‘It Started Here’: A WIS Black History Month Special
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - The power of our past becomes the power of our future.
Carter G. Woodson’s vision of what has now become Black History Month is about pride, progress and celebration. It’s about sharing the truths of the many contributions of courageous Black people who helped shape our world today — even those here at home in South Carolina.
During WIS’ Black History Month Special ‘It Started Here,’ Billie Jean Shaw and Intisar Faulkner travel across the Midlands to share the stories of African-Americans who ignited the flame of change in the Civil Rights Movement.
Watch all five parts of ‘It Started Here’ below:
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune
Born in Mayesville in 1875 to former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune was the 15th of 17 children.
Bethune never imagined she’d go from picking cotton in the fields to becoming an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt and to found one of the first Black colleges in the country.
“She had $1.50 and a Bible — by most accounts — and that’s how she started, she had a vision,” Historian and Vietnam Veteran George Frierson said.
The Civil War blew a storm through the south and the reconstruction era was in full effect.
However, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t unchain former slaves from their conditions.
Bethune’s parents continued to work for their former masters hoping to buy the land one day.
“She was born free but some of her older siblings were born enslaved,” Frierson said. “She had that vision, that ‘hey, I can do better than this.’”
By the time she was 9 years old, Bethune could pick 250 pounds of cotton a day, but she dreamed of more.
“There’s a famous story about Dr. Bethune that I enjoy repeating,” Executive Director of the University of South Carolina (USC) Center of Civil Rights History and Research Dr. Bobby Donaldson said. “It’s a story where her mother was a housekeeper, a domestic at a white family’s home, and one day she took Mary with her to this home...Mary goes into a room—and she sees on a shelf, books, and she begins to look through the books very innocently.”
Bethune didn’t know one of the children in the house was watching her. The child walked over and stopped her, telling her she couldn’t read.
“That moment was an awakening that she indeed was going to read,” Donaldson said. “She indeed was going to master books, and she was going to teach others to do the same.”Bethune graduated from Barber-Scotia College in 1894 and went on to attend Dwight Moody’s Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago.
She married Albertus Bethune after a brief time back home and had a son in 1899.
The family packed their bags and moved to Palatka, Fla. where Bethune led a mission school.
Bethune and her husband separated less than 10 years later — however, she was determined to provide for her son.
“She knew that education was the path forward,” Donaldson said. “She knew that in the transition for African Americans from slavery to freedom that schools became the vehicle for transformation.”
Bethune opened the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls.
She started with six students that grew to over 30 within a year, and she was always seeking donations to keep her school operating.
“She was constantly working and perfecting her skills as a leader and an influencer, she was an influencer, in her own time,” Donaldson said. “In fact, Dr. Bethune was regularly writing newspapers, it was like she was creating her own social media outlets, so that people understood her thoughts and her abilities.”
Bethune gained support from influential corporation leaders like John D. Rockefeller and James Gamble of Proctor and Gamble.
“She would turn a dream into reality,” Donaldson said. She would take a few modest resources, just a few children, and she would build a phenomenal education institution of what we know today as Bethune Cookman College.”
The Methodist Church helped merge her school with the boys’ Cookman Institute in 1931 to form the Bethune-Cookman College where Bethune became president.
Aside from being an educator, Bethune created and led several national organizations to help and support Black women including the National Association of Colored Women, the National Youth Administration and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935.
“Mary McLeod Bethune really wanted every woman to feel as if they belonged, she belonged to some group,” Life Member of the National Council of Negro Women Carrie Sinkler-Parker said. “She did not want this thing of one organized group based on profession.”
The college had developed a four-year curriculum and achieved full college status by 1941.
World War II broke out and Bethune’s efforts expanded to Capitol Hill.
“She also had a relationship with President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and so she had access,” Frierson said.
“But, one thing she did that a lot of people don’t know about, she was the reason we got our first Black general in the Army,” Former South Carolina Rep., activist and historian James Felder said. “She went to her and said ‘Mrs. Roosevelt, this war has broken out, they’ve drafted these Black boys and city boys from the country and everywhere else, but we have no generals or admirals in the military. Talk to your husband, see what he can do.’”
In 1942, Roosevelt appointed Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. as the first black general in the military.
Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations after being appointed by Harry S. Truman in 1945.
She also regularly wrote columns for the Pittsburg Courier and the Chicago Defender.
For the remainder of her life, she continued speaking tours and appearances across the country, leaving an everlasting impact on those she met.
Briggs v. Elliott
In 1947, Levi Pearson, a farmer and father of three, became the catalyst behind the fight for equal education nationwide.
He was frustrated that in Summerton the segregated Clarendon County school district provided 30 buses for white students and none for Black children who were forced to walk to school in hot and freezing temperatures.
“White students would pass us on their bus throwing things out the bus window at us, calling us the n-word and all of that,” said petitioner Bea Rivers.
With the assistance of local civil rights leader Reverend J. A. Delaine and attorney Aarold Boulware from Sumter, Pearson — on behalf of his son — sued the district for a school bus.
