Behind-the-scenes, some city council members had early concerns about apology resolution

Note: This story has been updated to clarify that Taylor Smith, a FOIA attorney, is the legal representative with the South Carolina Press Association. It's also been updated to include additional comments from City Councilman Jamie Fulmer. 

When Spartanburg City Councilwoman Meghan Smith suggested in a letter to her council peers this summer that the city apologize to its Black residents for racist policies of the past — something no other city in South Carolina has done — she was prepared to engage in tough conversations.

The public never got the opportunity to hear those conversations.

Before the council approved the resolution on Sept. 28 without discussion, they spent more than three months talking through the language of the resolution in emails and phone calls in an effort to reach consensus, records obtained by the Herald-Journal show.

Behind the scenes, some council members disagreed early on, and one of them attempted to remove the apology from earlier versions of the document altogether. 

Several drafts were penned and emailed to council members before they each signed off on the final product that appeared on the agenda and was voted on unanimously. 

While many have lauded the city for being the first in South Carolina to take such a bold stance against racism, some of the resolution’s most vocal supporters are now questioning why the council wasn't brave enough to hold the debate publicly.

Doing so would have made the apology and the showing of unity by the council even stronger, said Charles Mann, one of several residents who requested the city apologize. 

“What are they afraid of?” he said. “This should have been more transparent. I wish this had taken place in an open forum so the community could see and hear what our elected officials thought about it.”

Letter:Why the city's apology to Black residents is important

In South Carolina, it's legal for council members to email each other, so long as the majority of the elected body isn't included in the conversation, according to Taylor Smith, an attorney who specializes in the Freedom of Information Act with the South Carolina Press Association. If the majority is involved in the thread, it's considered a meeting and would require notice to the public.

At one point, Councilwoman Smith emailed all of the council members at the same time a draft of the resolution. It would have been problematic if a council member had hit "Reply All" to that message and spoken to everyone.  That didn't happen here, records show.

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None of the emails the Herald-Journal received featured four or more members of the council in the same conversation. Some included three. 

City Manager Chris Story said it’s not uncommon for members of the council to engage in back-and-forth dialogue about a topic before it comes to a vote. The council often weighs in on the wording of resolutions, he noted.

"We encourage Council members to talk with their peers," Story said in an email. "I expect that they communicate with each other regularly on a great many Council matters. The legislative and policy-making process depends on Council members knowing each other’s priorities, concerns, and values"

While it's legal for the public's business to be conducted in emails and phone calls, Taylor Smith called it "shady" since residents are left out of the process.

In this instance, some city council members said they preferred working out this apology resolution away from the spotlight because of the subject matter. 

“I’m a big believer in transparency, but I do think because of the sensitivity of this matter, it couldn’t be held in a public forum,” said Councilman Jamie Fulmer, who had some concerns about the resolution early on. "I don’t think the results would have been as positive if we had discussed this solely in a public forum."

Spartanburg is one of a few American cities to apologize for racist past

The way this played out is indicative of how tough it is for a government body to confront racism, said Kim Rostan, an English professor at Wofford College who co-coordinates the school’s African American Studies program. 

And it's why Spartanburg stands among only a few in the nation to have passed a resolution like this, she said. 

“People don’t know how to talk about race in this country,” Rostan said. "We don’t want to talk about it. We know how to hide (racism) and erase it. But to talk about it, that’s new.  There’s a fear that talking about it will do more harm than good.”

She said that regardless of how the City Council reached the unanimous vote for this resolution, it’s to be celebrated.

“It’s still really important,” she said. “This is really hard to do.” 

The resolution acknowledges the city’s role in systematic racism when it used federal “urban renewal” money intended to improve blighted communities. 

Instead the city razed several Black neighborhoods and Black-owned businesses. The south side of the city, where these businesses once thrived as part of the Black downtown, is now a food desert where low-income residents struggle to find basic essentials, such as medicine and groceries.

The resolution, titled "Healing, Reconciling, and Unity. A Pathway to a More Equitable Spartanburg,”  apologizes for “racial injustices and long-lasting inequities" and vows to do better. 

Some say it isn't enough:After Spartanburg apologizes to Black residents

Emails show some council members did not want use word 'racism'

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Herald-Journal obtained 118 pages of emails between City Council members from June 16 to Sept. 24 regarding the resolution. 

Although the conversation had occurred in the background for months, it was never brought up by a council member in a meeting until the day of the vote.

It was brought up by residents before then though. In public comment time of the Aug. 24 meeting, Charles Mann talked about how his home community, the city's south side, was destroyed during urban renewal. He called the city "racist" and demanded an apology.

Mayor June White told Mann, "if Spartanburg is so damn bad, I wouldn’t have come back to it."

White later apologized to Mann for that remark. Meanwhile, the bigger apology that Mann hoped for was already taking shape outside the meeting. 

Email records show that Councilman Fulmer and Councilwoman Ruth Littlejohn had concerns early on.

