Champions of Civil and Human Rights in South Carolina Volume 1: Dawn of the Movement Era, 1955 ed. by Marvin Ira Lare (review)

Champions of Civil and Human Rights in South Carolina, Volume 1: Dawn of the Movement Era, 1955–1967 is an edited collection of transcribed oral histories with people who engaged in racial and social justice movements during the mid-twentieth century in South Carolina. Edited and introduced by the Reverend Marvin Ira Lare, the book includes the transcriptions of interviews conducted by Lare and his research assistants or drawn from interviews held by archives. The first volume in a planned five-volume anthology contains thirty-five interviews, the bulk of which Lare conducted.

Overall, the volume is a welcome addition to literature on the postwar civil rights era in South Carolina. It includes interviews with well-known figures in the movement, such as James E. Clyburn, Septima Poinsette Clark, Harvey Gantt, and Cleveland Sellers, but it also provides a wealth of interviews with lesser known but significant figures. Interviews with Fred Henderson Moore, James E. Sulton Sr., and Matthew Douglas McCollom, for example, offer valuable insight into the struggle for racial justice in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in the years preceding the Orangeburg Massacre, providing critical context to a tragedy too often described as an isolated incident. Other interviews, such as one with Frederick C. James, discuss places like Sumter, where significant activism took place but which have received limited attention from scholars.

Some may quibble with Lare's periodization, an issue he acknowledges in the prologue. Scholars of the postwar freedom struggle in South Carolina recognize that organized challenges to de jure segregation in the mid-to-late 1940s are key to understanding civil rights activism in the state. Despite the volume's title, many of the interviewees provide insight into events before 1955. For example, Beatrice McKnight recalls economic reprisals directed at George A. Elmore, who challenged the white primary in South Carolina in 1947.

The book is an incredible resource for scholars studying the freedom struggle in South Carolina and educators who teach South Carolina history. If it has one shortcoming, it is that the editor does not provide much context for the interviews or biographical information about the interviewees. The volume is divided into four sections: "Following the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling: The Setting," "The Reaction of Orangeburg and South Carolina State College," "National Leaders from South Carolina," and "Spawning the Movement in South Carolina." Beyond these section titles, a brief prologue that mostly describes how the book came about, and a short appendix with some background on the geographic region and race of the interviewees, there is very little historical context to help the reader understand the circumstances surrounding each interviewee's participation in the movement. Lare writes that this is intentional, as he aims to allow the interviewees to "reveal themselves in their own words" (p. 439). He also notes that although the interviews "contain history," they are not "intended to document, describe, or interpret the events except as the persons themselves describe them" (p. 439). Some readers may find this to be a major weakness of the volume, but there is little doubt that Lare has made it easier for others to document and historicize the period with a treasure trove of new oral history interviews. At over 450 pages, the first volume of the anthology is certainly loaded with content, so much so that it may have worked better as a digital humanities project where page limits and scope are nearly inexhaustible.