Leaders had pivotal roles in civil rights

Today, the patch of green in the middle of Ashley Avenue at Fishburne Street is hardly noticed by drivers and pedestrians. Few are familiar with the story of the "Hanging Tree," the place where Denmark Vesey likely was executed in 1822 for his role in an interrupted slave revolt.

The tree, a symbol of violence and oppression, refers to the politics of fear, a certain "way of life" in the South that demanded a uniquely American response. That response culminated with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s with Martin Luther King Jr.'s eloquent appeals for justice.

King is the best-known figure of the movement, and Alabama and Mississippi, where most of the brutal violence and oppression occurred, attract much of the popular and scholarly focus. But South Carolina, too, contributed to the fight for civil rights in many ways, producing leaders who made a lasting impact, many of whom remain active today.

S.C. currents

This history is conveyed in "The Palmetto State" by Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole, and attentively documented in

"Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina During the Twentieth Century," edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton and published in 2008 by the University of South Carolina Press.

"Waters" is a collection of papers and presentations offered at a 2003 academic conference hosted by The Citadel. It describes how the shag in Myrtle Beach prompted a spontaneous assembly of the races, which, in turn, caused the Ku Klux Klan to react, burning down a famous dance hall and ending the early experiment in integration.

It also tells some of the brutal history of lynching in the state, how South Carolina's coastal plain during the first decade of the 20th century was where 60 percent of all lynchings from 1881 to 1940 occurred.

Black resistance, then, from Vesey to Cleveland Sellers, can be traced in South Carolina. For blacks, it was a simple question of life and death.

There was the breach of justice in Aiken known as the Lowman lynchings of 1926, in which members of the Lowman family were brutally killed by police, and the 1947 vigilante mob killing of Willie Earle, who was dragged from his Pickens prison cell, beaten, stabbed and shot.

Consider the work of Levi G. Byrd, a plumber living in Cheraw who first founded a new branch of the NAACP in the 1930s and then revitalized the organization throughout the state, setting the stage for strong statewide advocacy and influence in the years that followed.

And remember the Briggs v. Elliott school segregation case. It was the first legal action taken against school segregation in the nation and one of five lawsuits that eventually was made part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. It could not have been possible -- and by extension, nor could have Brown v. Board -- if not for the courage of the Rev. Joseph Armstrong De Laine of Clarendon County.

The Briggs case

In the early 1950s, "Rural Clarendon County was among the poorest counties in South Carolina, which made it among the most underdeveloped in the United States," wrote Orville Vernon Burton, Beatrice Burton and Simon Appleford in their essay, "Seeds in Unlikely Soil," which appears in "Toward the Meeting of the Waters."

"African Americans comprised roughly 70 percent of the population, and most worked on land almost 85 percent of which was owned by whites," they wrote. "The segregated public schools of Clarendon County had an enrollment of 6,531 African American and 2,375 white students in 1951. Yet total expenditures for white students exceeded that for blacks by $112,379 -- some 300 percent per pupil -- leaving the African American schools in appalling conditions and lacking basic facilities."

In addition to roughshod school buildings, the lack of toilet facilities, gaping holes in the curriculum and other problems, black students were forced to walk to school, sometimes miles, sometimes carrying drinking water, while white students rode the bus.

De Laine, an Allen University graduate and Methodist minister, campaigned to end these iniquities, eventually persuading Harry and Eliza Briggs to be the first to sign a petition. The case did not challenge segregation itself, only the disparities between blacks and whites, but a white federal judge in Charleston, J. Waties Waring, known for his radical views on racial issues, "instructed (NAACP attorney Thurgood) Marshall to challenge explicitly Plessy v. Ferguson and the very institution of segregation."

Briggs v. Elliott became one of five cases in Brown v. Board, argued by Marshall before the U.S. Supreme Court. De Laine would be forced to flee South Carolina after threats to his life culminated in a drive-by shooting.

NAACP and the law

In 1954, Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins set up the first "citizenship school" to teach would-be black voters how to read. Jenkins had founded Haut Gap School on Johns Island and was a tireless advocate of civil rights.

Clark was a longtime member of the NAACP, eventually becoming vice president of the Charleston Branch. In 1956, the S.C. Legislature passed a law forbidding city or state employees from joining civil rights organizations. Clark refused to quit the NAACP and was fired from her job as a public school teacher after decades of dedicated and successful service.

In 1958, the Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman became NAACP field secretary and, later, state president. He "emerged as the organization's chief strategist and a highly skilled political negotiator," writes Bass and Poole in "The Palmetto State." He set up the NAACP Legal Committee in South Carolina, recruited Matthew J. Perry Jr. to become its chairman, played a key role in ending the state's Jim Crow laws and later became the first black state senator since Reconstruction.

Perry would go on to represent or assist thousands of black defendants during the 1960s, including, briefly, Cleveland Sellers, who was arrested on an incitement charge in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. In 1979, Perry would be appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the bench of the U.S. District Court. Today, he remains an active judge with a courthouse in Columbia named after him.

