Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina

By Robert Greene II, Tyler D. Parry, Valinda W. Littlefield and Henrie Monteith Treadwell

Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Invisible No More seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Americans have shaped the development of the university. The essays in this volume span the full sweep of the university's history, from the era of slavery to Reconstruction, Civil Rights to Black Power and Black Lives Matter. This collection represents the most comprehensive examination of the long history and complex relationship between African Americans and the university.

Like the broader history of South Carolina, the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the university's history, Black students, faculty, and staff have pressured for greater equity and inclusion. At various times they did so with the support of white allies, other times in the face of massive resistance; oftentimes, there were both.

Between 1868 and 1877, the brief but extraordinary period of Reconstruction, the University of South Carolina became the only state-supported university in the former Confederacy to open its doors to students of all races. This "first desegregation," which offered a glimpse of what was possible, was dismantled and followed by nearly a century during which African American students were once again excluded from the campus. In 1963, the "second desegregation" ended that long era of exclusion but was just the beginning of a new period of activism, one that continues today. Though African Americans have become increasingly visible on campus, the goal of equity and inclusion—a greater acceptance of African American students and a true appreciation of their experiences and contributions—remains incomplete. Invisible No More represents another contribution to this long struggle.

A foreword is provided by Valinda W. Littlefield, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, research professor of community health and preventative medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and one of the three African American students who desegregated the university in 1963, provides an afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362557

Book preview

INVISIBLE NO MORE

INVISIBLE NO MORE

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

EDITED BY

Robert Greene II and Tyler D. Parry

Foreword by Valinda W. Littlefield

Afterword by Henrie Monteith Treadwell

© 2021 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22  21

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-253-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-254-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-255-7 (ebook)

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the University of South Carolina Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Front cover photographs: Richard T. Greener by Jon Hair, photograph by Ehren Foley; and the South Caroliniana Library, the University of South Carolina, Columbia, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Design by Emily Weigel

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Valinda W. Littlefield

Introduction

Chapter One

Slavery on Campus: Examining the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People at South Carolina College

Graham Duncan

Chapter Two

Irrespective of Race or Color: Examining Desegregation at the Reconstructed University of South Carolina, 1868–1877

Tyler D. Parry

Chapter Three

Richard T. Greener at the Reconstruction-Era University: Professor, Librarian, and Student

Christian K. Anderson & Jason C. Darby

Chapter Four

Laying the Mountains Low: The Life and Education of Simon Peter Smith, 1845–1914

Evan A. Kutzler

Chapter Five

Struggle for Educational Access in South Carolina, 1865–1890

Brian A. Robinson

Chapter Six

Before 1963: Race, Education, and the NAACP Desegregation Campaigns at the University of South Carolina

Robert Greene II

Chapter Seven

The Legacy of Desegregation: USC and Its Changing Campus and Student Body since the 1960s

Marcia G. Synnott

Chapter Eight

Peace, Love, Education, and Liberation: The Black Campus Movement at the University of South Carolina

Ramon M. Jackson

Chapter Nine

What’s Next, Southern Fried Chicken? Confederate Memory and Racial Violence at the Postintegration University

Holly Genovese

Chapter Ten

The Right Time: Performing Public History at the University of South Carolina, 2010–2020

Katharine Thompson Allen & Lydia Mattice Brandt

Conclusion

Afterword

Henrie Monteith Treadwell

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Bird’s Eye View of Columbia (1872)

Map of Horseshoe, University of South Carolina (1884)

William H. Heard (1910)

Graduates of the State Normal School for Teachers (1874)

Celia Dial Saxon

Portrait of Richard T. Greener

University of South Carolina Library (1875)

Richard T. Greener’s 1876 Law School Diploma

Robert G. Anderson, Henrie Monteith Treadwell, and James L. Solomon at the University of South Carolina after registering for classes (1963)

Harry Walker Campaign poster, Let’s Get Things Together

Harry Walker, USC student body president (1971)

Marker recognizing slavery on the Horseshoe, University of South Carolina

Sculpture of Richard T. Greener, University of South Carolina

Acknowledgments

The work of an edited volume is a collaborative project, which in many ways is a welcome departure from the traditionally solitary nature of historical work. Many hands have lifted this effort, and we are deeply grateful to acknowledge those who believed in this volume and brought it to fruition. Nearly one decade ago we each received a message from Valinda W. Littlefield, then Director of the University of South Carolina’s African American Studies Program, about an endeavor to commemorate the university’s two desegregations in 1873 and 1963. Alongside many others, including many contributors to this volume, Val oversaw a yearlong endeavor to commemorate the remarkable achievements and contributions of Black people on USC’s campus.

