health insurance agent in Charleston, SC

A long-held tradition since 1866, the annual celebration of Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021 by President Joe Biden. This year, Charleston can expect plenty of fun and educational regional events highlighting the works of Black-owned businesses and honoring African American traditions.

Beyond Emancipation Day, communities will be excited to find that a whole week of activities has been planned by local community leaders. J19 Week returns for another year of honoring Charleston's Black voices with memorable festivities.

"This year’s fifth anniversary is more than a milestone — it’s a movement," said Latisha Manigault, cofounder of J19 Week. "We’re proud to see this celebration grow each year as more people connect with the history of Juneteenth and the beauty of the Gullah Geechee culture. J19 Week is about unity, empowerment and honoring the journey."

Vice President Sean Smith added, "This isn’t just a festival — it’s a family. Whether you’re a longtime supporter or a first-time attendee, J19 Week is where everyone can feel seen, celebrated and inspired. We invite the entire community to come out and be part of this incredible experience."

Among events, Liberty Hill will be honored with a unifying parade followed by a celebration perfect for those looking to honor Black artisans, preview some of their community's local vendors and hear from leaders in this historic African American community.

"We hope people will better understand our history and why we celebrate the significance of our freedom. And really build up a sense of hope, setting goals for our future, paying homage to our ancestors and their resilience and that sense of camaraderie that we can impart to our children," stated Hester McFadden, president of the Liberty Hill Historical and Genealogical Society.

With everything from jazz concerts to family-style cookouts, there is something for everyone to enjoy. Here's how to celebrate Juneteenth in the Lowcountry.

J.O.Y. Juneteenth on the Yard

What: Celebrate Juneteenth with your community in a space dedicated to reflection, healing and joy. Grammy-nominated artist Mumu Fresh joins other artists and storytellers in an evening of music, food and fun.

When: Noon-5 p.m. June 19

Where: International African American Museum, 14 Wharfside St., Charleston

Price: Free

More Info: tinyurl.com/3tsek3hu

MOJA x Juneteenth

What: Experience a proper block party presented by MOJA Arts Fest in celebration of Juneteenth. There will be local artisan and food vendors to peruse, live entertainment from Motown singer Charles Grant, live painting by Kolpeace, performances by the Harambee Dance Company and more.

When: 6-9 p.m. June 19

Where: Ann Street (Between King and Meeting streets)

Price: Free

More Info: tinyurl.com/5erenxnu

Jazz Under the Stars

What: Enjoy a night of tasty hors d'oeuvres and some Lowcountry tunes from featured jazz artist Marcus Johnson as well as Reggie Graves and the Theory Band.

When: 7-10 p.m. June 19

Where: The Admiral House, 1100 Navy Way, North Charleston

Price: $32-$81

More Info: tinyurl.com/2tp5nj2y

Living Legacies: A Juneteenth Commemoration

What: Magnolia hosts their upcoming Juneteenth speaker series with Polly Sheppard, a survivor of the Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting, another speaker series with author Margaret Seidler and artist John W. Jones, an interactive historic slave cabins tour and a solemn reading of the names lost to slavery at Magnolia Gardens with special a cappella performances.

When: 6 p.m. June 19-6:30 p.m. June 21

Where: Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, 3550 Ashley River Road, Charleston

Price: Free

More Info: tinyurl.com/262jxm82

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - A relatively new nonprofit is working to provide affordable housing to Lowcountry and Palmetto State adults with nowhere else to turn.

The organization Berry Manor Boarding Home specializes in both memory care and supportive housing. They provide affordable, long-term, nonmedical residential care to elderly, disabled and memory-impaired adults—including U.S. Veterans and people suffering from conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Founder Deanna Miller-Berry says what they’re doing is a completely new approach to addressing the needs of people who are falling through the gaps of the health care system. Veterans without support from Veterans Affairs and seniors with pending disability claims are at the top of her client list.

“The whole premise of our program is making sure when these families trust their loved ones to us, they know that they’re going to be loved,” Miller-Berry says. “They know they’re going to be cared for and we’re going to make sure they get the health care that they need. Between good, old-fashioned science with basic, holistic foundations of community and love, this is what we are building.”

This week, Miller-Berry and her team are opening up their eighth home, this one in North Charleston. At least six people will live in the home.