“My grandfather wanted to make a change,” Levi Pearson’s granddaughter, Sandra Williams, said. “Along with my Uncle Hammett, they decided to file the Levi Pearson v. Clarendon County school board in 1948.”
The case was dismissed because the board claimed Pearson did not pay taxes in the district — a tactic used to throw the case out as Pearson did own property in the district.
“He suffered greatly. My grandmother often talked about he was denied machinery to harvest his crops, shots were fired in their home and how they pushed my aunts and uncle under the bed and how they took turns sleeping at night,” Williams said. “Several nights he slept in the woods because, if by chance, the nightriders called, they could tell him he’s not here.”
For context, Pearson told WIS “nightriders” were the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK.
NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, Rev. Delaine, along with other civil rights leaders met with families across the county who were fed up with the imbalance in education between blacks and whites which was justified under separate but equal laws.
They were done demanding equal transportation and wanted equal education as a whole.
“I was reading some history that said sometimes classrooms may have had 60 to 70 students at a time,” Williams said. “All of the toilets were outside there were not indoor toilets and every school book was a hand-me-down from the white students.”
On Nov. 11, 1949, more than 100 Black parents and their children signed what they called an equal-everything petition demanding equal access to bare necessities like textbooks and facilities.
Petitioners often met at the historic Liberty Hill AME Church in Summerton.
“I remember the day,” Beatrice Brown Rivers said. “We signed as families. The parents signed first and the children right after. Harry Briggs’ family was the first family to sign, my family was the second family to sign.”
Rivers was 13 years old when she signed the petition. She is 88 years old today.
Because the Briggs family was the first to sign the lawsuit it became known as Briggs v. R. W. Elliott, who was the head of the school board.
The petition was filed in federal court in Charleston in 1950.
In a WIS interview on Awareness in the late 1970s, Harry Briggs talked about the consequences he faced for signing the petition.
“You lost your job,” he said.
All the petitioners lost their jobs and initially lost their fight in court.
Marshall argued separate but equal was illegal.
Judge J. Waites Waring — an ally — dismissed the petition and encouraged Marshall and his team to to file a new one demanding desegregation of schools instead.
A new petition was signed in May of 1952.
Briggs v. Elliott headed to the U.S. Supreme Court becoming one of five cases from Kansas, Delaware, Virginia and Washington D.C. to fight for desegregation in schools nationwide.
Collectively, the cases were known as Brown v. Board of Education.
After years of stonewalling, appeals and dismissals the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation and separate but equal unconstitutional on May 17, 1954.
The ruling never said how integration would be enforced. That decision wouldn’t come down until a year later in 1955.
In the meantime, white community members built private schools to prevent integration.
Petitioners also continued to face backlash.
Most were forced to leave the state to make a living due to being blackballed economically.
Harry Briggs moved to Miami, Florida.
Delaine’s home was burned down. He moved to Florence County where his life was constantly threatened.
In 1955, he was was indicted for assault with a deadly weapon after defending himself against klansmen who fired shots into his home.
South Carolina’s slow response made it the last state in the nation to desegregate public schools.
Sarah Mae Flemming
In The Jim Crow era, seating on public transportation was a visible reminder of racial injustices within communities across the country.
Segregation rules on buses in Columbia meant that Black passengers could not sit in the same row as or in front of white passengers.
When it comes to movements that paved the way for desegregation, you may have heard of the Montgomery bus boycott or Rosa Parks — but what about Sarah Mae Flemming?
Flemming — one of the unsung figures in the American Civil Rights movement — was born in the small town of Eastover.
Daughter to Mack and Rosella Flemming, she was raised during the peak of the Great Depression on the family’s 188-acre farm.
Like many Blacks at the time, she was forced to drop out of school to work in order to help her family.
“She worked in Columbia for a number of years as a housekeeper and a domestic,” University of South Carolina’s Director of Center for Civil Rights History and Research Dr. Bobby Donaldson said. “She was living an average, normal life for an African American woman in the age of segregation.”
Black women in the 1950s, especially in the south, didn’t have much, if any, access to opportunities.
For those who looked for work outside the farm fields — maids, cooks and nannies was the hand that was dealt.
Flemming didn’t realize her story would showcase her to be far more than “the help.”
“Ms. Flemming’s story is not readily discoverable, in text books or monuments or in museums,” Donaldson said. “But, on Jun. 22, 1954 — she stepped into history.”
That summer morning in the famous S.C. heat, Flemming was en route to work at her job in the Five Points area of Columbia.
The first stretch of her journey took over an hour.
Once downtown, she transferred on a local city bus at the corner of Taylor and Main Streets and stood while on board.
“When the bus got to the corner of Main and Hampton, a seat became available. A seat that was close to the front of the bus,” Donaldson said. “For whatever reason that day, Ms. Flemming sat down in that seat.”
According to Donaldson, the bus driver demanded Flemming to move to the back of the bus — a demand she would refuse.
Instead, she got up with one mission: to get off the bus.
“As she’s leaving the bus, according to court testimony, she is struck in the abdomen, she is injured,” Donaldson said.
