Jenkins used the fear of black crime to get support for his orphanage

Just a quick post about a heartbreaking paragraph I just read in Walter J. Fraser's CHARLESTON! CHARLESTON! The history of a Southern City (1989), whilst I do some research in the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library.

The end of the nineteenth century in Charleston saw a rise of crime covering assaults, robberies, prostitution, illegal trafficking and gambling, with fights and stabbings frequent, and bootlegging preferred by many poor blacks over paying for the expensive goods. Wealthy African-Americans often requested the protection of police because they were afraid to leave their homes incase they were broken into by their own race.

According to Fraser, this heightened fear of black crime was used by Reverend Daniel Jenkins to gain funds for his newly founded orphanage, a perspective I have not come across before. A paragraph I found reads as follows:

'Fear of black crime helped a black Baptist minister, Daniel J. Jenkins, persuade the City Council to support the orphanage he had recently founded. The ingenious Reverend Mr. Jenkins argued that he was keeping potential juvenile offenders off the streets and making ''breadwinners out of beggars and loafers,'' and in 1897 the city council voted $250 to support the fifty-four ''colored orphans'' lodged at the Jenkins orphanage. The News and Courier believed he would provide a place where ''the small...thieves, crap shooters, and razor pushes could...learn an honest trade,'' and annually the city government continued to support the orphanage.' - p.34.

I found it touching that Jenkins, a black man himself, had to almost lie and say things he didn't agree with to get white funding for his orphans, which just shows the racial climate of the time period.
The city annually donated around $1,000 to Jenkins, yet the upkeeping of the orphanage cost $20,000 each year: in 1912 donations from the North and collections by the Jenkins orphanage band exceeded the city's donation by ten times. As you might expect, the two orphanages for white children in Charleston were given much more money from the city.

On a slightly more positive note, out of the seventy three lynchings that took place in the state of South Carolina between 1882 and 1900, none were in Charleston. Which isn't to say that the city wasn't highly segregated and unequal.

Yay a photo!