Such events were made possible by the support of many faculty, administrators, students, and community leaders in both the university and Columbia community. We give special thanks to Harris Pastides, Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Nikky Finney, Steve Benjamin, Chanal McCain, Tamerra McCrea, and Sean Pitt. We also gratefully thank each of our wonderful contributors, Brian Robinson, Ramon M. Jackson, Holly Genovese, Katharine Thompson Allen, Lydia Mattice Brandt, Evan A. Kutzler, Graham Duncan, Jason C. Darby, Marcia G. Synnott, and Christian Anderson, for offering their compelling work to this collection. Without their collective work, this volume would simply not exist.

Robert Greene individually recognizes several people at the University of South Carolina who shaped his academic career for the better. Marjorie Spruill, Greene’s dissertation advisor, became a mentor for him as he delved deeper into the history of southern politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. Bobby Donaldson taught him what it meant to be a true public-facing historian, always giving back to the broader community that shaped him as a historian, a citizen, and as a human being. Friends and colleagues Jennifer Taylor, Candace Cunningham, Ramon M. Jackson, Brian Robinson, and Randy Owens all served as bedrocks during his time in graduate school. Jennifer Gunter has been his closest friend and confidant during and after graduate school at South Carolina. Also, Robert thanks his colleagues at Claflin University, especially those in the Department of Humanities, who have supported him during this endeavor. Finally, without his parents Robert and Cynthia Greene, he would not be the person or scholar he is today. Their reading to him at a young age and encouraging his curiosity about the world molded him into a historian. To them, he owes an everlasting thanks.

Tyler D. Parry, also independently, first thanks his wife, Shanelle, who has been with this project since its inception, and who, as a fellow Gamecock graduate, is excited about its long-awaited publication. Tyler remembers how she listened to his first presentation on this subject in the Gressette Room of Harper College in April 2014 and has steadfastly supported the work in its long road to publication. He also recognizes the important contributions of his daughters, Nazanin and Yara, who, although making sustained writing and editing sessions rather difficult, have provided welcome distractions by pulling Dad from his work area to view their latest block towers or, most commonly, a new drawing (usually on the wall). Tyler is also thankful for their energy and the positive force they continue to provide in his life. In addition, he is grateful to his parents, Stan and Carol, who remain bedrocks of support and always listen to his latest ideas with interest. Tyler also recognizes the many scholars and friends who are responsible for helping him to see this project from beginning to end. Most notably, Kevin Dawson, who first encouraged him to consider the University of South Carolina for graduate school; Daniel C. Littlefield, a mentor, adviser, and friend who always gives honest feedback on his work; Bobby Donaldson, a scholar and community advocate who always asked him the best questions and demonstrated the value of connecting the university to the community; and Matt D. Childs, who is not only a terrific scholar but also a genuinely good human being. A specific thanks goes to Erica L. Ball, Sharla Fett, Justin Gomer, and Robin D. Muhammad, each of whom read and commented on Tyler’s Reconstruction research and helped push this broader project forward. He also gives a huge thanks to all of his wonderful University of Nevada, Las Vegas, colleagues, who have supported this project since his return home in the Summer of 2019.

Last, we both honor the remarkable Henrie Monteith Treadwell for accepting our request to write the afterword for this volume. Alongside James Solomon Jr. and Robert Anderson, Treadwell initiated the critical step toward desegregating USC, and we are deeply grateful for her continued activism and contributions to Black people in South Carolina and beyond.

