Introducing Charlie’s Place: A Cultural Haven That Brought People Together Through Music

The Memory Palace is supported by the new podcast, Charlie's Place, and by very occasional sponsored content like this. Hey, it's Nate. As a listener of The Memory Palace, you know my show. loves exploring lost moments and forgotten figures from our past. The podcast that I am about to share with you does just that. Charlie's Place tells the story of an iconic music venue that united a community divided by racial segregation.

honoring the legacy of those who stood up for unity in a divided time. Segregation was the law in the 1940s and 1950s, but Charlie's Place had its own rules, a juke joint that welcomed black and white people to enjoy some of the greatest musicians of our time. Artists like Little Richard, Ray Charles, Lena Horne, and many more. Charlie Fitzgerald, a revolutionary but mysterious black businessman, was the club's founder.

His spot was more than a nightclub. It was a cultural hub that defied racial barriers in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, breaking the rules at a time when infractions came at a high cost. Charlie's place sparked intense resistance from segregationists, leading to a raid by Ku Klux Klan members and profound change that reverberated throughout the community.

interspersing interviews with historians, cultural experts, and Carolinians who share firsthand accounts of growing up during the height of Charlie's Place. Host Reem Giese. tells the tale of triumph and tragedy, of resilience and joy, of a place where music changed lives and shaped a movement. Enjoy this preview. If you want to hear more, find Charlie's Place wherever you get your podcasts.

Pushkin A quick warning. Some of the language and imagery used to describe this period of time may be upsetting. Please take care while listening.

I was interviewing a gentleman about his participation in student demonstrations in 1960. He stopped me and he said, you know, I'm from South Carolina. Have you ever heard of Charlie Fitzgerald? He mentioned specifically knowing Charlie Fitzgerald, knowing his wife, and then relaying to me what he remembered happening in 1950. Charlie Fitzgerald was notorious. That's a good adjective for him. He was constantly having makeovers, seemingly always reinventing himself. He was a roving...

entrepreneur who was beloved and respected by some and despised and ridiculed by others. Traitor, turncoat, folk hero, defiant. The atmosphere is thick with this vehement rhetoric of white supremacy. Here was a black man who thumbed his nose at laws. and customs. And that is why he's a threat. What happened to Charlie Fitzgerald was almost... I guess it would be an Emmett Till moment.

It would be a Pearl Harbor moment. People remembered vividly. An ordinary person would say the hell with it. I'm going to the promised land. I'm going elsewhere. But Charlie was not ordinary I came to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in search of a folk hero. A man who died in 1955. A man who's almost forgotten, but whose name is still in the air.

He was the mythic proprietor of a mythic space, a place that sounded like a mirage. But it did exist on a Saturday night in 1940 in the seaside town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The smell of salty air and perfume. A night out on the town. Everyone is filing into a nightclub. The sound of Count Basie's orchestra carries into the night. Jim Crow laws are in full effect. It would still be decades before Black and white people were allowed to even eat together in a restaurant.

But something surprising is happening inside the club. Something the laws were designed to prevent throughout the South. Black and white people dance together. They partner, press against each other. swing and sway to the music. It doesn't feel dangerous. It feels joyous. Nothing else seems to matter. The lines on the outside don't exist. This was Charlie's place. It doesn't seem real, but a few people still remember.

I heard a phrase on one of my visits to Myrtle Beach about Charlie's Place. Segregation by day, integration by night. The people who lived it even have a hard time explaining it. How this nightclub existed when it did, for as long as it did, from 1937 to 1966. But they say it had everything to do with Charlie Fitzgerald. things just went that way with Charlie he blurred the lines the rules just didn't seem to apply to him and when I asked why it just led to more questions Charlie was

Big question mark. A lot of people knew him but didn't really know him. He always had an aura about him and people used to say he was a serious man. I took that to mean that he could be a dangerous man. He carried two pistols. He had a .45 on one side and a .38 on the other side, and he carried those guns with him all the time. The rumor was spread that...

Charlie was running a prostitution ring over there. Charlie was a source of constant speculation and misinformation. I got to work separating rumors from the facts. Now, um... As far as businesses go, what we learned about Charlie was he had gambling in the back. Yes. Yes, he did. And some other businesses. Yeah, but I can't. When I came to Myrtle Beach, these questions were sometimes met with a guarded attitude. There was something here people were compelled to protect.

I was on a mission to find out what that was. I'm Reem Giese, and this is Charlie's Place. Episode 1, Whispering Pines.

