African-Americans

Located in the Piedmont, Laurens is a county of forests and gently rolling hills.

Laurens has been frequently cited by historians as one of the few citizens in the lower South who expressed opposition to slavery in America as early as the 1770s.

After the British shifted military operations to the South, Laurens proposed that South Carolina arm slaves and grant them freedom in return for their military service.

After relocating to Charleston, Lee began to practice law and went on to become one of the state’s most successful black lawyers.

Barred by his race from receiving advanced medical training in South Carolina, Leevy was admitted to the University of Michigan Medical School.

As a strong proponent of minority education in a state that underfunded segregated black schools, Leevy pushed for the creation of Waverly Elementary School, Leevy Graded School (now Carver Elementary), and Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia.

LeJau worked for the more humane treatment of slaves. He denounced the law that permitted the physical mutilation of runaway slaves and carried on a veritable crusade again brutality, immorality, and profaneness.

The rapid expansion of the Columbia metropolitan area in the final decades of the twentieth century made Lexington one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. The county’s population more than tripled between 1960 and 2000, with most of the growth taking place in the Columbia suburbs of West Columbia, Cayce, and Irmo.

Black leaders in South Carolina, including Richard Harvey Cain, Harrison Bouey, George Curtis, and the Reverend B. F. Porter, responded to the interest in black emigration by incorporating the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company in the spring of 1877, naming Porter as its president.

His reputation firmly established, Lieber became interested in a permanent academic position. With the reorganization of South Carolina College in 1835, Lieber was elected professor of history and political economy.

Born to a family of Sephardic Jews in London, Lindo became an authority on dyes at the Royal Exchange, the city’s center of commerce.

Aware that African Americans did not have access to suitable medical care, Littlejohn created the John-Nina Hospital in 1913.

Chartered in 1869, the Longshoremen Protective Union Association (LPUA) established the legacy of a strong union presence, comprised almost exclusively of African Americans, along Charleston’s docks.

For as long as people of African descent have lived in Carolina, they have made baskets. The early history of the lowcountry coiled grass basket parallels the rise of rice cultivation on the southeastern coast of North America.

The news of the Lowmans’ deaths stirred a firestorm of state and national outrage.

Lumpkin’s final novel, Full Circle, which appeared in 1962, is a fictionalized account of her peculiar ideological and spiritual life journey, which she delineated as her Communist and “return to God” phases.

Early Lutherans in South Carolina were invariably of German descent. The first were a part of the Purrysburg settlement of mainly French Swiss immigrants in the 1730s along the Savannah River.

Lynching became so widespread that the years 1882 to 1930 have been termed the “lynching era.”

A cooperationist earlier in his career, Magrath supported secession by 1860, feeling “an assurance of what will be the action of the State.”

Malaria was arguably the most significant disease in the history of South Carolina from the colonial period until the early twentieth century.