When U.S. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) gathers in August with hundreds of supporters and well-wishers in South Carolina for his annual Rudolph Canzater Memorial Golf Classic, the highlight of the event will not be golf.
The focus of the two-day gathering in Santee, S.C., is a dinner at which Clyburn honors the more than 100 winners of a $1,000 Canzater Scholarship to college students from his congressional district. The money raised for the needs-based Canzater Scholarship (named for a late close friend and Clyburn campaign volunteer who had a passion for education and helping young people) helps determine whether a disadvantaged student will get to go to college this fall.
“It’s a weekend about more than golf,” says Clyburn, a nine-term Democratic congressman for the 6th Congressional District in South Carolina. In an interview, he recently reflected on the impact of the tournament, first held nearly 25 years ago as the Palmetto Issues Conference Classic, with 12 participants who raised enough to offer four $500 scholarships.
Now, “it’s a big economic engine for the whole area,” Clyburn says, and it includes a free health fair for residents of his district, one of the poorest and least healthy in the nation. Created in 1992 under the federal Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voter strength in this once majority-Black state and other mostly Southern states, the district also includes a largely rural, 200-mile stretch along Interstate 95 that’s widely known as the “Corridor of Shame” because of historically high rates of poverty, lack of employment opportunities and substandard schools.
The $1,000 scholarships, often matched by the students’ selected schools, can be used to attend any college in the country, although many attend schools in Clyburn’s congressional district—home to most of South Carolina’s HBCUs. Each Canzater recipient also gets a new Dell laptop and a Microsoft software package, according to the James E. Clyburn Research and Scholarship Foundation, organizer of the golf tournament and administrator of the scholarship program.
“What he’s doing is simply giving back and helping,” says Dr. Henry Tisdale, president of Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C. Clyburn has been “a real advocate for the people of South Carolina. He has helped us understand the availability of resources and how to get resources.”
Elected to Congress in 1992 after a nearly 20-year stint as an appointed state official, Clyburn worked his way through the Democratic Party ranks to become House majority whip in November 2006. In the third-highest position in the U.S. House of Representatives behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, it is Clyburn’s job to line up votes—through arm-twisting, deal-cutting and brokering—in support of legislation proposed by the president.
