“N” is for Newman, Isaiah DeQuincey (1911-1985)

“N” is for Newman, Isaiah DeQuincey (1911-1985). Clergyman, civil rights leader. A native of Darlington County, Newman attended Claflin College and became an ordained United Methodist Church (UMC) minister. For some forty years he served UMC churches in Georgia and South Carolina. Early in his ministry, Newman identified the struggle for racial equality as a matter of the spirit as well as a social and political concern. In 1943 he assumed a key position in the emerging civil rights movement when he helped organize the Orangeburg branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Newman served as the NAACP’s South Carolina field director from 1960to 1969, the most critical period in the civil rights struggle. In 1985 Isaiah DeQuincey Newman became the first African American since 1887 to serve in the South Carolina senate.