Post-War America (1946-1954)

The Pine State Playboys were essentially a small western swing combo, deeply influenced by the foot-stomping rhythms of Texas performers Bob Wills and Milton Brown.

Despite the burdens of his position, Chamberlain produced more than sixty scientific publications, mostly on birds but also on amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. His most important contribution was South Carolina Bird Life, written with [Alexander] Sprunt.

Her success in the 1970s was linked to the popularity of “outlaw” country artists— Nashville rejects including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.

During the early 1960s Checker had thirty more chart hits. Eleven of these reached the top twenty, including a re-release of “The Twist” in 1962 that reached number one and made Checker the only artist to have had the same single song at number one on different releases.

Considering herself a Charlestonian, she visited the state in 1977 with her husband, with whom she wrote A Sea Island Song, a musical and dramatic tribute to the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands.

She was a founder of the Bethlehem Center, an educational and community center in one of Spartanburg’s black communities sponsored by Bethel Methodist Church.

Clark is credited with the creation in 1957 of the “citizenship school” model, which ultimately engaged thousands of ordinary people in literacy and political education throughout the South.

Clyburn represents the state’s “largest and poorest legislative district,” and this has led him to support legislation that addresses issues such as health care, transportation, environmental justice, and education.

In addition to writing novels, Coker reviewed books and published satirical poems in various newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. For some four decades she was deeply engaged in other efforts that defined her era’s literary and cultural life in South Carolina and the region.

The longest-running single episode of armed confrontation in the American experience, it proved to have wide-ranging impacts on the people, life, and economy of South Carolina

The air base’s main role was to train newly commissioned pilots, bombardiers, and navigators in flying B-25 bombers. Each crew received at least two hundred hours of flying before transferring to a war theater.

During World War II, the U.S. War Department acquired the Lexington County field and expanded runways, hangars, roads, and buildings. In early 1942 the heralded Doolittle Raiders trained at the base for their carrier-based raid on Tokyo. After the war, the field reverted to peacetime use and airline operations were moved there from Owens Field.

A consummate storyteller, Conroy in his novels relates tales of family conflict, fathers and father figures, racism, and coming of age, all against the consistent backdrop of the South Carolina lowcountry.

Although revised several times until abandoned in 1698, the Fundamental Constitutions framed the colony as a social hierarchy, encouraging new settlement based on landownership and a provision for religious freedom.

In 1907 Cooke took a three-day federal civil service examination in Boston (blacks were not allowed to take the test in Washington, D.C.). He passed and was assigned to the office of the supervising architect at the United States Treasury Department, the first black man to be employed there.

Emulating the progressive policies of his predecessor, Cooper proposed an ambitious reform program, notably statewide compulsory public school attendance.

A man with broad zoological interests, Corrington began working on the then little-known herpetology (study of amphibians and reptiles) of the Columbia region, an area of considerable biological importance as a result of its location on the fall line between the Piedmont and the coastal plain.

Brown’s intense, shouting rhythm-and-blues vocal style remained rooted in gospel but was also distinguished by his unusual rolling of consonants.

Working in affiliation with the Associated Press, United Press International, and Religious News Service, she initiated weekly religious news-interview programs in several cities and wrote hundreds of scripts for radio and television spots.

Dabbs was also one of the South’s principal twentieth-century Christian churchmen and theologians, although he never claimed this distinction for himself. He certainly was the chief lay theologian of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church of the United States.