I had to prepare to go back to the South, a place I've rarely been since I was a girl in Louisiana. I usually wear my hair natural, but for the trip to Myrtle Beach, I straightened it. My parents and I first moved to the South when I was 12 years old. We came here from the Ivory Coast. I didn't speak English, and I still remember what my teacher told me while I learned the language. She said,

Listen. Things we do not talk about. Sex, religion, politics. Do not touch those subjects. That never made sense to me as a kid. What else is there to talk about? That stuck with me. And this story, it turns out, would touch on all the things that you don't talk about in polite conversation in the South. Coaxing out the truth would be delicate.

I had one shot to get this right. And I didn't have a lot of time. Because most of the people who really knew the story were well into their 80s. There weren't a lot of people left. But there was Miss Pat. But Miss Pat, I was curious, do you still stay in contact with everybody you grew up with that's still, you know, here? Come on. You do.

Yeah. The most of them, if I can find them, I can stay in contact with them. Yeah. Mm-hmm. For so many of them, younger than me did. Yeah. And it bothers me. I get nervous. I'm not ready to go yet. Yeah. Miss Pat has a wheelchair ramp leading into her house because she has very limited mobility. She had a heart attack recently and can't leave her home.

She says most everyone who worked dry cleaners in Myrtle Beach in the 50s, like she did, ended up with either cancer or heart trouble because of the cleaning fluids they used. Each time I walked up to her house, she'd spot me first and call out through the screen door from her lazy boy, Hey baby! And each time, it was good to be reminded of the warmth in her voice.

Charlie Fisher was a good man to the whole neighborhood, the town, everywhere. And you either respect him or you hate him. And see, I respect him because, see, he didn't mind putting something on you. Not many folks really knew him. And I would come to believe that maybe that was intentional on Charlie's part. But Miss Pat knew Charlie.

And everyone that sent me her way described her as a mess. I knew exactly what that meant. A mess in the South is someone who talks a lot. Now you stop me because I don't know when to hush.

A mess was exactly what I needed. Now, what do you want to talk about? How I was raised on Myrtle Beach on Carver Street? Ms. Pat helped me understand the setting around Charlie's Club. In the 1940s, before integration, Carver Street was the center of Black life in Myrtle Beach. There were shops, restaurants, clubs, juke joints. all owned by Black people for Black people. Carver Street was the only street that we could sell anything, open up a business. We wasn't allowed on Oak Street at all.

Back then, there were boundaries around where Black people lived and where they were allowed to move freely in Myrtle Beach. This neighborhood was known as The Hill, made up of several streets, including Carver, set a few blocks back from the ocean. Miss Pat was born on the Hill in 1943. By the time she was two years old, her mother and two sisters died from tuberculosis. She was raised by her grandmother.

They survived by knowing where to find cracks in the system. They existed between broken rules and abandoned materials. During this time of extreme segregation, Ms. Pat's grandmother was resourceful. Black people weren't allowed to buy coal in town, so they collected fragments that fell off the coal train. They dug tar out of the street before it dried to patch their roof. They worked at night to avoid the police.

The first gas stove her family owned was fished out of the ocean after Hurricane Hazel. And dried it out for three weeks so we could put it together. They kept pigs, grew their own fruits and vegetables, sold corn liquor, and did laundry for tourists. Oh, God, there's some nasty girls coming to Myrtle Beach. Oh, my God. I wouldn't touch the clothes. I said, no, no, I don't want the germs cleaning your clothes. The girls, the men's was all right.

But them girls, oh my God. She shared her vivid memories with me, revealing them as kind of a mental map. Geographically, her world was small, but the details she shared conveyed something much bigger. It helped me understand what the community on the Hill was made of, and what it took for Ms. Pat to survive, to live out an entire life here. It was almost freedom, as long as she stayed in the lines.

Outside the hill, Miss Pat was barely allowed to exist. Because outside the hill, she couldn't eat inside restaurants. Outside the hill, she couldn't wear shorts on the boardwalk along the ocean. Outside the hill, she couldn't step barefoot on the sand, let alone touch the water. Merrill Beach was a good place if you stay in your place, if I put it like that.

We couldn't go into the ocean. We couldn't go in none of the water. Until the late 1960s, it was forbidden for Black people to swim in the ocean in Myrtle Beach. Because they said the dirt would come off and go in the water. That's why we couldn't contaminate the water. But other than that, it was all right. I love family. My family was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. When Ms. Pat wasn't helping her grandmother, she was hanging out at her grandfather's barbershop.

