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COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - This week on Awareness, I take you to my hometown of Clarendon County where there is a plan to restore and reopen Pleasant Grove School, the first public school for Black students in the county.

Alcolu, a rural unincorporated community in Clarendon County that sits about nine miles outside of Manning is home to the county’s first public school for Black students.

Pleasant Grove was constructed in 1933 and included four classrooms and a kitchen and was listed as a destination in the “Negro Motorist Green Book”.

That was an annual guidebook for Black Families which identified services and places where they could find lodging, businesses, and gas stations that would serve them as they traveled around the country.

Inside the school, was a safe haven for little Black boys and girls but on the outside, a different story.

“As we walked to school, white buses, people driving the white buses, people were calling us n****, throwing rocks, throwing apples, everything at us,” said 86-year-old Raymond Evans. Evans attended Pleasant Grove in 1946.

“That was norm for us because our parents tell us, not to get involved or talk back, or anything like that or fight them or anything like that. That road right there was a highway, not too many people traveled except white people who had cars and when we had entertainment here at nighttime and we were late going home, when the car passed, we had to slide into the ditch until the car passed us because we didn’t know who was in the car to harm us,” Evans said.

In 1953, Pleasant Grove closed during the state’s equalization program, an attempt to create “separate but equal” schools, a statewide effort to maintain segregated public schools.

At the time new schools were being built for Black students while reducing the number of smaller rural schools.

This closing of Pleasant Grove happened a year after the Supreme Court heard the Briggs versus Elliott Case.

The case originated in Summerton, also a small town in Clarendon County, and was the first of five cases combined into Brown V. Board of Education.

Brown was the landmark decision that struck down segregation in public schools nationwide.

Evans says while he’s thankful changes were made, nearly 80 years later the wounds of racism and segregation remain fresh.

“It hurt me, the things I went through here. I could’ve did much better if I had the proper education from here and all the things that I went through. It hurts just to think back on it, Evans said.

There is now an effort to reopen Pleasant Grove School as a multipurpose center. If you are interested in helping rebuild the school or donating funds and or supply, contact Raymond Evans at 860- 917- 1675 or via e-mail at Rjevans34@aol.com.

WIS Awareness 10 Sunday mornings at 11 a.m.

There is an effort to restore and reopen Clarendon County’s first public school for Black students as a multipurpose center in the next three to four years.

Pleasant Grove opened in 1933 in Alcolu and for 20 years was the only place where Black students could legally go to school in the rural community due to Jim Crow Laws of the South.

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