These kinds of attacks weren’t uncommon across the south on men, women and even children.
The tragic news about what Flemming encountered spread quickly across town and came to the attention of civil rights activist and matriarch Modjeska Moteith Simkins.
“Ms. Simkins put Ms. Flemming in contact with a young Jewish attorney named Philip Wittenberg, and they decided given the circumstances, they were going to press charges against the bus driver and the operators of the bus,” Donaldson said. “The operators of the bus in Columbia at the time was South Carolina electric and gas company SCE&G.”
At the time SCE&G had just become the first corporation in the state to be listed o the New York Stock Exchange.
A month after the incident, Wittenberg filed a suit on Flemming’s behalf in federal court asserting her 14th amendment rights were violated.
Friendship Nine
Throughout the south in the 1960s, segregation was the standard.
Many across the nation shared the same twisted thought — blacks and whites could not co-exist.
“You had certain places you could go, certain things you could do and couldn’t do. You had two cities, the chocolate city and the white city.” Friendship Nine member David Williamson said.
Those were the rules embedded into Williamson as a young boy growing up in Rock Hill.
“Being raised by your parents, you know they want to keep you out of trouble so they tell you the dos and the don’ts,” Williamson said.
Those dos and don’ts were not supposed to be optional.
According to the law at the time, legally black and white people were to stay separate in everything including housing, education and even lunch. But, depending on who you are, rules are meant to be broken.
“The only way you can bring about change is get out of your comfort zone and find something new,” Williamson said. “That’s how you bring about the change.”
Students from Friendship College, a private Historically Black College in Downtown Rock Hill, decided to be the change.
In February of 1960, they began protesting segregation by purposely breaking the law and sitting at whites-only lunch counters demanding service.
This was a part of a bigger movement already spreading across the south in places like Greensboro and Nashville.
”It wasn’t so much we wanted to eat there, we figured we start at the lunch counter and make that change there we can make other changes in the city,” Williamson said. “This was only the beginning of what we wanted to do.”
At the end of the fall semester in 1960, more students at Friendship College joined in on the movement, preparing to organize a sit-in in a way that had not been done before.
That’s where the Congress of Racial Equality, also known as CORE, stepped in.
“We were led by CORE. They took us through training, like you’re in a classroom and throw stuff on you and hit you. Stuff like that,” Williamson said. “If you fought back, then you got eliminated. You wouldn’t be able to come downtown and do the demonstration.”
After weeks of training, the next step was to decide when to do the protest.
According to Williamson, they took the advice of a professor and waited until they finished the semester in order to get credit.
January 31, 1961 would be the day.
The protestors — nine young brave and bold black men — John Gains, Thomas Gaither, Clarence Graham, William Massey, Willie McCleod, Robert McCullough, James Wells, Mack Workman and Williamson marched downtown to McCrory’s Five and Dime.
“You sit down like this and the lady said ‘we don’t serve you’ and before she can get finished, they pulled you off the counter and take it out,” Williamson recalled. “They will grab you like this and give you a wedgie, and he slammed me into the door.”
Right behind the men continuing to protest were a group of seven young Black women who became known as the “City Girls.” They often joined forces with civil rights protestors through out the city.
Little is known or recorded about their contributions to the sit-ins as the dominant role of men often overshadowed the women’s contributions during the movement.
The only difference that day of the sit-ins was the women were not arrested because the jail did not have a space for female inmates.
In other lunch counter protests, Black demonstrators would sit down, get arrested and then bail out of jail.
This group chose the opposite — jail over bail, birthing an entirely new movement.
At this moment, history was made in the South Carolina Civil Right’s movement and they became known as the Friendship Nine.
“This way they had to feed us, take care of us for thirty days, instead of us paying money,” Williamson explained. “It would cost the state and the county and the city money instead of us forking money over to them.”
They were only fed stale bread and water for 72 hours straight.
Their brutal jail conditions began to make national headlines with telegrams sent to President John F. Kennedy. Protestors near and far also showed up to Rock Hill.
Three days later, civil rights activist John Lewis arrived, lining the streets with Black supporters who showed up in droves at the York County prison for visitation day to see the Friendship Nine.
The Friendship Nine’s 30-day sentence was complete on Mar. 2, 1961, but the start of their new lives as Black men in the south with criminal records was just beginning.
When asked if he regretted his decision, Williamson answered with one word: “Never.”
The Present
On Jul. 13, 2022 Bethune became the first African American to be represented with a state statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol.
Summerton continues to be home of pioneers in education including South Carolina’s first Black Superintendent, Broadus O. Butler, who also served as principal of Scott’s Branch High School from 1956-1971.
Today, nationwide students of all races can learn together 70 years after the Briggs v. Elliott case.
2024 also marks the 60th anniversary of Flemming’s crusade on public transportation. Today, everyone can catch a ride and she has s permanent seat.
Now, the story of the Friendship Nine is known everywhere and told through children’s book, plays and films.
The contributions of so many courageous and determined leaders have brought us where we are today, because Black history is all of our history.
Together we can move farther and continue to be the change.
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