A decade ago, the white supremacist store in Laurens was a place where one of the few shirts sold without an overt racial slur said, “If I had known this was going to happen I would have picked my own cotton.” The World Famous Ku Klux Klan Museum with its racist meeting place was in the back.
But there was a twist. Under the agreement, John Howard, who owned The Redneck Shop, would be allowed to stay and run his store as long as he lived. The studio is getting companies to donate materials and time and is selling commemorative bricks that can be placed at the theater. Kennedy knows about not giving up. He protested when a South Carolina county refused to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and he helped lobby to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome. In his church office, he keeps a poster-size photo of a lynched black man swinging at the end of a rope. It is his great uncle, killed more than 100 years ago by a white mob in Laurens County.