Free Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride

answer was a horrible blank.
    Everybody got to leave this land.
    The rumor traveled from ear to ear, from one plowed field to the neighboring field, from one kitchen to another, from one shanty to the next. It gnawed at every cotton picker, maid, cook, mule driver, and housewife, and at the workers who sweated out long hours at the banana crate company and sawed lumber for the International Paper Company. It was too unsettling to be true. Too impossible to believe. But by late summer of 1950, the rumor began to gather steam. By fall, it grew teeth and bones. By December of 1950, it had blossomed into a horrible reality:
    Everybody got to leave this land.
    The announcement was made by the community leaders at a packed, segregated meeting held at the Ellenton High School auditorium, where five hundred people from the town assembled to hear it. The whites sat in chairs, the blacks were crowded into a single doorway.
    Everybody got to leave this land.
    The question was, Why?
    The answer was simple.
    The government says so.
    There was more. It was to protect America. The Commies were coming. This was the Cold War. America needed to be strong. For that, there would have to be sacrifice. The government needed the land to make a bomb factory.
    Why us? Why here?
    That part was never made too clear. The backroom shenanigans of South Carolina’s political machine were a mystery to the farmers of Ellenton and its surrounding areas. From 1932 into the 1970s, the state was basically run by four powerful politicians known as the Barnwell Ring: Senator Edgar A. Brown, state representatives Solomon Blatt, Sr., and Winchester Smith, Jr., and onetime governor Joseph Emile Harley. Wherever those four moved, so went the state of South Carolina. A deal had been struck, one so far over the heads of the good people of Ellenton that it might as well have been made on the moon; it was a deal struck between the state, the federal government, and its big-business partners. The nation needed Ellenton’s land and water—big water, Savannah River water and its surrounding rivers, creeks, gullies, and tributaries—for its bomb factory. On November 28, 1950, the rumor became fact, and the fact became a heartbreaking reality that changed life in Ellenton forever, including the life of its most famous African American son.
    Everybody got to leave this land.
    And they did.
    In 1951, everyone and everything—dogs, sheep, cows, horses, mules, carts, house keys, wagons, family photos, outhouses, had to go; 1,500 homes, 2,300 farms, 8,000 people, the majority of whom were African American. Entire cemeteries—more than 1,700 graves—were dug up and moved. Churches, schools, sawmills, icehouses, drugstores, cotton gins, factories, fifty-six businesses in Ellenton alone, all moved. Six towns in all—Dunbarton, Hawthorne, Meyers Mill, Robbins, Leigh, and Ellenton—gone. Scattered to the wind, so that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, General Electric, and the DuPont Company could construct the Savannah River Nuclear Site, the biggest bomb maker the world had ever seen: 310 square miles of government secrets, stretching into three rural counties; five nuclear reactors and a cooling tower; two chemical separation plants; management compounds; offices, labs, checkpoints; and security—a giant engine built to extract plutonium and uranium products from materials superheated in the reactors to make enough bombs to blow up the world one hundred times over. The Cold War had begun, and the people of Ellenton and its surrounding towns were among its first American victims.
    Those who owned homes got new homes built elsewhere or their homes were moved. Those whose businesses were bought out were resettled elsewhere with new businesses. Their schoolhouses were moved or rebuilt elsewhere. They were all uprooted to new towns, where they were strangers.
    There was no giant protest. No rally, no marchers picketing in circles chanting. But there were a slew of stories in the