An American flag flies over the historic buildings of King Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Photograph: Hal Bergman/Getty Images
By Susan Crawford, The Guardian, April 4, 2023
Predictions about how much water is coming vary greatly. Some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070 and 10 feet by 2100. Someday, not too long from now, the stories of many current coastal and riverside cities across the US will include sudden plot twists as well as new beginnings, as edges that had seemed solid liquify and become indistinguishable from the seas around them.
That brings us to Charleston, South Carolina. Its geography is that of a small New York City. The city also has a history of racial immorality, often ignored by its contemporary boosters.
About 40% of all the enslaved people who were forcibly brought to the US first stepped ashore there. Enslaved people were the basis of Charleston’s economy and development for 200 years, planting and harvesting the rice and extracting the indigo that the region exported, filling the marshy margins of the peninsula with trash, rubble and human waste.
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