The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

7. Civil Rights Era

7 civil rights era South Carolina played a unique role during the civil rights era. An established statewide network of strong black leaders ultimately coalesced with a succession of progressive governors to ease the transition to a multiracial society. It took the federal courts and federal law to force change and the courage of African American citizens to bring lawsuits. Although change did not come without resistance or without sacrifice, its path met far less confrontation and violence than in the Deep South states. African Americans in South Carolina also exerted pivotal influence in events leading directly to Brown v. Board of Education. That seminal Supreme Court opinion in 1954 reversed the Court’s late-nineteenth-century “separate but equal” doctrine that underlay the social fabric of the segregated South. In addition a quest for stability among twentieth-century whites had emerged as a central theme in response to the felt memories of the Civil War’s devastation and disruptive aftermath. This provided a climate for accommodation to change. Instead of confrontation, South Carolina fought to the end in the courts but obeyed the law when it mandated change. Although the NAACP had established an urban presence in the state with branches chartered in twelve communities between 1917 and 1929, the organization had become almost defunct in Depression-era South Carolina. Only Columbia and Charleston maintained branches in 1930,and neither had active programs related to the cause of civil rights or equality. Transformation of the NAACP’s role in the state came from an unlikely source. Levi Byrd, an African American who had apprenticed and become the only skilled plumber in the Chesterfield County town of Cheraw, also had internalized a message he once saw scrawled inside a railroad car while unloading cargo as a laborer. At one end of the car was written,“What is your life?”At the other end it said,“Your life is what you make of it.” After a beating in 1933 by a group of white men, Byrd contacted the national NAACP. Despite limited formal education he maintained correspondence with the national body for years. After persistent effort he spurred the organization of a countywide NAACP branch in Cheraw. He then generated support to create in 1939 a statewide network of branches that transformed the organization. Instead of a small, urban-based unit that primarily represented the interests of black professionals, the NAACP soon evolved into a broad-based, mass organization representing the diverse interests and aspirations of the full black community in the state. From fifteen branches in 1943, the number grew to forty-nine in 1946.Membership topped ten thousand.The number of branches reached eighty-four in 1955, but two years later fell by more than fifty in response to a white backlash after Brown. A new state law prohibited teachers from belonging to the organization. The state NAACP, however, soon fully regained its vitality.1 Meanwhile state NAACP president James M. Hinton of Columbia and black newspaper editor John H. McCray of the Lighthouse and Informer, a statewide weekly that provided a thoughtful voice and detailed reporting on civil rights issues, demonstrated strong leadership. They inspired a successful equal-pay lawsuit for teachers in 1944 and three years later led what became a successful effort in the courts to end the all-white Democratic primary. McCray also played a major role in organizing the Progressive Democratic Party, a pioneering political organization for blacks then excluded from participation in the state Democratic Party; its membership also was open to whites. Beginning before and continuing throughout the civil rights era, Modjeska Monteith Simkins of Columbia served as an irascible and untiring champion of black civil rights and equality across the state. Serving as secretary in the early years of the state NAACP, she was the only woman officer. Simkins would earn the sobriquet of South Carolina’s matriarch of the civil rights movement, and her portrait now hangs in a position of honor in the State House. The strongest white leadership organization for racial change was from the South Carolina Council on Human Relations, an affiliate of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council. Director Alice Norwood Spearman, who grew up in a small-town South Carolina family with high social status, had traveled widely and possessed an indomitable spirit. She was once badly beaten in her civil rights era 87 Columbia office by an angry young...