Lebanese Families Who Arrived in South Carolina before 1950

115 Pages·2016·0.97 MB·English

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]
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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
adifferent 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
1CharlesReaganWilson,“Beauty,Cultof,”600-603.EncyclopediaofSouthernCulture.CharlesReagan
Wilson&WilliamFerris,eds.ChapelHill:TheUniversityofNorthCarolinaPress,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

2DennisC.Rousey,“AliensintheWASPNest:EthnoculturalDiversityintheAntebellumUrbanSouth,”
TheJournalofAmericanHistory,Vol.79,No.1(Jun.1993),152-164;WalterEdgar,SouthCarolina:A
History,Columbia:UniversityofSouthCarolinaPress,1998,49-62.