This week we'll be talking with Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs about his latest novel, Bloody Newton: The Town from Hell (2024, Psicom Publishing), his journey from a childhood in the Pee Dee, his life in Santa Fe, New Mexico,and his career as a celebrated author of Western fiction. Bloody Newton has just won for Johnny his tenth Spur Award from The Western Writers of America.

This week we going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. That’s the title of our sister podcast and the title tells you all you need to know about what that podcast does: Letter by letter Walter goes through the South Carolina Encyclopedia, giving you bite-sized takes on the history of the Palmetto State. The challenge he faces for each episode is that it is only one minute long - 145 to 149 words of text to cover the topic.

On today's Journal Walter and Alfred are taking five topics from past editions of South Carolina from A to Z and are discussing each at lenght, giving some of these people and events from our state's history room to "breathe."

This week author and journalist Carolyn Click joins us to talk about her new book, The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot (2025, USC Press). Elmore's story is that of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. He volunteered to become the plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit that successfully challenged the all-white Democratic primary in South Carolina in 1946.

Carolyn centers her story on Elmore, his family, his neighbors, and the activists and lawyers who filed the suit. Although Elmore's court challenge would prove successful, he and his family paid a steep personal price.