Below the Line With Congressman James E. Clyburn

Welcome to Below the Line, a monthly question-and-answer column in which Chancellor Bennie L. Harris, Ph.D., of the University of South Carolina Upstate interviews a leader about change, technology, education, and leadership. This month, Dr. Harris spoke with Congressman James E. Clyburn, the U.S. representative for South Carolina’s 6th congressional district. (This article has been edited for clarity, content, and length.)

Harris: So let’s jump right into it: Tell me about your upbringing in Sumter and how it affected you and informed who you've become.

Clyburn: Well, Sumter, as you know, is about one-hour drive from the capital city in Columbia. My father was from Kershaw County, my mother was from Lee County, but the two of them met, got married in Camden, and moved to Sumter because he was called to a church there.

We decided on Sumter because Morris College was there. He and my mother both longed for a college education, which they had not been able to get. In fact, my dad was not allowed to finish high school. When he came along in Kershaw County, the state of South Carolina did not allow education for blacks beyond the seventh grade in that county. There were several counties around where that was the case.

Because my dad was not allowed a high school education, he self-taught and got to the point that he could pass a college entrance exam, but he was not allowed to get his degree because the state law was that he had to produce his high school diploma, which he could not do. So therefore, my dad did not get his degree until 20 years after he died.

My mother opened a beauty shop. And after my dad was no longer in college, I thought my dad had graduated. I didn't know that he had not graduated. I didn't find that out until 1978, about six months before he died. My mother went to college in winter and summer. Closed the shop up, and it was time to go to classes, and she went to classes.

Harris: That's compelling.

Clyburn: Those two people instilled that sort of thing in me. When my mother graduated, she took her diploma, put it in a frame, and hung that thing on the wall in her beauty shop. I asked her one time, “Why?” She spent all that time going to college and never utilized a degree professionally. And she told me she always wanted her college education, but she thought she could make a much better living as a beautician. And that was the kind of tenacity I grew up with.

Now, one other thing that happened. My dad and mother opened a kindergarten when I was 3 years old. So I got introduced to education very early. And my parents were devoted to education. And that kind of framed who I am today. Even today, I try to pay that forward. Next month, I will be handing out 200 scholarships to high school graduates. Some of them have attended USC Upstate.

Harris: So I understand that you were elected president of your NAACP chapter at age 12. How did that come about and how did that early experience shape your leadership?

Clyburn: Well, my mom, in that beauty shop, she became a fundraiser for the NAACP. And she had some captive audience. And remember, this was the time that things had begun to happen. I was born in 1940. In 1948 is when Harry Truman integrated the armed services in the executive order.

We were getting active in stuff. So I go to this meeting and I think I went to the bathroom or something. At some point in the meeting, they told me I was the president.

Harris: So you were “voluntold”?

Clyburn: I got “voluntold,” yeah. So I became president. I think this is basically because my dad taught us Robert's Rules of Order (the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States) and all this stuff. So I knew how to run a meeting at that age. And I think that's why I became the president.

Harris: That's interesting. So in your first full-time position, you taught English and social studies at the middle and high school levels. What drew you to teaching?

Clyburn: I was drawn to teaching simply because at the time I came along in South Carolina, if you were going to be meaningfully employed, you had to be a preacher, an undertaker, or a teacher. Basically, that was it. Things, of course, started to change around that time. But I got married before I finished college.

My wife was a librarian, and I converted my degree to the teaching of social studies. Another thing that was the law at that time: South Carolina State was not allowed to offer a degree in history, state law.

And when young people run their mouths today about what is or what ain't, I let them know that nobody can be any more or less than what their experience has allowed them to be. And when you experience growing up in South Carolina when I do, the schools are segregated.

Harris: Walk me through your political career, from freshman class co-president, to the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, to the House Majority Whip.

Clyburn: I got elected to Congress at the age of 52, which meant that I was going to be a freshman. At the time, a lot of Congresspeople were retiring. So I had to do something to jump-start my career, because I felt it was going to be much shorter than it turned out to be.

I had some friends whom I had developed politically. I had worked four years in the governor's office. I had run a state agency for about 18 years. I had run state, county, and local agencies. And so I knew a lot of people who had worked in government, one of whom said to me, “You're going to need to do something pretty dramatic to jump-start your career. So we are going to help you get elected president of your freshman class, OK? That will automatically set you on a leadership track.”

And to make a long story short, I successfully got elected president for the second session of the 103rd Congress. That was 1993. the year of the woman as declared by the United Nations. And I'm running for president of the freshman class against Eva Clayton from North Carolina, an African American woman. And so I came up with the idea that we should not run against each other, that the two of us should be co-presidents. She would serve for president in the first session of the 103rd, and I would serve in the second session of the 103rd.

Harris: Now let's talk about your civil rights activism. I really admire that. And you continue to do that.

Clyburn: My mother helped instill that in me. The Southern states were filing lawsuits against the NAACP, trying to break the backs of the NAACP. So my mother was raising money for the NAACP, and of course there was a big lawsuit against a local branch, to try to shut them down.

My mother was raising money to fight that lawsuit. She brought me to the courtroom, and my mom said to me that day, “I just want you to see what you can be when you grow up.” And that had a tremendous impact on me.

So I go off to college, I get involved in the sit-ins. And that just started my activism. There were eight of us that organized that first sit-in. It was not a successful sit-in, because when we got downtown, they had removed all the stools. So I grew up with all this kind of stuff, experienced it. In fact, I was in Charleston, I helped them organize the community in 1969. And we found out that somebody among us was betraying the cause. So I've been a part of all this kind of stuff pretty much all my life. And so you learn how to work through and around that kind of stuff.

