a person · SCMaurice Bessinger

Lloyd Maurice Bessinger Sr. (July 14, 1930 – February 22, 2014) opened Maurice's Piggie Park, a drive-in, in West Columbia in 1953 with his brother Joe Jr., built it into a chain, and bottled his father's mustard sauce as Carolina Gold for supermarkets nationwide. He refused Black customers until the suit that became Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises (1968), ran for the legislature in 1964 and for governor in 1974, and raised the Confederate flag over his restaurants on July 1, 2000, the day it came off the State House dome. His children took the last flags down in 2013.

Bessinger was born on the family farm near Orangeburg on July 14, 1930, the eighth of eleven children of Joseph Jacob and Genora Thomas Bessinger, and started cooking at nine in his father's Holly Hill restaurant in 1939. He served in the Army in the Korean War, came home in 1952, and with Joe Jr. opened the first Piggie Park drive-in in West Columbia in 1953; there were four by 1964. That year Anne Newman, the wife of a Black minister, was refused entry, and Matthew J. Perry filed a class action under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Bessinger answered that his religious beliefs compelled him to oppose integration. The district court held the Act reached his sandwich shop but not the drive-ins; the Fourth Circuit reversed; and in 1968 the Supreme Court held 8–0 in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, 390 U.S. 400, that a plaintiff who wins such an injunction ordinarily recovers attorney's fees. He chaired George Wallace's 1964 campaign in the state, lost a House race that year by about a hundred votes, and took 2.5 percent in the 1974 Democratic primary for governor. By 1999 the sauce — mustard, brown sugar, soy sauce and vinegar, sold as Carolina Gold — had made his the largest barbecue business in the country. On July 1, 2000 he raised Confederate flags over them and called the flag a Christian symbol; his restaurants distributed a tract arguing that slavery is not inherently evil; Bi-Lo, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, Publix, Sam's Club, Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie dropped the sauce, and his $50 million suit against them failed at the state Supreme Court in 2007. He published an autobiography, Defending My Heritage, in 2001. He died on February 22, 2014, at eighty-three.

Dead: February 22, 2014, West Columbia, aged eighty-three. His sons Lloyd and Paul, his daughter Debbie and his grandchildren run Maurice's Piggie Park; the flags came down by 2013 and the sauce is sold as Southern Gold.