Foreword

ROBERT ANDERSON

HENRIE MONTEITH

JAMES SOLOMON

They arrive knocking at Osborne’s great garnet door. They want to

study mathematics, join the debate team, and sing in the choir. They are three in a sea of six thousand. With each step they pole-vault shards of doubt, sticks of dynamite, and stubborn hate mail. With them arrives the bright peppermint of change. The new laws of the new day can no longer resist these three irresistible ones, in a sea of six thousand, stepping through a door now garnet and black.

Nikky Finney, The Irresistible Ones, 2013

For two and a half years I served as cochair, along with then Associate Provost, Lacy Ford, for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 desegregation of the University of South Carolina, Embracing Change, Fulfilling the Dream. Tiye Gordon, MA History graduate student, served as the graduate assistant for this project, and much gratitude is owed to her for those long hours of service.

At the beginning of this journey, I wanted to accomplish three things. First, I wanted to ensure we developed and completed a series of successful events. Working with alum, colleges, departments, institutes, programs, corporations, members of the at-large community, and an advisory board, we held a series of events from September 6, 2013, through April 12, 2014. The university family was so receptive, and several organizations provided crucial assistance in moving these commemorations forward. The College of Education, McKissick Museum, and the Thomas Cooper Library each hosted separate exhibits. Members of USC’s alumni also held events, and both undergraduate and graduate students were fortunate to collect and preserve oral interviews they conducted with them. Civil rights activists Andrew Young Jr. and Diane Judith Nash also spoke on campus and met with students. Even when Nash was unable to visit on the originally scheduled date, the late Don Fowler graciously arranged for Young to appear before the campus community. Fowler embodied those individuals who go above and beyond their required service to make such commemorations successful.

Other USC sponsors included the Black Alumni Council, Department of Athletics, Department of Facilities, My Carolina Alumni Association, Office of the President, and Office of the Provost. African American Studies sponsored John C. Brittian, Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. The Athletics Department honored African American firsts in Athletics during halftime at the USC versus Kentucky football game. Other speakers during the year included Benjamin Jealous, former president and CEO of NAACP, and Jotaka Eaddy, founder and CEO of Full Circle Strategies and an alum of the university.

The list of supporters is immense, and the activities they produced are incomparable. The Dance Theater brought Alvin Ailey II Dance Group to campus, while USC Gospel Choir hosted a Festival of Spirituals. On September 11, 2013, we held a ceremony for the Retracing the Steps and Commemorative Garden Groundbreaking, and the university hosted the Garden Dedication on April 11, 2014, to honor the bravery of the Irresistable Ones, Henrie Monteith, James Solomon Jr., and Robert Anderson, the first Black students to attend USC in the post-Reconstruction era. The closing ceremony was held the following day on April 12. Bert Ligon, Professor of Music and Director of Jazz Studies developed an original composition, Our Journey Forward: Remembering Our Past, Celebrating Our Progress, Sharing Our Future. Thaddeus Davis and Tanya Wideman-Davis, both from the School of Dance, presented an original choreographed dance with historical documentary vignettes titled, We Hold These Truths. The University of South Carolina Gospel Choir and Carolina Alive presented Medley of Freedom Songs arranged for the Commemoration. We’re At The Crossroads, composed in 1989 by Bert Ligon and Melissa Gatchel North as part of Project Crosswords for KERA-TV in Dallas, Texas, concluded the program, and the evening ended with a public reception in the Koger Center Lobby. Taken together, the academic year, 2013–2014 was nine months of intense intellectual, cultural, and social exchange.

In my second wish, I hoped to produce a permanent physical space to remember this occasion, which eventually became the Desegregation Garden. After checking with Elizabeth West, the university archivist, about the availability of space beside the Osbourne building located on the campus’s Historic Horseshoe, I approached Emily Jones, University Landscape Architect, and Derek Gruner, University Architect and Associate Vice President of Facilities Planning, Design and Construction, to investigate the possibility. Working with Gruner and Jones was one of the most rewarding experiences of my 21 years at USC. Lacy Ford and I then began to work with other university leaders to designate the specific area where The Irresistible Ones registered for classes as a commemorative space, though the location was largely unused and not particularly attractive. But our team believed in the value of this project. We discussed ideas about the space and in the final design created a place, as cultural theorist Isadora Stankovic articulates, of cultural encounters … of heritage itself, combining different cultures through the use of the past in the present and its preservation for the future.¹ Nikky Finney, an award-winning poet and the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters agreed to write a poem that was etched in the granite monument, and Pearl Fryer, a South Carolina–based topiary artist and civil rights activist agreed to design the garden. Numerous corporate sponsors, including Bank of America, Columbia Green and Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, and USC facilities, provided funding for the Desegregation Garden.