Every day, a small, but dedicated, staff will spend hours at each home, cooking meals, reminding residents to take their medications and helping them set up home health care.

Miller-Berry says communal living is the key to making this system work. Many of the seniors are on fixed incomes that are too low to afford housing, health care and necessities.

She says they provide those things, like food and beds, in a home-style setting that helps clients with memory issues connect with their environment. While they leave the actual medical care to outside nurses and doctors, Miller-Berry says having a community can work wonders on health.

“We pride ourselves on making sure that we provide an atmosphere that’s conducive for healing. We use a very holistic approach, which is old-school traditional love. Literally,” Miller-Berry says. We take the time to be able to pour into them in a way that makes them feel like they’re still a part of society and they’re still contributing to building what we call all our new community of folks.

The nonprofit is rapidly expanding with new homes popping up throughout the state all the time. Berry-Miller says she expects to go from the current eight homes to 17 homes by the end of the year.

Copyright 2025 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Top Chef contestant Shuai Wang does not think of himself as a competitive person. "I'm one of those people who thinks everyone deserves a trophy for participating," he says.

And yet, the Charleston chef did really well on the television cooking show - making it all the way to the finale.

"Prior to going on Top Chef, I felt very stuck," Wang says. He thought he'd peaked. But being in competition mode, learning from other chefs, he says, "it kind of just rejuvenated my creativity." In one episode, he cooked with ants that he'd foraged and gently toasted. They tasted like lemons, he said, "such a wonderful, zingy flavor."

When he's not off filming a reality show, Shuai Wang is usually in North Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife and business partner, Corrie Wang. The couple met working at a restaurant in New York City. They moved south 10 years ago and had a food truck before opening their first restaurant, Jackrabbit Filly, named after their zodiac signs, and then a second restaurant, King BBQ.

Catie Dull/NPR

Catie Dull/NPR

It opened a year and half ago in a building that was, at various times, an ad agency, a church and a lunch counter, says Shuai. It's a beautiful space, with lots of personal touches. A pair of lions standing guard out front and the tile ceiling were custom made and shipped from Beijing, where Shuai was born. Framed portraits of the couple's dogs line the hallway. Red Chinese tassels hang from the ceiling and the walls are painted jade green - for good fortune.

The Wangs call their menu "Chinatown BBQ made with southern smoke." It, too, is full of personal touches. Krab rangoon with buttermilk hush puppies and hot honey. Chinese BBQ egg rolls with habanero duck sauce. "I cook from nostalgia," Chef Wang says.

Catie Dull/NPR

Catie Dull/NPR

The first dish Shuai cooks for NPR rings that bell - crispy, smoked duck on top of noodles with bok choy.

"That's just my fondest memory of growing up in New York," he says, "my parents taking me to Flushing on the weekends, or late nights after work, going down to Chinatown."

Catie Dull/NPR

Catie Dull/NPR

Shuai Wang remembers that when he was a young boy in Beijing, Communist China was still handing out food rations. So his grandma, who helped raise him, had to stretch her portion of rice and allotment of lard to feed the family.

He likens it to how enslaved families in the South improvised using the scraps they were left with to make a meal.

"That's why I feel so connected with Southern food, right?" he says. "That's where collard greens came from. The field peas, the butter beans."

Wang immigrated to the United States when he was nine, where his mom took over the cooking. He calls her the "OG Top Chef." But he didn't find his own love of cooking until high school. "I had to take a culinary class in my last two years to make up credits for all the classes that I 'accidentally missed,'" he laughs.

Catie Dull/NPR

The next plate he makes - chili tofu, a take on mapo tofu - is an homage to Shuai and Corrie's relationship. "That's the first dish that Corrie and I shared on our first date," Shuai explains. "I immediately scooped it up and put it in my mouth, not thinking that it would be a million degrees. And I spat it right out onto my plate, and everywhere."

Corrie didn't leave, and that's how they knew it was meant to be. "We're both like, crying… everything's so spicy and hot," adds Corrie. "It was a great time."

Catie Dull/NPR

This version of chili tofu is done in a fancy, Hamburger Helper, Asian-Italian style, with soft tofu, a sweet, spicy, tangy chili sauce and local ground pork on a bed of pasta, topped with mozzarella cheese. Tofu and mozzarella sound a little funky? Somehow, it really works.

