Word: carolina
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Condon, 44, took statewide office in 1994, but already he is being touted for Governor and beyond. Condon is "the most ambitious and opportunistic attorney general this state has seen in modern times," says David Lublin, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. "He has taken clever political advantage of the backlash against the 'moral looseness,' and is effective at getting his message...
...underlings and has instead focused on such high-profile issues as defending the Confederate flag and cracking down on pornographers. He is especially proud of his push to hasten the process of getting death-row inmates actually put to death. Two have been executed this year in South Carolina, but Condon expects the numbers to rise next year. (Sixty-nine prisoners in the state are on death row.) Condon has long been passionate on the subject. In the 1994 campaign for attorney general, a race in which both candidates were so pro-death penalty that Professor Lublin refers...
...early 1990s, he sensed changes in the political winds, critics say, and switched parties. "Charlie Condon will be anything that 51% of the population wants him to be," says a bitter Dick Harpootlian, a Columbia lawyer who lost to Condon in 1994. "He's now helping move South Carolina faster toward the 19th century than toward the 21st...
Perhaps--unless that historian is Ed Ball. His clan stretches back to Englishman Elias ("Red Cap") Ball, who came to Carolina in 1698 for his inheritance of 740 acres and 25 slaves. His descendants would ultimately rule 25 plantations and 4,000 slaves. As a child, Ed Ball heard tales of war heroes and beautiful plantations; slaves were rarely mentioned. Ball's father once quipped about matters not to be discussed: "Religion, sex, death, money--and the Negroes." When slavery did come up, two assertions were made as God's truth: We were good to our Negroes. There...
Since Ball began his work, other whites have shown up at the South Carolina Historical Society, seeking to make similar connections. Filmmaker Macky Alston, who sought Ball's advice, won the Sundance Freedom of Expression award this year for Family Name, a documentary of his search for descendants of Alston slaves. Another Ball convert is Allen Hutcheson, 24, a descendant of the man believed to be the model for Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. "We have to find these people," he says of his family's former slaves. "You have to cut the wound open...