By Mike McCombs
The Island News
Rev. Kenneth Hodges was the pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church for nearly 30 years and the owner of LyBensons’ Gallery on St. Helena Island. He was also the former State Representative for House District 121 from 2005 to 2016.
He was all of these things, but he was so much more.
Hodges died Tuesday, April 22, at 73 years old after just over a week in Beaufort Memorial Hospital. And members of the community are taking stock of just how much he meant to Beaufort.
“I admired that I kind of saw him as a Renaissance man, you know,” former Beaufort Mayor Stephen Murray said, “and that he was, you know, he was an artist. He was a business owner. He was a pastor, elected official, you know, a humanitarian. I mean, … he wore so many different hats and had such a vibrant life. You know he’ll be missed. I don’t know. It’s just sad.”
Born Feb. 11, 1952, Hodges grew up in Colleton County and graduated from Walterboro High School before heading to Atlanta where he graduated from Clark Atlanta University and earned his Master’s of Divinity at Morehouse University’s School of Religion in 1986.
Eventually he made his way to Beaufort and took the reins as Pastor of the historic Tabernacle Baptist Church.
While Tabernacle’s building had been around since the early 1800s, the church was first established in 1863 for Black worshipers. Some of it’s earliest members wrote and sent resolutions in support of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Hodges embraced its history, protecting it, nurturing it and honoring it.
Beaufort’s Robert Smalls, a state legislator, five-term congressman and a Civil War hero, is buried on Tabernacle’s grounds.
Born enslaved in Beaufort, Smalls pulled off the amazing feat of stealing a Confederate ship, sailing his family to freedom and delivering the boat to the Union on May 13, 1862. S.C. legislators approved designating May 13 as Robert Smalls Day in South Carolina and voted to erect a statue of Smalls on Statehouse grounds, the first memorial for an individual Black person at the S.C. capitol.
Hodges would say the state was behind. Tabernacle already had a bust of Smalls on its grounds.
“Tabernacle has always been associated with history and culture,” Hodges told the S.C. Daily Gazette for a story last year. “That’s just an extension of our ministry, of our service to the community.”
While pastor at Tabernacle, Hodges, Democrat, served in the S.C. House of Representatives.
It was there he fought to have the new bridge over the Combahee River on U.S. 17 named for Harriet Tubman. In June 1863, the year Tabernacle was founded, Tubman became the first women to help lead an American military operation when she assisted in the Combahee River Raid.
He succeeded.
But that wasn’t enough.
In 2016, Tabernacle raised $600,000 to fund a monument to Tubman on the Tabernacle grounds. That monument was completed and dedicated last summer.
“They could not identify with the story locally. It’s not told. It’s not in the history books,” Hodges told The Island News when asked why it took so long for Tubman’s exploits to be memorialized. “[Beaufort] is the only place this story can be told. If we didn’t tell it, it couldn’t be told. This story had to be told here.”
“He was a great religious leader as Pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church,” Beaufort Mayor Phil Cromer said. “He was kind of a voice of wisdom and reason, if you will, in the community he served as a state representative in the House. And he did a lot of work, and was devoted to the preservation and celebration of the African-American history and culture in the area. That’s seen through the efforts to honor Harriet Tubman and elevate the legacy, if you will, of the Reconstruction Era in Beaufort.”
Murray, who said Hodges encouraged him to run for office, said he wasn’t just about history, though. He was looking forward, too.
Over the years, he championed bills in the General Assembly to help support small businesses, Murray said. And during the COVID pandemic, he helped arrange tractor trailers of food boxes for those in need and called on Murray, as well as his congregation to unload, organize and deliver them.
“He was such a die-hard preservationist, but he was also in my mind a futurist and was always thinking forward,” Murray said. “So he helped convert the house at the corner of Charles Street and Craven Street … the church owned it. It was a single family residence and the church went in and cut it up into four suites. Now it’s workforce housing for four families. … But from the outside, it still looks [the same]. Other than the four mailboxes on the front porch, it still looks like a single family home.
“So he sort of proved how you could, you know, preserve a historic structure with its integrity, but also help sort of take care of the modern needs of, you know, folks who needed a place to live here at a reasonable price.”
“You could tell just how much he loved and cared for the people that live in this community,” said S.C. Rep. Shannon Erickson, who served with Hodges in the General Assembly. “He just seemed like such an amazing person. He was probably one of the most caring, deeply dedicated public servants Beaufort County has ever had.
“I mean, he didn’t care who you were, where you came from, or what your deal was. He would make time. And did. I don’t think he ever missed a meeting. At least none that I attended. He would go out of his way to be collaborative and thoughtful, really embraced the diversity of our community and our Lowcountry. And he never hesitated. This is something that I’ve learned from him. He never hesitated to celebrate even the smallest victory.”
Hodges ran for the State Senate seat of the late Sen. Clementia Pickney in 2015 after his close friend and colleague was killed in June of that year with eight of his parishioners by a shooter at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Hodges lost in a primary runoff against Margie Bright Matthews, who still holds the seat.
Though his political career ended in 2016, that didn’t mean he wasn’t active.
He wrote several opinion pieces for The Island News, advocating for the Cultural Protection Overlay (CPO) zoning on St. Helena Island and Michael Moore’s candidacy for the House of Representatives in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District.
During the 2020 election, he welcomed Texan Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate, to Tabernacle to meet with church, Black and Gullah leaders from Beaufort County.
And, in addition to pastoring the flock at Tabernacle, he continued to own and run LyBensons’ Gallery on St. Helena Island, which featured much from his own expansive photography portfolio, often focused on Civil Rights Movement figures – Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Maya Angelou — as well as Black entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr., and Dizzy Gillespie.
“He was always such a kind of a quiet, demure man, Murray said. “If you just met him, … he wasn’t very like boisterous. But then like if you asked him to give the invocation or prayer, he just had this like really commanding, deep, booming voice that would take over the room. And I always enjoyed hearing him speak and hearing him give the invocations. He just had a nice way of sort of connecting the past to modern times.”
Services
The Reverend Kenneth F. Hodges 73, of Burton, husband of Patricia Hodges, died Tuesday, April 22, 2025, at Beaufort Memorial Hospital.
A Celebration of Life Service will be held at 11 a.m., Saturday, May 3, 2025, at Tabernacle Baptist Church at 907 Craven Street in Beaufort. Burial will follow at the Samaritan Baptist Church Cemetery in Bennett’s Point, S.C..
Wake Services/Public Viewing will be from 5 to 7 p.m., Friday, May 2, 2025, at Tabernacle Baptist Church. Reflections can be made during this time. There will be no viewing after the eulogy.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the Harriet Tubman Monument Fund c/o Tabernacle Baptist Church, P.O. Box 1564, Beaufort, S.C. 29901.
Mike McCombs is the Editor of The Island News and can be reached at TheIslandNews@gmail.com.
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