desegregation

On November 22, 1963, Bennie Sulton suited up in his maroon and white high school football uniform. The 17-year old was a captain of the Lakeview Tigers in West Columbia. They were about to face Gresham Megget High school from James Island in a championship game. The two schools were a part of South Carolina’s Equalization program; providing an education for African-American students and maintaining “separate but equal” schools for white and black children.But instead of euphoria, Sulton and his teammates where dealing with a different set of feelings stemming from the realization that graduation meaning the end of football careers for many, desegregation ending the history of their school and also the death of Pres. John F. Kennedy.

When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA all-star team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision. White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street all-stars, the first Black Little League team in South Carolina.The Cannon Street team won two tournaments by forfeit. If they won the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, they would have advanced to the Little League World Series. But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible to play in the tournament because they had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, denying the boys their dream. This became a national story for a few weeks but then faded and disappeared altogether as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the horrific killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till.Chris Lamb, author of The 1955 Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (2022, University of Nebraska Press), and John Rivers, who played shortstop on the All-Stars, join Walter Edgar to tell the story of the Cannon Street all-stars.

When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA all-star team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision. White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street all-stars, the first Black Little League team in South Carolina.The Cannon Street team won two tournaments by forfeit. If they won the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, they would have advanced to the Little League World Series. But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible to play in the tournament because they had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, denying the boys their dream. This became a national story for a few weeks but then faded and disappeared altogether as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the horrific killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till.Chris Lamb, author of The 1955 Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (2022, University of Nebraska Press), and John Rivers, who played shortstop on the All-Stars, join Walter Edgar to tell the story of the Cannon Street all-stars.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has joined House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn in visiting a rural South Carolina school that is now part of a National Park Service program to safeguard institutions connected to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. Legislation signed by President Joe Biden in May added two South Carolina schools to the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. Haaland and Clyburn both spoke about the importance of preserving and learning from America's history.

Three new historical markers have been unveiled in a South Carolina community to commemorate two of the state's early legal battles against segregated schools. WIS-TV reports the Summerton Community Action Group placed two markers at local sites with ties to the Briggs vs. Elliott case in 1950 that demanded equal access to buses for children attending all-Black schools. The third marker recalls the 1948 Levi Pearson v. County Board of Education case in which the NAACP attempted an earlier challenge against inequalities in busing. The Briggs case went on to become part of the litigation that resulted in the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education that found racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.

Four years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a federal judge in Charleston hatched his secret plan to end…

Four years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a federal judge in Charleston hatched his secret plan to end…

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the need to conclude “the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.” In his second…

"D" is for Dixiecrats. Dixiecrats were a political party organized in 1948 by disgruntled white Southern Democrats dismayed over their declining influence…

“C” is for Citizens’ Councils. Founded in 1954, in Indianola, Mississippi, Citizens’ Councils quickly spread across the South. The organization promoted a…