"I get crazy ideas," Shuai Wang says. "I have a million and one crazy ideas. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, you know?"

Catie Dull/NPR

Corrie Wang says she's seen a natural progression as they've developed the restaurants where Shuai is "just creating legit Chinese food" rather than making gimmicky dishes.

"I just realized I really just want to embrace myself and my culture and cook Chinese food," he says.

After his Top Chef stint, Shuai is taking all his crazy ideas, his heritage and a renewed spirit of adventure and creativity into the future. "I realized oh, I didn't peak," he says. "Chinese food has 500 years of history. I've explored very little of it."

MOUNT PLEASANT — The S.C. Shrimpers Association is suing the 40 unidentified Charleston-area restaurants that were recently found to be selling imported shrimp following a genetic study by a Texas-based research firm.

The federal complaint, filed June 13 on behalf of the association by attorney Gedney Howe IV, accuses the restaurants of false advertising and violating South Carolina's Unfair Trade Practices Act.

That statute states that knowingly misrepresenting food as a South Carolina-produced product is an unfair trade practice.

Joined by representatives and chefs from nearby restaurants, Howe and association leaders announced the lawsuit from the humid docks of Shem Creek.

"These boys don't want a lot. They just want to be able to work and earn a living and continue the work that their parents and grandparents that came before them did," Howe said.

The defendants, called John Doe Restaurants 1-40 in the complaint, were secretly tested by SeaD Consulting, a Texas-based research firm, in late May.

A team took small samples of cooked shrimp sold by the restaurants, some of which were labeled on menus as being wild-caught in the United States. Some locations were selected for using shrimp boats and other imagery. The 40 establishments named in the lawsuit were found to be selling imported shrimp, not U.S.-caught shrimp.

Because SeaD Consulting did not release the names of the 40 restaurants they claimed were misleading consumers on June 10, it’s unclear if all the defendants were publicly advertising local, wild-caught shrimp but serving the imported product.

A representative for SeaD Consulting said the company had not seen the lawsuit and declined to comment.

The complaint alleges that passing off imported, farm-raised shrimp as wild-caught threatens to "irreparably harm the strong reputation and customer goodwill" earned by South Carolina shrimpers.

Rocky Magwood, president of the S.C. Shrimpers Association and a fourth-generation shrimper, said he has spent his entire life fighting to keep the industry alive. He hopes the testing results, and the subsequent lawsuit, can change the tide for the dying industry.

"Now that we we have some proof ... hopefully we can get something to come out of this, because it's wrong," Magwood said. "It's been a long time coming."

The association is seeking monetary damages, an amount to be determined at trial, as well as an injunction against the 40 restaurants. The injunction would prohibit restaurants from labeling imported or farm-raised shrimp as wild-caught or local, Howe said.

Restaurant community reacts

For many, the genetic testing results published June 10 by SeaD Consulting were shocking. For others, the fact that only four of the 44 restaurants sampled served wild-caught shrimp came as no surprise.

Kerry Marhefka, a biologist and member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, suspected that if every restaurant in the tri-county area were to be tested, the ratio would be about the same.

"It's a huge problem, and it's not just shrimp," Marhefka said.

There are reasons for serving imported seafood, Marhefka said, whether it's access or cost of goods. But the issue in this case, she said, is whether some restaurateurs are lying about what's on their menus.

"Don't try to pass off to the public that it's local when it's not," Marhefka said. "The key is to be honest."

She does have one concern about the study: By not naming the supposed offenders, researchers have put the entire restaurant industry on the defensive to say they are not one of the 40, Marhefka said.

Allison Cagle, an owner of The Wreck of the Richard and Charlene restaurant off Shem Creek, said the seafood establishment tucked away on Haddrell Street in Mount Pleasant has "only ever served locally sourced shrimp right here from our South Carolina shrimpers."

"While we were very happy with the testing, finally, it was the manner in which the results were reported, I was kind of shocked," she said. "The exclusion felt purposeful, even though I'm quite sure it wasn't, but there are a lot of people in this area serving nothing but great locally-sourced shrimp."

Local purveyors like Tarvin Seafood have taken to social media to highlight the many restaurants that do serve local shrimp. Still, the news has sent waves of chatter through the dining community.

