Here’s a story about a high school principal, a head basketball coach, a mathematics teacher, an adjunct instructor at various universities, a multibusy volunteer and a longtime member of a local city council. This story is about one man.
Harvey Choplin continues packing a lot into his so-far 74 years, even after he technically retired in 2003. Retired from what, exactly? Well, from all of the above, which he was at times doing all at once— though he’s still not really retired.
“Black history should be history all year long. I feel like I am more than just a month, and I tell my students that at Furman … when they’re out there student-teaching. I tell them: Just keep in mind that Black history, Asian history or whatever history you’re doing, is more than just a month or week.” -Harvey Choplin
“I’m not a person who likes to sit down,” Choplin says over a mug of hot chocolate at Bridge City Coffee in Travelers Rest, where he served on City Council for 29 years, starting in 1981.
At the time, Choplin was also principal at Travelers Rest High School, the capstone of his 30-year career with Greenville County Schools.
At TRHS, he taught math, then served as assistant principal and then as the school’s first Black principal starting in 1995. And he was the Devildogs’ head basketball coach and athletic director.
Then came politics. He ran for TR City Council after he’d run into then-Mayor Murray Garrett one day.
Of Garrett, Choplin recalls, “He was very interested in trying to find a way — at a slow pace obviously — to get an identity for Travelers Rest, so I wanted to be a part of that.”
In 2018, Brandy Amidon became TR’s first female mayor, and at 27, its youngest. Choplin had once been her principal … and would become mayor pro-tem.
“Harvey has this problem: this thing where he does a good job and then people beg him to stick around,” she says with an affectionate laugh as she joins Choplin at the coffee shop.
Years before that — and until the Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail began in 2015 to unleash what would become the northern Greenville County hamlet’s tectonic transformation — Walmart’s arrival in the 1990s posed one of the biggest issues.
Choplin remembers getting an earful about that when he was gathering campaign petition signatures for another run at a four-year term. The supercenter had opened the year after he won another of the eight council seats, all non-partisan.
“‘I can’t do anything about Walmart, Walmart’s here,’” he says he told constituents at the time. “‘What I can do is make sure that the citizens of Travelers Rest get everything that Walmart said that they were going to do for the city.’”
He also got a bit of an earful about his race.
“It was tough,” he recalls of the early 1980s. “I’ll tell you some of the comments that have been made to me: they say, ‘Harvey Choplin is a good person; we like him — this, that and the other — the only downfall is he’s Black.’”
Even so, Amidon says she has always seen the always affable Choplin as always unflappable.
“In politics, things get a little wild — you’re talking about peoples’ space and homes — but he has always been such a stable force to be reckoned with,” she says.
Asked about what he sees as his single biggest accomplishment over all these years in all his various roles, he says, “I don’t think there’s any one particular thing. The thing that I like most — I felt like I was able to talk to the people, period. Listen to their concerns, no matter what they were, good, bad and evil.”
That goes for the personal challenges he faced as one of fewer than five African American councilmen (so far) in a city of some 7,700 people, of whom 10% are Black.
“You had people in the Black community who sometimes thought you were too white and then sometimes you had the white community that thought you were too Black, and so you had to find that balance,” he says. “I guess that’s one thing I was kind of proud of, I was able to find that balance.”
More about Harvey Choplin
The son of a construction worker, Eugene, and housewife, Carrie, Harvey Choplin grew up in Pageland, South Carolina, a Chesterfield County town of roughly 2,500 residents about 45 miles from Charlotte.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1971 from Claflin University, an HBCU in Orangeburg, where he met his wife, Vivian.
Married 52 years, the couple has two children: Reggie, athletic director and head basketball coach at Wade Hampton High School, where Harvey attends home games when the Devildogs are away; and Monica, a social worker at Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System. Both of his adult children have master’s degrees.
He earned his master of arts in education in 1974 from Furman University and a “master’s plus 30 hours” — an advanced certificate — from Furman and Clemson universities in 1990.
He served on Travelers Rest City Council from 1981 to 1997; in 2004 to fill an empty seat; and then for 12 more years until retiring from the council in 2021. He served under four mayors.
He has supervised student teachers at Southern Wesleyan and Lander University and serves as an adjunct teacher at Furman University.
He has taught at and served as academic coordinator at Sevier Middle School, where he is known as “Pa Pa Chop.” He was named one of three Teachers of the Year there in 2008-’09.
Sources: Travelers Rest High School’s newspaper, The Blue & Gold and Travelers Rest Tribune
A few among numerous awards and accolades
Bridges to a Brighter Future, a Furman University program for Greenville County college and high school students, honored him with a Bridge Builders Award in 2015.
Here’s a video of Choplin receiving the Hero Next Door Award from Greenville Forward.
The city of Travelers Rest bestowed him the Citizen of the Year Award in 2018.