My granddaddy was something. Nobody ever had a granddaddy like mine. And he would call me to cut his hair and say, if I cut him, he's going to shoot me. And show me how to shoot the gun. The pistol. And a shotgun. How old were you? 15. Everything happened in her grandfather's yard behind the barbershop. It's where she learned how to shoot a gun.

how to shave her granddad's head with a straight razor without cutting him, and where she learned how to dance. And dance, oh my God. We'd dance in the yard. We didn't worry about what went on outside. But we dance all we want. I love to dance more than I did anything else. Didn't drink, didn't hang out, but honey, I dance. Anybody want to dance, I was ready.

When Miss Pat says we didn't worry about what went on on the outside, she means outside of the hill. That world didn't matter. What mattered was who she was on the hill. And on the hill, Miss Pat was known as one of the best dancers in Myrtle Beach. Dance was everything. And right on Carver, in the center of all the action, was the best place to dance. Charlie Fitzgerald's nightclub. Charlie's Place.

The insiders know that before it was Charlie's place, everyone knew it as Whispering Pines. They called it that because of a legend. Once. Billie Holiday and Count Basie came and played two nights in a row. The locals say Billie Holiday's voice lingered like a whisper through those pine trees. And that's why they call it Whispering Pines.

Because when the wind blew those trees, it was, oh my God, it was beautiful. Whispering Pines was run by a married couple, two Black entrepreneurs, Charlie and Sarah Fitzgerald. According to the people who lived on the Hill, Charlie and Sarah were forces of nature. Two outsiders who came to town in 1937. When I asked people, where did Charlie come from? I thought it was a simple question with a simple answer.

Some said he was from Georgia. I think Charlie was from New York somewhere. So I think he came from Jamaica someplace. And he came from up north. Nobody knew exactly where. Nobody talked about where he came from. So yeah, not so simple. But wherever Sarah and Charlie came from, they ended up in Myrtle Beach. When they opened their club in 1937, it drew entertainers and visitors from all over the country. On Saturday night, cars would line Carver Street.

Women emerged in evening gowns and men in white tuxes. The crowd felt enormous. And they were all there for the music. And not just any music. It was the best music. I love you, babe. Oh, yes, God, Ruth Brown, Jane Brown. Girl, I see so many people up in there. Oh, my God. They don't talk about Wilson Pickett. They don't talk about him. They're right there from the country.

Roy Hamilton, Johnny Ace, my favorite. The Drifters, Fats Domino. Johnny Taylor, Ross C. Clough, Curtis Mayfield, The Impressions. Marvin Gaye was here. Marvin Gaye used to come to there, the barbershop, get his hair cut. The last concert that I attended here with Otis Redding, we were having such a good time that the floor was really caving in. Charlie's Place, or Whispering Pines, was a stop on the Chitlin Circuit, safe venues for Black entertainers in the Jim Crow South.

These clubs and juke joints launched artist careers. And Charlie's Place contributed to that. I wanted to know what it felt like to be inside that history. Most people I interviewed, their memories are of a specific era at Charlie's Place. Maybe a few remember the late 40s, and a lot like Miss Pat remember the 50s and 60s. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall. It was like sipping on another world. And they had these black and white...

I mean, it was so pretty and so different. Charlie and Sarah kept tabs on the kids and let them in to dance while the acts warmed up. as long as you were out of there by 9.30. Miss Pat took advantage of that. She put on a dress and went to see all the artists who came through. You couldn't wear no pants, no slacks at all.

and my older sister went over to slacks on her and he marched her right back home that's right and you had to be out of there by nine thirty he just was strict when it come down to children he didn't allow children to be in grown people company

The more time I spent in Myrtle Beach, the more people turned up with something to share about Charlie's place. The club isn't there anymore, but I heard many stories about what it looked like inside. I'd sketch as I listened and tried to capture it in as much detail as possible. pieced together from people's distant memories. Roddy Brown's family ran Club Bamboo, next door to Charlie's Place. He says Charlie's Place was always packed. Okay, you got a huge building here. And you could see.

Maybe 1,500 people in here. 1,500? That's 1,500. We have no pictures. You need to get some authentic pictures because there got to be some pictures of Charlie's. There aren't any other than that bar. No interior pictures? No. What I can gather is when you stepped inside, there was a big bar in front. And towards the back, there were a set of folding tables and chairs. They were in clear view of the front door. Ms. Pat says she always found her dad there with his girlfriends.