Finney noted about her short poem that she wanted to find one word that would make readers of the poem slow down and linger a bit as they read it. Thus, Finney’s The Irresistible Ones has a double meaning. There is the Irresistible word, and there is also the Resist word embedded inside of it, said Finney. For this poem, these students were ‘Irresistible’ because the laws of the country had finally changed in their favor. Attached to Finney’s words, Fryer’s vision for the garden’s landscape exemplifies the power of the moment, creating one topiary of three connecting balls for the center of his creation, and two individual topiaries for each side that provided a double three imagery. In honoring the courage of Anderson, Monteith, and Solomon, this space gives sensory meaning to the experiences of the Irresistible Ones and preserves those memories for future generations. Jessica Allison and the Alumni Center facilitated a bricklaying ceremony at the Maxcy Monument for Anderson, Monteith, and Solomon.

The third and final wish was to involve students in researching and presenting information on African American Experiences at USC from 1865 to 1980. My stated suggestion to the students in 2013 was that they should continue this research and later publish their work. The seed is now bearing fruit with this volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina, edited by Robert Greene II, Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University, and Tyler D. Parry, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Both Greene and Parry were among this original contingent of researchers when they were PhD students in the USC History Department.

The original panel consisted of graduate and undergraduate students. All were affiliated with the African American Studies Program (AFAM) as majors/ minors, teaching assistants, research assistants, or adjunct faculty. All students were an absolute joy to work with, and they have become the successful lawyers, professors, and archivists AFAM helped to nurture. Using archival resources, oral histories, interviews, and a wide swathe of secondary sources, eight students presented their findings on April 12, 2014. The list included the following: Brian Robinson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Found and Lost: Reconsidering Education and Culture in South Carolina, 1865–1878; Tyler D. Parry, PhD candidate, Department of History, When the Mountains Were Brought Low and the Valleys were Exalted: African Americans at the University of South Carolina, 1873–1877; Robert Greene II, PhD candidate, Department of History, Before 1963: African Americans, USC, and the Fight to Desegregate Southern Universities; Chanal McCain, undergraduate (2014), African American Studies, Political Science, We Can’t Be Mississippi: Some White Students’ Response to Desegregation; Sean Pitt, undergraduate (2015), American Studies and History, From Desegregation to Integration: Early Race Relations at the University of South Carolina; Holly Genovese, MA Candidate, Department of History, After Desegregation: USC and the Office of Minority Student Affairs; Ramon M. Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Peace, Love, Education, and Liberation: The Association of Afro-American Students and the Rise of Black Studies at USC; Tamerra McCrea, undergraduate (2014), African American Studies and Health Promotion Education and Behavior, ‘Let’s Get Together’: Harry Walker’s Campaign. Of the eight presenters on Friday, April 11, 2014, in the Gressette Room at 2:00 P.M., two of them are the editors of this volume and three others are contributors.

In the ten chapters of Invisible No More, the writers collectively explore the experiences of African Americans on the campus from the inception of the university in 1801 to present. In doing so, Parry, Greene, and the ten other authors continue the long journey of ensuring that the contributions made by underrepresented and often oppressed people help us remember all of The Irresistible Ones, those who have committed, and continue to commit, toward the long struggle for a more democratic society. For their efforts, I am eternally grateful!

