians at the Cooper Library of Clemson University, the staff of Clemson University’s Resource Sharing (Inter-Library Loan), the librarians of Clemson University’s Special Collections, the South Carolina Room of the Greenville County Library System, and the Carolina Room of the Anderson County Library. I particularly appreciate the assistance of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in photocopying and mailing the Greenville County Aliens Book to me. Producer Steve Folks of South Carolina Educational Television lent me a copy of “A Better Life,” a half-hour program on the Lebanese in South Carolina. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TITLE PAGE ......................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ...................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................. vi CHAPTER ONE ................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO................................................................................................... 16 CHAPTER THREE............................................................................................... 27 CHAPTER FOUR ................................................................................................. 46 CONCLUSION..................................................................................................... 67 APPENDIX ......................................................................................................... 76 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................. 96 11 CHAPTER ONE THE IMMIGRANTS AND WHY THEY LEFT HOME The Lebanese and their descendants who settled in South Carolina before 1950 founded and ran small businesses in the cities, towns and rural areas of the state. Almost all of these immigrants were Christian, and most were either Catholic or Orthodox. Most of their small businesses were stores and eating places, but a few were farms. Though these Lebanese immigrants as a group have been generally accepted as “white” due to their status as entrepreneurs and professionals, they faced discrimination because they were obviously not native- born South Carolina whites and because most were not Protestants. As a group, the Lebanese immigrants and their descendants inhabited a social limbo. In the eyes of some, they were not quite white because they did not “look American” and were not Protestant, but they definitely were not African-American. Adding to the pain of this limbo was the fact that the popular standard of female beauty in the early 20th century South was a blonde with a pink-and-white complexion: a woman’s proximity to this ideal was a measure of her whiteness.1 1 Charles Reagan Wilson, “Beauty, Cult of,” 600 -603. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture . Charles Re agan Wilson & William Ferris, eds. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, 600 -601. 2 Contrary to popular belief, the South as a whole has always been ethnically diverse. Before the Spanish began founding their settlements in the 16th century, numerous bands of American Indians lived in the South. At an unknown date, occasional castaways and runaways from European ships and European settlements began arriving in the back country. These people came from a variety of places. The English settlements, even from the beginning, were never completely English: early Virginia, for example, had inhabitants from central Europe and Protestant refugees from France (Huguenots), as well as the Africans. As a whole, before 1860, the South was more ethnically diverse than the North.2 In South Carolina, the Huguenots were a prominent element in the population of early Charleston. Large numbers of German-language speakers settled in central South Carolina (the “Dutch Fork”), the Orangeburgh District, and in what is now Jasper county (“Purrysburg”). In Colonial times, Charleston boasted the largest Jewish community in North America. After the Revolution, with the restrictions on Catholic settlement removed, Charleston and other 2 Dennis C. Rousey, “Aliens in the WASP Nest: Ethnocultural Diversity in the Antebellum Urban South,” The Journal

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