In 1963, the year of the March on Washington, Clemson University was integrated after a three year-effort by Harvey Gantt and his attorneys, Perry and Willie T. Smith Jr. Gantt, born and raised in Charleston, would go on to serve as mayor of Charlotte 1983-87. He ran for U.S. Senate against Jesse Helms, twice, and lost. Today, he is a practicing architect in Charlotte who remains active in politics. His daughter, Sonja Gantt, is a television news anchor.

Luminaries

The Rev. McKinley Washington Jr. , a Presbyterian pastor who in the 1960s signed up black residents on Edisto Island to vote and founded the NAACP branch there, became a member of the General Assembly, where he served from 1975-2000. Today, he is serving his second term with the S.C. Employment Security Commission and preaching at his Edisto church.

Lucille Whipper, another trailblazer, applied to the College of Charleston in the 1940s to try to change its policy of segregation. In response, the public college went private, allowing it to maintain the status quo.

Whipper breathed life into what was the Avery Normal School, organizing the Avery Institute of African-American History and Culture, which later became the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston, and went on to become a powerful voice in the state's General Assembly from 1985-95.

Today, she enjoys her status as the Whipper family matriarch. Her son, Seth, is serving in the state Legislature.

Christine Jackson, first cousin of Coretta Scott King, initially worked as a home economics teacher with the Clemson University Extension Service after she moved to Charleston in 1963.

When the directorship at the YWCA of Greater Charleston became available in 1966, she took charge, and over the course of 36 years, desegregated the institution and assumed a leadership role in promoting civil rights for blacks and women.

Last week, Jackson received a special King Picture Award for lifetime service from the YWCA of Greater Charleston.

The strike

A pivotal moment in the state's history came in 1969, when hospital workers in Charleston went on strike to demand union representation. For strikers, fair labor treatment and basic civil rights were inextricably linked, according to "The Palmetto State."

Tensions in the city increased. Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King, one year after her husband's assassination, led a huge downtown march. About 900 were arrested during the turmoil, and 5,000 National Guard troops were called into the city.

Bill Saunders, a militant leader groomed by Jenkins, negotiated directly with Gov. Robert E. McNair, who a little more than one year earlier had ordered state troopers to rein in protesting blacks on the campus of S.C. State College in an episode that would end tragically with three dead and 28 injured.

"In the end, a crucial call came to the governor's office from White House aide Harry Dent, former top staffer for Senator (Strom) Thurmond," Bass and Poole wrote. "His message amounted to an ultimatum from the White House: get the strike settled."

The Medical College Hospital backed down. Mary Moultrie and other workers celebrated.

Instrumental in negotiating a final settlement were a young James Clyburn, a schoolteacher and director of the S.C. Commission of Farm Workers, and Robert Ford, an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Today, Clyburn is the third most powerful congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives; Ford is a longtime state senator and candidate for governor; and Saunders, who spent 10 years on the Public Service Commission from 1994-2004, serving the 1st District, continues to run the North Charleston-based Committee for Better Racial Assurance (COBRA). Bass is working on a new book.

Anthems to change

No survey of South Carolina's contributions to the civil rights movement should fail to acknowledge the careful manner in which three governors -- Fritz Hollings, McNair and John West -- moved the state in midcentury from hostile defiance to moderation.

Or the dynamic leadership of Jesse Jackson, born in Greenville, who one day would run for president of the United States and have his campaign managed by Sellers, the Denmark native and organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who was shot and arrested during the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers serves today as president of Voorhees College.

Or Reuben Greenberg, Charleston's first black police chief who was hired by Mayor Joe Riley in part to help defuse racial tensions in the city.

Or the contemporary leadership of the Rev. Joseph Darby, a Columbia native and pastor of Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston.

And there are the many whites who have advocated for change: Judge Waring, filmmaker Charles Traynor (Bud) Ferillo, author Bass -- to name just three. Ferillo has received the 2010 Harvey Gantt Triumph Award from the YWCA of Greater Charleston in recognition for his film, "Corridor of Shame," which drew attention to the poor condition of rural schools in the state.

South Carolina even contributed a little music to the movement. In 1960, folklorist and musician Guy Carawan, visiting Johns Island, first heard the song "We Shall Overcome," which had been sung by striking workers 15 years earlier at the cigar plant in Charleston.

After Carawan became music director at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the song -- and others he first heard on Johns Island, such as "Eyes on the Prize" and "Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life" -- became anthems of the civil rights movement.

Finally, there was one man in particular who worked harder than most to create a visual document of the movement in South Carolina: photographer Cecil J. Williams. He was there to capture Marshall stepping off the train in Charleston. He was there to photograph episodes at S.C. State. He committed images of Gantt to posterity. He photographed those who participated in the sit-ins and freedom rides. And he shot a priceless portrait of the plaintiffs in Briggs v. Elliott, among many other achievements.

Thanks to Williams, students of history can see what the civil rights movement looked like in South Carolina. Williams captured the pride of the people, the undying human wish, sometimes hard to fulfill, for a better life.

Reach Adam Parker at 937-5902.