VALINDA W. LITTLEFIELD

Columbia, South Carolina

April 2021

INTRODUCTION

Enslaved people were an integral part of the operations of South Carolina College, visible on campus yet invisible, said then–University of South Carolina (USC) president Harris Pastides in 2017. As part of a celebration of two new markers on campus dedicated to the enslaved at USC, Pastides’ statement was intended to recognize how far the university had come to remember their contributions. However, the legacy of Black involvement at the school has, in recent years, been a curious and tumultuous one—springing from the complicated history of the institution.¹

In August 2020, a curious event occurred on the campus of the University of South Carolina. As students returned to campus during a tumultuous year of the COVID-19 pandemic and a resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, one individual decided to go to the campus in Columbia, South Carolina, to protest the existence of the social justice movement. He soon found not only opposition to his protest and his presence on campus, but he also caused what became a humorous response to his one-man crusade. Students began to play instruments —including a trombone—to drown him out. In the process, it showcased a renewed militancy among many students to oppose discrimination of any kind. The student body president at the university, Issy Rushton, said, The Gamecock family is defined by passion, resilience and a community that celebrates diversity. She argued that he stood for everything that USC did not. This is not what we stand for, she said, and we will not let our family be divided.²

This statement would have been welcome news to African Americans who have been part of the university’s fabric from its founding in 1801. Indeed, it would have been a balm to the African American students and faculty of the school during the Reconstruction era, and a comfort to the three brave African American students who desegregated the university for a second—and permanent —time in 1963. Of course, such resistance efforts by student activists are not unknown in the university’s history. Even during the most dangerous periods of segregation when public rallies were held by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) throughout the state, student activists resisted the foremost symbol of hate in the American South. In one report from 1949, a group of USC students actually approached a KKK rally held in West Columbia to specifically challenge the event. They threw stench bombs into the crowd of five hundred Klan members and jeered as the grand dragon, Samuel Green, gave a speech against President Harry Truman’s civil rights efforts. In a team effort, the police and a few burly Klansmen dispersed the student protestors, who continued to disrupt the event by jeering at them from the fringe of the meeting.³

This 1949 case is important for what it does, and does not, reveal about histories of student activism. Throughout the duration of Jim Crow, USC reflected two contradictory identities. On the one hand it was a symbol of white supremacy and separatism as it prevented African Americans from entering its grounds. On the other hand, it was an institution that harbored liberal ideas that challenged past orthodoxies, which helped to gradually prepare many of its students to confront segregation and reject white nationalist organizations in the mid-twentieth century. Were these students reflective of the university’s all-white student body or were they outliers? Did these white students form any coalitions with Black student activists throughout the city of Columbia, or was this a single event specifically rejecting the KKK and its dwindling power? Was this event at all significant in the larger effort toward desegregating the University of South Carolina fourteen years later? The lack of details in the report, alongside the reality that such stories are largely unknown in official university histories, reveals the need to further investigate histories of activism, specifically those centering the contributions and efforts of Black South Carolinians who led efforts toward social justice and placed their lives on the line to push for systemic change.

The continued reckoning with the legacies of white supremacy, the Old South, and the largely suppressed histories of Black activism throughout the university’s history serves to remind student activists of the tremendous work that needs to be done to make African American students at USC today feel that they are part of the campus community. In the winter of 2021, the USC chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was reformed, sparked by both Black Lives Matter protests and the protests at USC against the numerous buildings on campus named after slaveholders, Confederate leaders, and segregationists. Caley Bright, an African American student at USC, said, I think students are ready for change. I think people were looking for that one person to lead or that one organization, and now that we have the NAACP, I think they have found it.⁴

Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina makes it clear that, to understand the history of the flagship university of the Palmetto State, one must look at the experience of its African Americans. This encapsulates all African Americans—from the enslaved who kept the university running in the antebellum era; to the Black faculty and students that were the mind, body, and soul of the institution from 1873 until 1877; to the students, staff, and faculty at the university today. Like the broader history of the state of South Carolina, the American South, and the United States of America, the history of African Americans at USC is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts.

The University of South Carolina’s current debates over race, memory, and representation are but the latest phase in an argument that has taken place since the institution was created in 1801: What does it mean to be an African American at the flagship institution located in the capital city of the seedbed of the Confederacy? The chapters in this collection show this to be a variegated debate, one that has both matched similar queries about the place of Black people in South Carolina, the South, and across the United States—and, at the same time, often influencing those debates too. The chapters are a window into both a changing university, and a changing South Carolina.

