A handwritten note on the indictment indicates Solicitor Gedney M. Ware would be indicted on a murder charge three months later, but the case never went before a jury. A judge ordered him to remain jailed until his trial. The head wound explained his “sudden death,” according to the report. A second bullet penetrated the top of his skull. One round entered his right buttock and exited his abdomen. 38 caliber pistol, according to a necropsy report. Ware fired at least two rounds before Varner fell. Pringle said Ware “pulled out a gun,” and Varner ran away. Pringle and Witherspoon do not mention Ware retrieving the weapon from his truck. A friend then gave Ware a ride to the hospital. Ware told police he grabbed a pistol from his truck and shot Varner as he approached. Witherspoon confirmed Varner struck first. “Jake Varner walked up and didn’t even say nothing, but stabbed Otis with an ice pick,” Pringle told police, using a nickname for Ware.
Two men, Moses Pringle and Burnie Witherspoon, witnessed the violence. He drank a beer and chatted on the street with several men before he spotted Varner, 30, enter the bar. with his friend, Leo Fleming, he told police. The piccolo joint, or small bar, was about a mile east of the Jenkins Homes in Union Heights, a predominantly Black community founded after the Civil War by former slaves. Ware told police he went to Solomon Ford's Place for a dance the night of the shooting. Tests would later show lead and arsenic from phosphate mills contaminated the land.
Freedom moses men windows#
The company’s fertilizer plant belched foul-smelling fumes that dirtied windows and dulled the paint on residents’ cars. The project was built on land leased from the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company in “The Neck,” a skinny tongue of land that connects the Charleston peninsula to the mainland. A Charleston city directory from 1950 shows he lived there with his wife, Louida, and their four children, including Scott’s mother, Frances. In 1953, Ware was a 32-year-old laborer living in the Daniel Jenkins Homes, a segregated federal housing project constructed 10 years earlier to accommodate the influx of shipyard workers who thronged Charleston during World War II. (Courtesy of the Charleston County Public Library via Courthouse News) Homicide at the neighborhood bar A 1965 map of "The Neck" region in Charleston, South Carolina.
Using city directories, newspaper accounts and other historical materials, Courthouse News verified information in the court record to piece together details about a man who would inspire his grandson to pursue the nation's highest office.Ī spokesman for Tim Scott's campaign declined to comment for this story. The accounts differ in the details, sometimes in important ways, and the case's resolution is ambiguous.īut the narrative belies the messy realities of Ware’s life. Police misspelled the names of some witnesses in documents and recorded the wrong age for Ware. It’s difficult to parse the facts of a homicide after 70 years. “Today, I am living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” he told supporters as he announced his presidential bid in North Charleston. The South Carolinian left grade school to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South, Scott has told crowds, but lived long enough to see his grandson become the first Black senator elected in the South in more than a century.įor Scott, the family’s ascent from “cotton to Congress” is proof of progress toward racial equality in the United States, even as the nation continues to reckon with the brutalities of slavery.
Ware looms large in Scott’s campaign narrative.
Varner died from gunshot wounds that night - Sept. The shooter was Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott’s grandfather, Artis Ware. I didn’t know whether I hit him or not, but as I fired, he turned around and started back towards me and I shot again.” “He turned around and I shot at him once. “He kept following me and I got a gun out of the glove compartment,” the man said in a statement. The victim told police he fled down the street to his vehicle. Without word or warning, Varner pulled out an ice pick and stabbed another man twice in the chest and once more in the back. Old scars marred his arms, and a silver ring adorned his right hand. The local laborer returned after a few moments, dressed in a yellow sport shirt and blue trousers with striped yellow socks. Men lingered outside the raucous piccolo joint in Union Heights as Jake Varner quietly ducked inside. (CN) - It was a Saturday night at Solomon Ford's Place.
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