Mount Pleasant Probes 1 Misplaced Marker for 2 Black Landmarks
Updated
Updated · Live 5 News WCSC · Sep 7
Mount Pleasant Probes 1 Misplaced Marker for 2 Black Landmarks
1 articles · Updated · Live 5 News WCSC · Sep 7
Summary
Mount Pleasant leaders said they will review residents’ complaints that a double-sided historical marker does not sit at the actual sites of Riverside Beach and White’s Paradise.
Residents say the marker wrongly combines two separate landmarks and misses the geography of places that served as rare safe leisure spaces for Black residents during segregation.
Riverside Beach opened in 1930, and White’s Paradise followed in 1943 as a nightclub and hotel where performers including James Brown, B.B. King and Duke Ellington appeared, residents said.
The town said it had not previously known of the location concerns and will gather more history and context before deciding what role it can play in addressing them.
The dispute centers on landmarks largely erased from the landscape after the county sold the beach to developers in 1975 and White’s Paradise was demolished in 1993.