Other universities have begun the process of reckoning with their own histories of race and racism at their campuses. Books such as Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder and Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies, an anthology edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, have led the way in the last decade in pushing the African American experience at institutions of higher learning across the United States to the forefront. Both works trace this troubled history back to the era of enslavement, going beyond the narratives of desegregation in the twentieth century—as does our volume.⁵

Our book also joins a growing list of volumes dedicated to the fight for access and equality for African Americans that took place at numerous universities in the twentieth century. Some of these schools, like the University of South Carolina, are schools based in the former Confederacy. Their desegregation in the 1960s represented progress, but these works also remind us that such progress did not come without cost for the African American students involved. Nor—and this is a critical point for Invisible No More as well—did the process of desegregation end when those students first registered at their campuses. Instead, the process of desegregation should be thought of as ongoing, which explains the decades of activism at universities across the country for the sake of greater acceptance of African American students, minds, and experiences. Books on institutions such as Georgia State, the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia, and numerous private institutions done by scholars Maurice C. Daniels, Robert A. Pratt, F. Erik Brooks, B. J. Hollars, and Melissa Kean reveal how specific institutions throughout the South desegregated during the Jim Crow era.⁶ Also, Stefan Bradley’s works on the effects of the Black Power Movement on campuses across the nation in the 1960s and ’70s inform the latter chapters of this edited volume.⁷ The University of South Carolina was never separated from the broader battles for racial equality at colleges and universities, north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The early chapters of the book describe the life of African Americans from the opening of South Carolina College in 1801, to the end of a valiant experiment in biracial education in 1877. In chapter one, Graham Duncan explores the world of slavery at South Carolina College during the antebellum era in his chapter, Slavery on Campus: Examining the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People at South Carolina College. Duncan’s chapter is an intriguing look at slavery in not just a university setting, but an explicitly urban one too. As the Head of Collections and Curator of Manuscripts at the Caroliniana Library, the university’s on-campus archive, Duncan is the leading authority on slavery and the enslaved people forced to labor at South Carolina College. This chapter continues the work he started as an undergraduate at USC in 2006 when he focused upon slavery at South Carolina College for a term paper. Duncan’s twelve-page study was the first, and until this point remained, the most extended study of the enslaved and their presence at this institution.⁸ As mentioned earlier, various books have examined the role of the enslaved at a wide range of colleges and universities across the United States, and this chapter will do the same for South Carolina College from the scholar who knows it best.

Next, Tyler D. Parry’s chapter on the brief but extraordinary history of Reconstruction at the University of South Carolina in chapter 2, ‘Irrespective of Race or Color’: Examining Desegregation at the Reconstructed University of South Carolina, 1868–1877, is both a window into a period of South Carolina’s history where a biracial democracy seemed possible, and a reminder of the deep well of possibilities tantalizingly glimpsed during the Reconstruction period. The brief experiment with allowing African American students to grace the campus of South Carolina was a radical departure from the status of many African Americans on the campus before 1865—enslaved and without freedom. It marked a radical shift that was both a literal and symbolic manifestation of Reconstruction’s goals: educational access that was promoted and sponsored by the state. In 1873, as Reconstruction was approaching its twilight throughout the United States, this campus invited both Black and white Americans to join the integrationist experiment and challenge critics who claimed Black and white people could never live harmoniously alongside each other. Though a monumental achievement, it is one that was deliberately cut too short, and consequently the state and University of South Carolina both continue to struggle with memorializing this period in the school’s history. As it represents one of many possibilities opened up during the Reconstruction era, it also marks the state of South Carolina’s continued need to fully reckon with what was lost with the Redemption of the state in 1877.

