Take interstate highways between South Carolina’s largest metropolitan areas and the scene remains similar \u201d\u201d thick forests, meandering rivers and lush farms punctuated with thriving suburbs and vibrant downtowns.<\/p>\n
Get off those interstates and something else emerges \u201d\u201d towns where poverty rules, illiteracy passes to children like an inherited disease, and diabetes strikes 9-year-olds because of bad diets and obesity.
This is the other South Carolina. It runs along the \u201cInterstate-95 Corridor\u201d\u009d through the mostly majority black counties made infamous by the \u201cCorridor of Shame\u201d\u009d documentary about inequities in public schools. It also includes the \u201cMill Crescent,\u201d\u009d the swath of rural, largely white, old textile mill counties between the I-85 economic powerhouse and greater Columbia.<\/p>\n
If you took this other South Carolina away, the state would no longer rank at the bottom of nearly every list you want it to be at the top of. Instead, it would basically mirror the nation as a whole in income, education and health.<\/p>\n
Many crippling disparities linger in these metropolitan counties, but the areas have been pushed into the national mainstream by four decades of economic growth, desegregation and an influx of people from other states and countries with new ideas and high expectations.<\/p>\n
The other South Carolina remains shrouded in despair by the legacies of slavery, dependence on a marginally educated workforce, and political and economic domination by an elite few.<\/p>\n