If his wife walked in the door, he'd have time to spot her and move the girlfriend out of view. I didn't care what he done, as long as he didn't bother me. I didn't like my daddy too good. Further behind the tables was Charlie's back room. As a kid, you'd be in trouble if Charlie caught you trying to sneak in there. But you're never allowed to go in that back room. But Mr. Charlie will let you know. I'll get you tomorrow if I don't get you today.

Miss Pat says that didn't stop kids trying to get back there to rob him. That's where the money was, in the back room where the grown-ups gambled. On the right side was a patio. That's where the musicians performed. It was sort of a makeshift enclosure made from old signs and a big green canvas curtain, so you couldn't watch the music from outside. I used to listen in my bed. I used to slip out of my bed to slip around the Charlies.

and see the performers. I was 12 years old. Roddy and his friends climbed the trees outside to try to catch a glimpse of the performers. Of course, Charlie, the man of mystery, didn't make it easy for him. He had curtains. Big. military curtains to block off the view. I don't know where Charlie got those curtains, those things were so big, you'd take a whole day to put them up. Everything happened at Charlie's place.

The dancing, the music, yes. But it was also a place where people came to blow off steam. And that could look like a lot of things. Roddy remembers being there in the daytime and seeing something that would stick with him. In broad daylight, in Charlie's club, Roddy saw a man get shot right in front of him. He said a guy he knew named Nathan pulled the trigger. As Roddy puts it, he witnessed an almost killing.

And here I am, 12 years, looking at it, almost killing all kinds of things. We were so terrified, you know. So this was during the day. These guys getting drunk, getting ready for the dance and starting some foolishness. Charlie came up and said, boy, Nathan put that gun up. Nathan's a better old cousin and all that. It was his time. You see, we were living in an age, it's totally different from this atmosphere.

Totally carnal. I'm a sin city. But Charlie was prepared for anything. He always carried two pistols. Everyone knew they were there, under his coat.

If the Hill was one big family, Charlie and Sarah were the matriarch and patriarch to many who lived there. They were Miss Pat's neighbors, and they looked out for her. And Mr. Charlie's a good-looking man. The Fitzgeralds also owned a motel next to the club. The building bent around in a horseshoe. In the center of the horseshoe was the house where the Fitzgeralds lived. They ran a supper club out of it and sometimes invited the kids in for hot dogs and candy. Charlie was a good man.

Charlie made sure Ms. Pat got her share. What he said, he meant it. And he said, Patricia, I was real skinny. He said, if you don't get in here and get the candy, all the candy, if you're gone, you two literally let them take all the candy. And Miss Sarah will give me my hot dog first so I can gain weight. My other sister was big and I was little. I was little and skinny, but they were so nice people.

They were kind, but they were more than that. They had standards everyone learned to maintain. And Ms. Sarah was a sweetheart. She was a pretty woman, but she was very strict. You didn't go in her house any kind of way. You come to the side. Miss Pat says the Fitzgeralds were big on education. Before there was an integrated school in Myrtle Beach,

The kids on the hill had to ride a bus to Conway, 14 miles away. And they never knew when it was going to come. And when it did, it got stuck on a hill heading out of town. The bus would start to roll backwards, and the kids would have to jump out and push it over. Every time. But Sarah made sure Miss Pat got to school.

and we missed that school bus she'll fuss all the way to call me 14 miles why did you miss the school bus was the bus too early or was you lazy or you couldn't get up what was the problem oh my god As long as you wasn't involved in it doing wrong, she would take you to school and wouldn't see nothing. But if it was your fault you didn't get up on time, oh, honey, she fussed the whole time. Uh-huh. And fix your breakfast.

That sounds brutal, but also very loving. It is. She was. And since the kids on the hill couldn't go to the beach, Miss Pat says the Fitzgeralds put a kiddie pool in the back. But another neighbor, Leroy Brunson... mainly recalls the great lengths Miss Sarah took to keep the kids out of it. So she wasn't always sweet. Well, Miss Fishdarell was... She had a temper.

She didn't care for kids. The way Leroy tells it, instead of a guard dog, the Fitzgeralds had a guard monkey. A spider monkey. Leroy remembers Miss Sarah kept the monkey near the pool, tied to a tree. She took the monkey and she put a longer line on him so he could reach all the way to the front of the pool. So my little niece and my son, he told us that, don't go around the pool. That monkey back there. Excuse me.

