Jim Clyburn

And when he stole that ship, that planter,

And he made a stop on his way out of the Charleston Harbor to pick up his wife and other friends and deliver that ship to the Union soldiers.

Then, within six months of having escaped from slavery, he's sitting down with the president of the United States.

In August of 1862, he escaped from slavery back in May.

In August, he was in Washington, D.C., sitting down with Abraham Lincoln, and he came back to South Carolina with authorization to recruit 5,000 African Americans to fight in the Union Army.

And so he is a genuine hero.

Then he ends up with significant wealth.

Ends up.

spending 10 years in the state legislature and 10 years in the United States Congress doing all that without ever achieving a formal education.

Now, he did hire folks to teach him because he's third-tier education.

And so I say that Robert Smalls

is the most consequential South Carolinian who ever lived.

And I had a gentleman one time, we were down in King Street, South Carolina, Martin Luther King Jr.

spoke, the first time he spoke in South Carolina after the passage of the 1965 Voter Rights Act, was in the little town of King Street down in Williamsburg County, which is in my district.

And so I was down there to speak for the 50th anniversary of his visit to King Street,

And while I was talking to the group, I reminisced a little bit about Robert Smalls having represented that same area in the United States Congress.

And how proud I was to have inherited his constituency.

Well, I said at the time that I thought that Robert Smalls was the most consequential South Carolinian who ever lived.

So I came down from the podium.

I'm walking.