Before I graduated college is when I met Martin Luther King Jr. I was a junior in college. I met King and John Lewis the same weekend.

Harris: You have said that in every movement you are going to have someone in there who's going to betray the cause. How do you lead in those environments? How do you lead and how do you keep the faith? How do you keep focus on that? Or how do you keep people motivated when the cause gets undermined?

Clyburn: You have to decide whether you're going to work through the obstacles or work around them. No matter what, you have to keep pressing forward.

Harris: So your endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primary is widely credited with helping Joe Biden's campaign get on the path to the presidency. What did the moment teach you?

Clyburn: Well, I would say that endorsement didn't start with me. It started with my late wife. Emily fought a 30-year battle with diabetes. She lost that battle in September 2019, about four or five months before the primary.

Prior to that, we had our big fish fry. And because of Emily's diabetes, she could not go. It was the most successful fish fry I've ever had. Over 7,000 people attended. Later that night I said to her, “We've got a real problem because everybody actually needs to endorse a candidate, and we got 23 people running for president. Four or five of them are big friends of ours. I don't know what we're going to do.”

She said, “Well, I'll tell you this. I don't care how many are running or how many are friends. If you want to win this election, you better nominate Joe Biden.” OK. Now, that was good to hear, but then we get into the primary in the upcoming year, and Joe Biden loses the first one, he loses the second one, lost bad, finished in fifth place. And he lost the third one. And then I said, now with my daughters, I said, “You know, we got a real problem. Your mother told me that I should be endorsing Biden. It's looking bad. What are we going to do?” And almost in unison, they said, “You're going to listen to Mom.” And that settled it for me.

So I made the endorsement commitment to Joe Biden on that Sunday evening before his debate that was going to take place on Tuesday. And I told him what I was going to do, and I told him what he needed to do in order to make my endorsement work. And that was, during his debate, he had to make a commitment to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court. Because when I was talking to my daughters and asking them, I said, “Well, if I'm going to do this endorsement, the question is, what can we do to make it meaningful? What can Joe Biden do to give people some hope?” And we discussed the fact that there'd been five women on the Supreme Court, and nobody had ever seriously discussed an African American woman.

He was a little bit recalcitrant about that. And in fact, I found out after, the staff told him he couldn't do it, that it would backfire. How in the world could that have backfired? It didn't backfire.

Harris: So, you served under four governors, two Democrats and two Republicans. What did that bipartisan service teach you about working across differences?

Clyburn: Well, my dad taught me all of that — the fact that disagreements should not necessarily end up being permanent. You disagree, and you resolve it, and you move on to the next one.

There’s an experience I had with my two brothers. One day, my dad took the three of us with him to have his automobile worked on. (We started arguing), and he called the three of us to him. We were sitting there pretty anxious about it, wondering what this punishment was going to be. He had a piece of cord string in his hand. He gave that cord string to my brother, Charles. He said, “Charles, I want you to pop this string.” Charles struggled and couldn't pop it. He then took it back and gave it to John. He said, “John, you're two years older, you're stronger, you pop the string.” John couldn't pop it.

He then took it back and gave it to me. And he said, “James, you're the oldest, you're the strongest, you pop the string.” I couldn't pop it either. And then he took that cord string, he put it in the palms of his hands, he began to rub his hands together. The more he rubbed, the more friction he created. And the more friction he created, the more it unraveled. And then he gave one piece to Charles, one to John, and one to me, and said, “Sons, pop your strings.” And with very little effort, all three of us popped our strings.

He said, “This is going to be a lesson to you for as long as you live. Don't you let the little disagreements that crop up among you cause so much friction that they separate you, because if you do, the world will pull you apart and you will never know why.” I lived by that experience.

Harris: So President Barack Obama has described you as one of a handful of people who, when they speak, the entire Congress listens. Were you surprised by those words? And do you feel that confidence when you're in front of your colleagues?

Clyburn: I was surprised when I first saw that. But what I've always tried to do, once again, is what my dad told me, “Son, don't waste time cursing the darkness. Light a candle.”

I say to people all the time, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” I don't talk about anything unless I think I know what I'm talking about. I spend a lot of my time studying, reading, and researching.

Harris: I’d next like to talk about Leading Below the Line. What I mean by that is that oftentimes we don’t know what’s going on beneath the surface — for leaders and for their teams — and we have to dive in and find out exactly what’s at play in order to make a project or a plan successful.

Clyburn: It is the unknown. My mother taught me: You don't anticipate. You just prepare. And you don't know what the end result is going to be. Which takes us really to the second South Carolina motto: prepared in mind and resources. Now, very few people use that motto. Some people don't know it is there. I didn't know it was there.

Harris: Do you have a hero, someone who inspired you the most?

Clyburn: My dad. My mother. My parents were just incredible people. But if you step outside the family, Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero. Robert Smalls, whom I write about in my book. I look at the Harry Trumans of the world. And there's my high school Bible teacher — a white woman — who was most responsible for my staying in South Carolina. She told me she thought I was being short-sighted when I said I was going to finish college and go live in New Jersey. And she taught me that was an error in my thinking. And so I don't know what my life would have been like in New Jersey, but I doubt it could be much more consequential than the last however many years in South Carolina.

Harris: The fact that you're here, the fact that you're leading the way you're leading, and the fact that we have a country where these opportunities are made available to us — it’s inspiring. And you have challenges that you have to navigate. You have to persevere through and you have to keep fighting through.