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As an essential business, automobile service has continued to operate relatively normally even as other facets of the car business have been changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.    Like other businesses, auto dealers have made numerous adjustments to keep their employees and clients safe and retain the confidence of their customers.   Some of these adjustments were outlined by Sims Floyd, executive vice president of the South Carolina Automobile Dealers Association:

Education Superintendent Spearman, District Superintendents, and Democrats Criticize as Premature and Unsafe

While there appears to be overwhelming support to re-open South Carolina’s public schools this fall, the question of how to open them safely has become a contentious and highly political issue. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster this week said despite the growing pandemic in the state, schools must open, and that parents must be given the option of sending their children to school five days a week.

The coronavirus has generated a lot of phone calls.  Many are from friends and family checking on each other.  Many are to restaurants to place a take-out order.  And thousands in South Carolina are made by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC).

The weekend after George Floyd’s death, a thousand-or-so people took to the streets of Rock Hill. At the heart of their march was a call to develop a citizen’s review board – a mechanism that allows residents to weigh in on claims of police misconduct. By the end of the march it was announced, to booming applause, that the city would start to develop one.

A few days later, a couple hundred people bowed their heads at a prayer vigil in Chester. The city’s mayor, Wanda Stringfellow, helped pull the vigil together with Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey. During the vigil, Stringfellow said she would personally shepherd a citizen’s review board to the City Council.

By June 22, the ordinance for such a board passed its first of two hearings with the council.

It might be tempting to end the story there.  

The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight that most historians place starting with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. But there are some who place the nearly 100-year struggle starting, in earnest, decades before the civil war with the proliferation of reform groups like temperance leagues, religious movements and antislavery organizations.

Testing for the coronavirus is ongoing throughout the country, but testing individually takes a lot of time.  University of South Carolina public health Professor Sean Norman is taking a different approach.  Viruses are not only carried in the body, but some are also shed in human waste, and coronavirus is one of them.  So Norman is analyzing sewage to determine the presence and amount of the virus in large populations.  He said the application is new, but the technique has been around for a while.

Attending a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) is not quite the same as attending college elsewhere. There’s a lot of history and culture that goes with the HBCU experience – and that can be surprisingly intimidating for young African-American intellectuals.

The only thing scarier is the prospect of not being on campus.

And that is what students at Clinton College in Rock Hill are facing, thanks to the coronavirus. Juwan Williams is one of them.

  As South Carolina enters the July 4th weekend, public health officials are bracing for what they term as a possible unimaginable number of new cases of the coronavirus.  Gov. McMaster said this week the state is facing a test.

In the months following the unimaginable church massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a poet, a journalist and an historian came together to write a book.  They wanted to explain to a nation not only what happened, but why.

Why were nine Black parishioners gunned down by a white stranger?

Five years later, the authors of "We Are Charleston" find themselves trying to explain again why more African Americans continue to be killed across the country, repeatedly and publicly, this time by white police officers.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, South Carolina Public Radio and South Carolina ETV are broadcasting the series Sisterhood: South Carolina Suffragists. The series looks at how local women played  roles in a national movement that eventually guaranteed more than 26 million women the right to vote.