They weren't sure if it was the current council's place to be apologizing on behalf of former councils that served 50 years ago.

"My thing was we have so many problems today to go back 50 years and look for an apology,” Littlejohn said in a phone call. “We have young kids in the Black community who can’t even read, we have workers who can’t even afford to pay their rent. I wanted to put my focus more on things that are going on right now and not 50 years ago.” 

When Fulmer shared his opinions with his council peers, some responded critically, emails show. 

On June 16 and17, Smith reached out to council members in individual emails stating that she was aware of two government bodies that had previously passed resolutions declaring racism as a public health threat: Indianapolis and Franklin County, Ohio.

In her email to councilwoman Erica Brown, Smith said every council member had expressed interest in pursuing something similar for Spartanburg, but noted Jamie Fulmer's concerns.

“Jamie was uncomfortable with the word racism. Ugh,” Smith said to Brown in the email.

Brown responded, “Well how exactly did Jamie want it worded? If there is something he would be more comfortable with that still gets the message across that they are linked? I mean we need to have these uncomfortable conversations, right? Or does he just want to wrap it in a bow?”

Fulmer told the Herald-Journal that the emails were in reference to a phone call he had with Smith about the resolution, which he said was originally to be focused on declaring racism a public health threat.

"Like my colleagues, I expressed my support for the general concept and in the course of our discussion shared my initial thoughts that any resolution should be more forward looking, focused on addressing inequities and the collective work required to improve health, educational and financial outcomes for our residents," he said. 

On Aug. 20, Fulmer submitted a revised version of the resolution that Smith had sent a day earlier. He marked out the only reference to the word “apologizes” and replaced it with the word, “acknowledges.”

He later explained why he suggested those edits. 

"There was concern (about) the nature of apologizing for something that none of us had anything to do with," he said. "We wanted to acknowledge and express remorse and that’s kind of where we started off in this process."

On Aug. 21, Littlejohn responded to Fulmer, saying she liked the changes. 

“Your suggested changes tones down Meghan’s version, which I prefer, and will probably be more acceptable to most people,” she said in an email to Fulmer “...Racism is an abrasive subject and it really is a personal issue that we all must deal with, but not necessarily through a resolution. ... Let’s trust your changes will be acceptable.”

In the end the council agreed to use the following language in that section of the resolution: “City Council acknowledges the historical antecedents of systemic racism in our society and city and is sorry for the racial injustices and long-lasting inequities that have resulted from those policies.”

Smith's original proposal in emails also called for the city to create an eight-member racial equity commission that would make recommendations to the council. 

"If we have a committee to deal with architecture storm water runoff, and hospitality taxes, I believe a committee on racial equity is important as well," Smith wrote in a July 30 email. 

That committee was included in a Sept. 11 draft of the resolution, but it was not in the final version two weeks later. 

Guest opinion:City of Spartanburg should apologize for past wrongs

Some say city needed public debate about resolution

There has been public discussion recently about how some past city policies hurt the Black community.

On Aug. 24, the same day Mann asked for an apology, City Planner Natalia Rosario noted that Spartanburg received more urban renewal funding than anywhere else in South Carolina.

"What ended up happening was the disruption of the fabric of a lot of these (Black) communities," she said.

Some feel as if the council should have been as open and transparent as it worked through the related resolution. 

There was no reason for the council to "sugar coat" or "tiptoe around this, said Councilwoman Erica Brown.

“To fluff this so it sounds all warm and fuzzy kind of defeats the purpose of addressing the core issues, which are policies that harmed and disenfranchised Black residents,” she told the Herald-Journal. “One’s feelings, whether they are good, bad or indifferent, needs to be on the record.”

However, Brown didn't bring up the resolution in a public meeting.

New Spartanburg group:SIREN sounds alarm on racial inequity they see in community

Several council members say the resolution had to be handled the way it was. 

This was much different than anything the council has ever taken up, said Jerome Rice.

“This is personal to me,” Rice said,” and that’s what makes this so tough. You bring your personal issues into this battle, I know I’m elected to serve the people, but when it comes to matters of that topic, it’s personal.”

Littlejohn said, "things were done the way they could have been done." 

"In my opinion this council became closer through this process," she said. "We were able to speak openly about this, we expressed our feelings and that made us stronger and it made us closer.”

It's a resolution that many have coined "momentous" and "historic" and it's one that Councilwoman Smith is proud of.

The bigger picture, she said, is not how the council went about addressing this. It's that the council did it, when no other city in the state has, she said.

“The goal was to send a unified message as a City Council," she said. "It wasn’t to demonstrate how to have these conversations in public, not that I don’t value that, and maybe there was even a missed opportunity, but it wasn’t the primary goal in this.”

She later added, “I remain extremely proud of what we did and what we said. I’ve only heard positive feedback from people about what this has meant to them.”

Contact Dustin at dwyatt@gannett.com or on Twitter @HJDustin_Wyatt