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In
1988, after visiting professorships at the University
of California, Berkeley and the University of Mississippi,
Joyner accepted an appointment to Coastal Carolina University’s
first faculty chair. The Burroughs Distinguished Chair
in Southern History and Culture had been created early
that year by the late Henry Burroughs Sr. of Conway
to stimulate the study and preservation of the history
and culture of South Carolina’s Waccamaw region.
It
was a homecoming for the Myrtle Beach native, whose
roots reach back two centuries in Horry County soil,
and a natural fit professionally. From his office in
the Prince Building – a comfortably cluttered study
and library crammed with books on every conceivable
aspect of the American South from Faulkner’s novels
to the Georgetown County Census of 1850 – Joyner
has continued to study, write, lecture and accrue honors.
He is also director of the Waccamaw Center for Cultural
and Historical Studies, the research center of Coastal’s
Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities
and Fine Arts.
One
of the center’s missions is to present public lectures
and conferences, a task which calls on another of Joyner’s
great gifts: friendship. His research and travels have
brought him in contact with many illustrious scholars
and writers around the world, many of whom have visited
the Coastal campus because “Chas” invited
them to lecture or take part in a conference. Among
them are William Styron, C. Vann Woodward, Josephine
Humphries, Elizabeth Spencer, Dori Sanders and David
Hackett Fischer.
Southern Study: Joyner's office in the Prince
Building is the headquarters of the Waccamaw Center
for Cultural andHistorical Studies. |
In
a field of scholarship inherently fraught with differing
interpretations, factious theoretical approaches, and
constant revisionism, Joyner’s calm integrity and
tolerant disposition are much respected. “I don’t
feel competitive, it’s not my nature,” he
says. “I’m very ambitious, but I never felt
that my getting ahead should require me to put anyone
else down.” Joyner says he also learned something
about professional good manners from his mentor and
friend, the late C. Vann Woodward of Yale University,
one of the leading American historians of the 20th century.
“Vann set a splendid example of how to disagree
and get along at the same time.”
Joyner
never had a better opportunity to exercise his diplomatic
skills than last spring, when he bravely joined the
fray over the Confederate flag as the controversy raged
in the statehouse and across South Carolina.
“It
was frustrating to hear over and over how the legislature
was being bombarded with informa-tion from the heritage
groups stating that slavery was not a cause of the Civil
War. I felt that the lawmakers and the public deserved
to know the real history of the situation.”
Sticking
strictly to historical facts, Joyner wrote a short paper
showing indisputably that perpetuating slavery was a
primary motivation for waging the war. He then circulated
it among four of five colleagues for comments. They
urged him to edit it down to two pages and send it to
the South Carolina Historical Association for endorsement.
An overwhelming majority signed it and on March 31,
2000, Joyner, with more than 70 other historians standing
behind him, led an unprecedented and widely publicized
press conference at the South Caroliniana Library on
the USC campus.
“Our
aim was not to take sides or tell people how to think,”
says Joyner, “but to help resolve the controversy.”
Although the effort was well received by the press and
the academic community, a few South Carolina historians
did not sign the document and a small group of dissenters
delivered a counterargument. A few days after his press
conference, Joyner spoke to the local chapter of the
Sons of Confederate Veterans. At the meeting, he passed
around copies of his statement from the press conference.
“I don’t know whether I persuaded anyone,
but they received me very cordially. Nobody refused
to take a copy. All in all, through the whole flag issue
I don’t think I lost a friend.”
Joyner’s
latest book, Shared Traditions, published in 1999, is
a collection of essays that explore how the culture
of the South has been shaped by the fusion of African
and European influences. The essay subjects reflect
the breadth of his interests. In addition to further
considerations of Gullah culture and American slavery,
there are pieces on the abolitionist John Brown, on
the development of Southern musical styles, on Appalachian
dulcimer makers, on Jewish life in Georgetown, S.C.,
on British and Irish cultural influences in the American
South, on the effect of resort development on folk culture,
and on the legend of Alice Flagg, the Grand Strand’s
favorite ghost, which Joyner runs through the wringer
of modern folklore scholarship.
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