Before the Civil War, nearly all African Americans in Clarendon County were enslaved, prohibited by law from learning to read and write. The Civil War, and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, brought freedom and citizenship to thousands of African Americans in the county, many of whom sought education. Northern missionaries, the United States Freedmen’s Bureau, and eventually the state of South Carolina established schools for African Americans. The state’s 1868 constitution mandated free public education for both Black and white students.
“All the public schools, colleges, and universities of this State supported in whole or in part by the public funds, shall be free and open to all the children and youths of the State, without regard to race or color.”
Constitution of the State of South Carolina, adopted March 17, 1868
However, in 1895, the state of South Carolina adopted another new constitution. It removed many Reconstruction-era legal protections and established property ownership, poll taxes, and literacy tests as requirements for voting. While the state still had to provide free public schools for all students in South Carolina, it required them to be separated by race. The next year, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal, if things were “separate but equal.” This allowed states across the country, including South Carolina, to pass laws requiring separation by race.
Educational Disparities
Courtesy of South Carolina Department of Archives and History
In South Carolina, by 1910, state spending on education for African American children was one-fifth the spending for white children. As a result, schools across the state were deeply unequal. While state and local funds paid for new school buildings, supplies, and higher paid teachers for white students, many African American communities had to pay for their own school buildings and supplies. African American teachers were also paid less than white teachers and had fewer opportunities to continue their education. On average, schools for African American students were open 42 days fewer than their counterparts for white students.
Educational Inequalities In
South Carolina
In 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) produced a film showing these unequal schools. Houston, education scholars, and film crews traveled across South Carolina, recording the conditions in Black schools. The documentary shows how many African American schools lacked things like running water and electricity in buildings that were often in disrepair.
Black South Carolinians pushed for students to receive fair treatment. African Americans formed branches of the NAACP in Charleston and Columbia in 1917. However, smaller communities faced challenges in sustaining their branches, and by the late 1930s, the organization was in decline across South Carolina. In 1939, Levi Byrd, a plumber from Cheraw, spearheaded the creation of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, leading to an increase in the number of branches and their activity.
Courtesy of John H. McCray Papers, South Caroliniana Library
“Levi G. Byrd Was 10 Feet Tall”
Levi Byrd Informs John McCray of a Successful Voter Registration Drive
In 1943, Charleston teachers and the NAACP sued Charleston schools for paying African American teachers significantly less than white teachers. Black teachers in Columbia did the same two years later. In both cases, Duvall v. Seignous and Thompson v. Gibbes, the teachers won, and South Carolina implemented a new teacher pay schedule based on exam results, which many feared would still discriminate against Black teachers.
In 1946, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the state of South Carolina on behalf of John Wrighten, an African American applicant denied admission to the University of South Carolina School of Law because of his race. Judge J. Waties Waring, the same judge who had ruled on the teacher salary cases, gave South Carolina three options:
- allow Black students to attend the University of South Carolina School of Law,
- open an equivalent law school for African Americans, or
- close the University’s law school.
In response, the state hastily established a separate law school for Black students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg to preserve segregation.
“Holders of the Torch of Freedom and Desegregation Pioneers”
The 25th Annual Conference of the South Carolina NAACP honored trailblazers in the Civil Rights Movement, who they called “Holders of the Torch of Freedom and Desegregation Pioneers,” including:
- Viola Duvall Stewart, lead plaintiff in Duvall v. Seignous (1944), the teacher salary equalization case in Charleston,
- John H. Wrighten III, whose lawsuit against segregation at USC led to the establishment of a law school at South Carolina State College in 1946, and
- Albert N. Thompson, lead plaintiff in Thompson v. Gibbes (1945), the teacher salary equalization case in Columbia.
Clarendon County
Courtesy of Library of Congress
Despite the success of the NAACP on the state level and in cities, Clarendon County seemed an unlikely place for a major civil rights victory to begin. During the first half of the twentieth century, the population grew very little. The county seat of Manning had a population of under 3,000 people; Summerton was about half its size. African Americans made up seventy percent of Clarendon County’s residents, but white people owned 85 percent of the land. Most African Americans worked as tenant farmers, growing cotton. Two-thirds of the African Americans in Clarendon County had a yearly income of less than $1,000.
As part of efforts to bring electricity to rural communities, the Santee River was dammed in the 1940s, creating Lake Marion. In the process, thousands of people were forced to leave the area, many of them African American tenant farmers. Soon, their homes and farms would be underwater. While the lake provided new recreational opportunities to tourists, it brought little of the economic growth that local communities hoped it would. In communities like Jordan and Davis Station, the dam caused creeks to flood for much of the year, making walking the miles required to get to school difficult or impossible.
