Beloved. Notorious. Defiant. Folk hero. These are just a few ways to describe Charlie Fitzgerald, the entrepreneur who owned an integrated nightclub during Jim Crow in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. What happened in Myrtle Beach at Charlie’s Place would come to define a community and generations to come. This is the almost forgotten history of Charlie’s Place.

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“Myrtle Beach was a good place, if you stay in your place, I’ll put it like that.”

At the height of segregation, when everywhere else was divided. Black and white people danced together to the biggest R&B acts of the time at Charlie’s Place. How was this possible? And who was the mythic proprietor of this mythic space?

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“All the dancers wanted that black music. Why? Because it had a danceable backbeat.”

Dance at Charlie’s Place wasn’t just dance; it captured the spirit of an era defined by both segregation and creativity. When white audiences arrived for the music, these moments sparked shifts that transformed Myrtle Beach and resonated far beyond its borders.

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“He helped people. He loaned people. He wasn't to be trifled with”

Charlie Fitzgerald built multiple businesses across Myrtle Beach – the hotel, the club, the cab company, the high-stakes poker game – and loaned money to white folks in town to bend the rules in his favor. How long would this last before Charlie became a target?

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“And in the minds of many, Charlie Fitzgerald's dance hall becomes the worst fears of the champions of white supremacy.”

There’s much mystery surrounding Charlie Fitzgerald and who he was before Myrtle Beach. Before he was Charlie Fitzgerald he was Lucious Rucker. So who is Lucious Rucker?

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“You know, that incident was what many of us consider the ugliest black molar in our local history. It was just pure evil and ugly.”

August 26th, 1950 was the night that changed Myrtle Beach. It changed Charlie and the impact reverberated throughout the south.

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Here’s a preview of a new Pushkin podcast, The Chinatown Sting.

In the late 1980s, a group of women connected through the mahjong parlors in Manhattan’s Chinatown were caught in a massive undercover drug bust. But this bust was just the beginning of an even bigger case. Host Lidia Jean Kott and co-reporter Shuyu Wang interview sources who’ve never spoken on record before, including witnesses, defendants, and federal prosecutors, to reconstruct a case that still has repercussions today. In this episode, we meet Tina Wong, a young mother who found herself in the middle of the operation with two choices—go to prison, or risk her life to bring down the man at the helm.

Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get podcasts and binge the entire season, ad-free, with a Pushkin+ subscription—sign up on The Chinatown Sting Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

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