When a high-level official of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of South Carolina complained that a downtown hotel had discriminated against him, Mayor Joseph Riley offered a swift public apology.
Riley has spent nearly 40 years as mayor of this historic city, building bridges between black and white. He was not going to let progress slip away. Bishop Richard F. Norris said he had been told to vacate his room in the middle of the night -- treatment he might have expected in the 1960s, not in 2013.
“I could not have that for my city, have him feeling that way here,” Riley, 72, said in an interview this week.