She went in away. She tried to run, and the monkey caught off her shirt. And he was holding her, man, so Miss Sarah came out there, and she... got the monkey off and told us i told you kids don't come around here so get off around here and don't come around here anymore that's so funny i didn't hear anything about a monkey

And she had out front used to be the little palm trees with the little fruits on them, the little orange type fruits on the palm of the tree. And the kids used to come in and pick them and they would eat them because they were really sweet. And she went out there and she chopped him down. It's hard to tell if she was a contradiction all along or changed over the years. But Ms. Sarah lived into her 90s, so people in town have much more vivid memories of her.

Either way, people remember Sarah and Charlie's kindness. He would allow the children to come over there for Christmas. He'd give everybody a child who could walk, who could crawl, who could dance, who could do anything. He'd give everybody a child a gift. He'd get all the kids on Christmas come out there, and he would have a bucket with dollar bills. I mean, maybe, I don't know, back then, probably $100. And he'd all the kids line up, and he would throw them up in the air.

Boy, we would tussle for that money. It always seemed like the Fitzgeralds had cash to spare and spread around to neighbors. And Leroy said something about that money when I first met him that stuck in the back of my mind. He told me Charlie went to New York a lot. He'd go to New York about once a month. He would go to New York. And we thought maybe Charlie was, you know.

With the big boys, you know, I'm not saying that he was, you know. Others would mention potential ties to organized crime, too. Charlie did spend time in New York, but that's about all I could verify. It was hard to find anything concrete about Charlie. I could only find two photographs of him. People that knew him told me he didn't like to get his picture taken.

In fact, there's a book about Myrtle Beach with a picture of a man labeled Charlie Fitzgerald, and it's clearly not him. For such an important figure, someone larger than life, who shaped the attitudes and culture in Myrtle Beach and beyond, This is bizarre and honestly kind of shocking. Charlie is someone everyone knew. How does that knowledge get lost? Has it been lost? It's clear Charlie was going to be hard to pin down.

Despite Ms. Sarah's help with getting to school, Ms. Pat dropped out when she was 16. She says it was because she was mad at her dad. He spent the money she'd saved for her graduation cap and gown, so she just quit and started working full-time. And there weren't many jobs Miss Pat didn't like. Cooking, slapping the hogs, but she loved working at the dry cleaners the best.

even though it paid the worst. I love to see clothes nice and fresh. And them pants creased down to the max. I love that. And for the most part, she liked taking care of the kids of white families. even though it brought her into the lion's den. There was a family in town she babysat for often. In the summer, she took the little girl to the beach. Miss Pat was careful to never let the waves lap at her feet and get her socks wet.

If she came back with wet socks, the parents would know she had touched that water and she could get fired. But Ms. Pat says they were a nice family. Nice enough. One day while babysitting... She saw something laid out on a bed. It looked like a white dress. Then she saw it had a hood. She knew exactly what it was. And you had them in the cleaners all the time because I work in the cleaners all the time.

You just go ahead and do it. You washed and ironed the white KKK suit? Uh-huh. Although her friends and family had a good life on the hill, They knew that the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere. White-clad ghosts that threatened all their lives. And here it was again, in the house of the white family she babysat for. A KKK robe. As she looked at the Klan uniform laid out on the bed, the little girl she was watching churned and threatened her. She said,

If you don't do what I tell you to do, my daddy will put this back on and he'll do you like he did Mr. Charlie. And I just let it go.

Coming up on Charlie's Place... It is a feeling that says, you belong. This is home. The slop. And then there was the bump. Boogie, boogie. Yeah, I did the shag. That was the main thing. Charlie was an example of power. No one told him what to do. What he wanted to do, that's what he did.

When you come in here and stir up trouble, they're going to be trouble. When you think somebody making more money than you make, they're going to stir up trouble. We was intrigued and in the woods on Carver Street waiting on them to come. Baby, say, when we spawn out in the morning, hear your babies. Yeah, come on and love me, baby. If you'll always eat me that way, yeah.

Charlie's Place is a production of Atlas Obscura and Rococo Punch in partnership with Pushkin Industries and presented by Visit Myrtle Beach. It's written and produced by Emily Foreman. Our story editor is Erica Lance. Our team at Atlas Obscura is Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Johanna Mayer, Linda Lobel, and Emily Yates. You can follow us on Instagram at Atlas Obscura.

Please head to charliesplaceshow.com for more information about the locations mentioned in the series and how you can visit yourself. I'm Reem Giese. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this preview of Charlie's Place. Find Charlie's Place wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want the full story right now, you can binge Charlie's Place ad-free with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Sign up on the Charlie's Place Apple Show page. or at pushkin.fm slash plus.