African-Americans

The segregation of black voters into the “Black” Seventh, as it came to be known, had the desired effect. The Democrats did not even field a candidate in that district in 1882, and a white Republican, Edmund Mackey, won the election. In 1886, however, Democrats began to contest the seat. The former slave and Republican George Washington Murray won in 1896 but lost in the following election. He was the last African American to represent South Carolina in Congress for nearly a century.

In addition to political coverage, the Lighthouse and Informer covered literary and sports news, while its network of correspondents across the state covered the breadth and depth of Black life in South Carolina.

In essence, the law guaranteed at least a seven-month school term for all white children. Additionally, it shifted the financial responsibility away from local districts, which often lacked resources, to the state.

She embraced community activism with the same zeal she had demonstrated in teaching, continuing to show former students and others that supporting and improving one’s community is essential for progress and success

Since 1670 there has been a visible African American presence in South Carolina. Regardless of individuals’ status, that black presence has had an incalculable impact of the cultural, economic, and political development of the state.

African Americans contributed to both the American and British causes during the Revolutionary War as laborers, soldiers, sailors, guides, teamsters, cooks, and spies.

Advocating “the Gospel of Freedom,” African Methodist ministers have played important roles as secular leaders.

The Zion Church expanded in decades during and after the Civil War, with the inclusion of many southern blacks, mainly freed people.

The archministry’s mission is to remove negative stereotypes of African and African American culture by providing a living laboratory of African traditions and by disseminating historical and cultural information.

The productive presidency of David Henry Sims, an Oberlin graduate and a future AME Church bishop, developed Allen University into a full fledged seat of learning.

Anderson’s eclectic repertoire and engaging personality brought him national attention during the folk music revival of the early 1960s.

Beginning in the 1920s, art has had a significant economic impact by virtue of its role in fostering tourism and later through museums dedicated to art.

One of several southern journalists whose “liberal” views on desegregation and civil rights attracted national attention and local scorn, Ashmore won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials opposing Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s attempt to stop the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957.

Atlantic Beach flourished during the 1940s and 1950s as one of the few places on the East Coast where black families could enjoy beach vacations during the era of segregation.

In 1917 Avery became a bulwark for the establishment of the city’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

By 1898 Banks was named the first head nurse at Charleston Hospital and Training School, and she dedicated her life to nursing and seeking more equitable health care for African Americans. Promoted to superintendent of nurses, Banks devoted more than thirty-two years to this hospital and the training of nurses.

In 1876 representatives from some of these independent African American Baptist congregations met in Sumter and organized the Colored Baptist Educational, Missionary, and Sunday School Convention to provide leadership. The name was later changed to the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention, and the body is known popularly as the “Baptist E & M.”

Baptists are by far the largest religious group in South Carolina, and in many ways they are the most diverse. They are black and white, Asian and Hispanic, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and liberal and conservative in their politics, their social views, and their theology. As different as Baptist groups or even churches within a group may be from each other, almost all Baptists share a commitment to believers’ baptism by immersion, the Bible as the primary source of faith, and a congregational church polity.

Initially settled by the English in 1627, Barbados had become an exceedingly wealthy, sugar-dominated economy by the time of South Carolina’s settlement in 1670. Sir John Colleton, who probably led the effort to gain the Carolina charter for eight English noblemen, had become a Barbadian planter after the defeat of the royalist cause in the Puritan Revolution.

Perhaps the greatest triumph for any mill town came in 1936, when the Spartanburg American Legion team won the state’s first national championship in any sport by defeating a Los Angeles team in a five-game series (some twenty thousand fans attended the fifth and deciding game).