Chapter three, Richard T. Greener at the Reconstruction-Era University: Professor, Librarian, and Student, examines the remarkable life and career of Richard T. Greener, the first and only Black faculty member hired at the University of South Carolina during its Reconstruction era. Christian K. Anderson and Jason C. Darby’s chapter on Greener focuses on his time at USC in the 1870s, where he served in a variety of roles. Greener—relating back to Parry’s chapter on Reconstruction—is also a stark reminder of what life during and after Reconstruction could have been for more African Americans, if simply allowed to pursue such a life. While Greener today has a statue on campus—the fight for which is part of the subject for the final chapter of this collection—for many years, the university simply wished to forget he ever attended the school. Anderson and Darby work here to make sure he is never forgotten in the larger history of the university.

Another angle by which to look at the history of slavery and freedom at South Carolina is shown in Evan A. Kutzler’s chapter, Laying the Mountains Low: The Life and Education of Simon Peter Smith, 1845–1914. Kutzler’s remarkable research into the life of Simon Peter Smith is a product of his tireless efforts in locating Smith’s extant papers, which were largely unknown until Kutzler traveled to different archives seeking a more complete picture of Smith’s well-documented life. His correspondences remind us that the transition from slavery to freedom was, for some Black South Carolinians, a literal experience on the campus. But chapter four also displays how much Black South Carolinians such as Smith were deeply tied to larger currents of movement and education among African Americans across the nation, as his travels would take him to Howard University and Chicago Theological Seminary. In the process, we see a different viewpoint of the history of African America from a man whose life spans the antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow periods.

In chapter five, Brian A. Robinson provides a bridge to understand the institutional shifts in South Carolina that led to the dismantling of the Reconstruction project and the subsequent inception of Jim Crow segregation. In Struggle for Educational Access in South Carolina, 1865–1890, Robinson gives necessary context for the early chapters in the book. The history of education in South Carolina is inextricably linked to the story of racism and classism that have long plagued the Palmetto State. Understanding how the state struggled with ideas of public education for all its citizens—white and Black—in the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum periods, Robinson displays the problems, and contradictions, that would ultimately hinder attempts to expand educational access for all South Carolinians, specifically by redirecting attention to the propaganda surrounding the mixed-schools and possibilities of Black progress that were a legacy of the Reconstruction era.

In moving the volume toward the university’s second desegregation, chapter six examines the push to desegregate the university’s law school during the Long Civil Rights Movement era of the 1930s and ’40s. In this chapter, titled Before 1963: Race, Education, and the NAACP Desegregation Campaigns at the University of South Carolina, Robert Greene II argues that the NAACP’s mission to gain admittance for Charles Bailey in the mid-1930s and John Wrighten in 1947 were part of a larger, national campaign to test the limits of separate but equal in southern society. However, the chapter also shows the close—nearly symbiotic—relationship between South Carolina and various historically Black colleges and universities in South Carolina, including Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, and South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Ultimately, the irony of the failure to desegregate the law school at South Carolina led to the creation of a law school at S.C. State—which created the cadre of African American lawyers needed to break the back of segregation in the Palmetto State and, ironically, desegregate USC in 1963.

Marcia G. Synnott’s chapter, The Legacy of Desegregation: USC and Its Changing Campus and Student Body since the 1960s, is a powerful account of how much the university has changed since three African American students— Robert Anderson, James Solomon, and Henrie Monteith Treadwell—registered on the campus for classes on September 11, 1963. Synnott’s chapter chronicles not only their initial experience on campus, but how much the campus would change via the influx of African Americans in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, and beyond. After all, the story of the desegregation of any campus does not merely begin and end with the first African Americans on a campus. Instead, Synnott’s narrative in chapter seven should push us to think about the long, difficult legacy of desegregation on a southern college campus.

This theme continues with Ramon M. Jackson’s chapter on the impact of the Black Campus Movement at the University of South Carolina. Peace, Love, Education, and Liberation: The Black Campus Movement at the University of South Carolina is a local examination of a nationwide issue during the Black Power Movement: the influx of not just African American students onto previously all-white or nearly all-white campuses, but the influence of ideas from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as well. The rise of such groups as the Association of Afro-American Students, the creation of an African American Studies program, and the installation of classes on Black life and history at USC are all central hallmarks of chapter eight.

Holly Genovese