Charleston

An unflinching look at the beautiful, endangered, tourist-pummeled, and history-filled port city which now finds itself at the intersection of the twin crises of climate and race.

Unknown to the happy, wealthy visitors who hop from one Michelin-starred restaurant to another on the cobblestone streets of the Charleston peninsula, or to readers of the glossy magazines in which the city is named a top destination year after year, rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storms are mere years away from rendering The Holy City uninhabitable. If this precarity is hidden, it is because the city's Black community will bear the brunt of these inequities.

As Charleston will show, the city must act quickly to right historic wrongs and reimagine the city for the future. Susan Crawford's evocative and profoundly important book will make us question whether Charleston is a bellwether for other towns and major cities along the Atlantic coast.

Charleston will chronicle a tumultuous year in the life of the city, from protests to hurricanes. We will follow Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minster with a powerful voice across the city and region-but perhaps not powerful enough to enact real change. It will follow Michelle Mapp, one of the city's Black leaders who left her nonprofit post to attend law school at the College of Charleston and hopes to revolutionize the systems around her. It will follow Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who is fighting to help her people retain their land from greedy white developers. And, finally, it will follow Jacob Lindsey, the young white city planner charged with running the city's ten-year "comprehensive strategy" efforts-a process that, considering the city's structural flaws, turns out to be far more daunting than Lindsey could have imagined.

Each of these leaders worked, in their own way, to change the city during what proved to be a pivotal year. Despite the odds they face, in the form of institutional racism and environmental chaos, these are creative, courageous individuals fighting to reform the heart of Charleston and to chart a new future for its citizens and this emblematic American city.