"I know a lot of restaurants here in Charleston are probably using the shrimp that are being outsourced. They get at a cheaper price, but at the end of the day, it's hurting our families that are around here," said Grant Smith, director of restaurants for Miller's All Day.

Parker Milner contributed to this report.

CHARLESTON — Fixing the structural issues that forced Dockside condominium tower residents to evacuate could cost $151 million, the building's homeowner association now estimates.

In February, some 200 residents were forced from their homes inside Charleston's tallest building — other than a church steeple — and also from the surrounding townhomes after engineers found the condo tower unsafe.

The evacuated owners are still in the process of gathering their possessions from the 19-story building, but will soon have to make a difficult decision: repair or sell.

A spokeswoman for the building's association board said all owners will first consider whether to repair the structural issues. No date has been set for holding that vote, but the spokeswoman said it would likely take place early this summer.

The costly repair bill would be apportioned across all owners. That includes not only the tower's 112 condominiums, but also the surrounding 21 townhomes, which don't have the same structural deficiencies — an argument made in a lawsuit challenging the evacuation order.

Each owner's share of the bill is based on their ownership percentage of the building, which varies condo to condo. A larger apartment might bear more than 1 percent share, meaning that owner would pay more than $1.5 million for the repairs.

Up until recently, the condos typically sold for upward of $500,000.

In some cases, the repairs could cost some owner three times what they paid for their home.

The repairs

It's unclear exactly what the $151 million projected price tag would cover.

But a March letter from the engineers hired by the condo association laid out several next steps that include installation of temporary shoring, asbestos remediation, further testing and design of the necessary retrofits.

Engineers from Wiss, Janney and Elstner, a national construction engineering firm that Dockside hired after a condo in Florida collapsed killing 98 people, found that the concrete slabs that make up Dockside's upper stories aren’t strong or thick enough to carry the weight of the building, its furnishings and residents. Any additional load could cause the building's columns to burst through the slab.

Engineers call this "punching shear failure."

Brandon E. Ross, professor at the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering at Clemson University, explained the concept in layman's terms using a pencil and a Styrofoam plate. A pencil standing vertically represents a building's columns, and the plate is the slab floor. Excessive pressure on the plate causes the pencil to punch through and the plate to collapse.

That's what happened to Champlain Towers South in Florida, according to WJE, the same firm now assessing Dockside. A primary structural element failed on the ground floor, resulting in the failure of adjoining elements that ultimately caused the eastern half of the 12-story tower to pancake.

The structural defects in Dockside stem from the building's construction more than 50 years ago, and are not the result of degradation over time.

But there are ways to address punching shear issues, Ross said.

"Basically, punching shear is all about how strong is the connection between the floors and the columns, and you need to improve that," he said. "Some ways that they can do that is go to the top of the column, right underneath the floor, and add additional structure around the column."

That could take the form of steel angles, carbon fiber wraps, or a cap or crown around the top of the column, the professor described.

"Basically, you're creating a pedestal at the top of the column for the slab to sit on," he said.

Returning to his pencil and plate analogy, he continued: "It would be like if you glued a quarter to the top of the pencil before you tried to push it through the Styrofoam. You've spread out the column. You made it bigger, so to speak, and that makes it harder for the slab to punch through. It increases the punching capacity."

According to the March letter, WJE has already designed conceptual "collars and corbels" that will serve a similar function as Ross' quarter.

In order to access the column, the existing floor and ceiling finishes must be removed from around each of Dockside's 702 columns, according to WJE. This demolition work prompts the asbestos remediation, which can be costly on its own because it requires special permitting and expertise to remove and contain the cancer-causing fibers.

This also indicates why the evacuation was necessary, aside from the concerns over safety should the building collapse. Many of the columns are inside condos where residents were living.

No timeline

There has been no timeline given for repairs.

The WJE letter said it would take nine months to a year for their engineers to preform additional testing, and that is only after temporary supports are installed and the demo is done.

No demolition or repair work is likely to start until all residents have removed their belongings. The protracted move-out, two apartments at a time, is expected to take through the end of June.

If the former residents decide not to save the harbor front property at 330 Concord Street, just south of Union Pier, they could vote to sell to a developer.

But all owners would have to agree to the sale.

Reach Ali Rockett at 843-901-1708. Follow her on Twitter @AliRockettPC.