civil rights
South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America
Since its founding in 1896, South Carolina State University has provided vocational, undergraduate, and graduate education for generations of African Americans. Now the state’s flagship historically black university, it achieved this recognition after decades of struggling...
50 Years Later, Congressman Clyburn Reflects on King’s Visits to South Carolina
On July 30, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in South Carolina. He had tea at Septima Clark’s house in Charleston and later that day spoke at a meeting at the old county hall building on King Street. It would be his last visit to the Palmetto state. Nine months later,...
Black South Carolinians in World War I
Upon the United States' entrance into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson told the nation that the war was being fought to "make the world safe for democracy." For many African-American South Carolinians, the chance to fight in this war was a way to prove their...
The Orangeburg Massacre 50 Years On
On Feb 8, 1968, three South Carolina State College students were killed and 27 others were wounded by State Highway Patrolmen. Civil rights activist Cleveland Sellers and Journalist Jack Bass reflect on the events which many consider a stain on South Carolina's reputation...
Friendship College - Jail No Bail
On January 31, 1961, ten black students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill, SC walked into McCrory's, sat at the lunch counter, and ordered hamburgers and soft drinks. They were denied service and asked to leave. After refusing to leave, the students were arrested...
The Education of Harvey Gantt
In 1960, a talented African-American student from Charleston, Harvey Gantt, graduated from high school and decided to become an architect. Clemson College was the only school in South Carolina that offered a degree in his chosen field. In January of 1963, with the help of...
Walter Scott's Family Hopes Officer Sentencing Sends a Message
It was a rare sentencing following a string of officer involved, racially charged killings across the nation. Thursday, a federal judge gave former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager 20 years behind bars for killing an unarmed man as he fled a 2015 traffic stop...
Remembering Chief Justice Ernest Finney
Justice Ernest A. Finney, Jr. , South Carolina's first Africa-American chief justice, has died Sunday, December 3, 2017. He was 86. Finney was one of just a handful of black lawyers in the state when he graduated from the South Carolina State College School of Law in 1954...
"D" is for Dixiecrats
"D" is for Dixiecrats. Dixiecrats were a political party organized in 1948 by disgruntled white Southern Democrats dismayed over their declining influence within the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats, officially known as the States' Rights Democratic Party, were...