LibGuides: Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture: Joseph Cabaniss Civil Rights Law Collections

Manuscript Collections

Robert N. Rosen legal papers, 1941-1994 (bulk 1981-1990) [AMN 1028]

The son of Ida and Morris Rosen, Robert N. Rosen was born in 1947 in Charleston, South Carolina, where his mother was a teacher and his father an attorney. Rosen attended public schools in Charleston and was a student at Rivers High School when it became the first integrated school in the city. He graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1973. He served as Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City of Charleston (1976-1985); as general counsel for the Charleston County School District (1982-2003) and for the Charleston Housing Authority (1984-2003). In the three cases represented in this collection, he defended the Charleston County School system against the initial charge that the Charleston County School District violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Rosen is also the author of several books on historical topics.

Each series in this collection contains court documents and legal proceedings pertaining to the three court trials of United States of America and Richard Ganaway, II et al. vs. Charleston County School District and State of South Carolina, in which Rosen and Alice F. Paylor, of Rosen, Rosen & Hagood, Charleston, S.C. successfully represented the defendants, Charleston County School District and State of South Carolina. The collection primarily follows the original order of the Rosen, Rosen & Hagood Law Firm, and is divided into six series. The first five (Judgment; Pleadings; Discovery; Testimonies; and Exhibits, Defendants and Plaintiff-Intervener) contain court transcripts, legal proceedings, reports, memorandums, correspondence and documents pertaining to the three court trials. The remaining series, Attorney Files, consists of sub-series of Desegregation Cases, School Board Minutes and Charleston County School District Correspondence, Charleston County School District Magnet Schools materials, Numbered Documents, and Miscellaneous Reports.

John C. Ruoff papers, ca. 1972-2002 (bulk 1992-2000)[AMN 1027]

John Carl Ruoff (b.1948) received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976, specializing in social and cultural history of the 19th century American South. Starting in 1987, he has worked as Executive and then Research Director for South Carolina Fair Share, a civil rights advocacy group, providing statistical and demographic technical assistance and support to community groups. He has also provided policy analysis and advocacy on consumer, utility, and telecommunications issues, and gave expert legal testimony for several legal cases during his career.

The collection, following the original order of the donor, contains materials grouped by subject, consisting almost exclusively of demographics, statistics, and data collected by John C. Ruoff in his capacity as Director of South Carolina Fair Share. The bulk is mostly data and statistics regarding legal cases for which Ruoff provided expert testimony. Legal cases include NAACP v. City of Columbia (1993), NAACP v. Richland County, Williams v. Baldwin County Commission, Able v. Wilkins, Smith v. Beasley, NAACP v. Kershaw County, and NAACP v. Spartanburg County Board of Education mostly regarding voting rights, local and state cases concerning reapportionment and redistricting, school desegregation, deregulation and restructuring of the electric industry and bus routes involving the SC Electric and Gas Co., auto insurance reforms, and various other economic and social reforms such as crack-addicted babies, teen pregnancy, statutory and marital rape, and other issues

Judge J. Waties Waring and his wife, Elizabeth, look at scrap books of articles praising and condemning the judge’s rulings in 1951 at their home in Charleston, South Carolina. (AP file photo) Judge J. and Elizabeth Waring Papers, Circa 1947-1964 [AMN 1033]

Julius Waties Waring (1880-1968), a Charleston native and attorney became a Federal Judge in 1942. At the time of his divorce and remarriage in 1945 to Elizabeth A. Hoffman (1895-1966), he began to hand down more liberal decisions, such as equalizing the pay of black and white teachers and outlawing South Carolina's white-only Democratic Primary. He soon ruled that separate but equal was per se inequality. In 1952, the Warings moved to New York City.

This collection consists entirely of photocopied materials from the Moorland-Spingarn Library's collections of Judge J. Waties Waring Materials. The correspondence series contains copies of letters from Septima Clark and Ruby Cornwell to Elizabeth Waring regarding national and local civil rights and election issues, the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), changing times and Clark's citizen education work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among other topics. Photocopies of legal proceedings including some from the Briggs versus Elliott law case fighting unequal school facilities for African Americans and some from the case of John Wrighten (with Thurgood Marshall as attorney) versus the Trustees of the University of South Carolina for his being denied entrance to the law school due to his race, and the unequal education a new law school for African Americans would provide.

Armand Derfner Legal Papers [AMN 1049]

Armand Derfner (1938- ) is a Charleston-based noted civil rights attorney, well-known for his work outlawing at-large elections in local governments. Derfner's papers document his professional work since establishing his legal practice in South Carolina in 1974. The papers are organized according to legal cases.

The bulk of the material concerns civil rights issues argued by Derfner at various South Carolina courts. Over 70 court cases are documented, with issues discussed relating mainly to racial discrimination, school desegregation, voting rights, employment rights, free speech and property rights in South Carolina. Cases challenging the local and federal governments to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in order to address the dilution of African American voting power and issues of racial discrimination and inequality in election procedures are well documented. Also included are videotapes of the Charleston 5, the alleged riot of Charleston Longshoreman Union members which resulted in an out-of-court settlement.

Selected Library Resources

Ambiguous legacies : the NAACP's legal campaign against segregation in Charleston, South Carolina, 1935-1975 by R. Scott Baker.
Call Number: F279.C49 N4124 1993a
Publication Date: 1993
Outside Agitator by Adam Parker
Call Number: E185.61 .P24 2018
ISBN: 9781938235450
Publication Date: 2018-11-06
Cleveland Sellers Jr. was the scapegoat for one of the bloodiest civil rights events of the 1960s. In 1968 state troopers gunned down black students protesting the segregation of a South Carolina bowling alley, killing three and injuring 28. The Orangeburg Massacre was one of the most violent moments of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and only one person served prison time in its aftermath: a young black man by the name of Cleveland Sellers Jr. Many years later, the state would recognize that Sellers was a scapegoat in that college campus tragedy and would issue a full pardon. *Outside Agitator* is the story of a Sellers' early activism: organizing a lunch counter sit-in as a 15-year-old in the tiny South Carolina town of Denmark, registering voters in Alabama and Mississippi, refusing the Vietnam War draft, serving as national program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and working alongside 1960s civil rights icons Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown and Malcolm X. It's also the story of his lifelong struggle to overcome the Orangeburg incident and his slow crawl to justice. That journey takes him to Harvard University, then to a hard-fought position in civil service in Greensboro, North Carolina. And in a triumphant end to his career, a major Southern university elevates Sellers to chair its African-American Studies program, and the historically black college in his hometown respectfully calls him to be its president. Adam Parker's incisive biography is about a proud black man who refuses to be defeated, whose tumultuous life story personifies America's continuing civil rights struggle.
Re: Gedney Main Howe, Jr. : 1914-1981
Call Number: KF373.H69 R4 1985
Includes chapter entitled "Medical University Strike" about the 1969 Hospital Workers' Strike.
Unexampled Courage by Richard Gergel
Call Number: E185.61 .G377 2019
ISBN: 0374107890
Publication Date: 2019-01-22
A 2019 NPR Staff Pick How the blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard changed the course of America's civil rights history On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver's disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody. President Harry Truman was outraged by the incident. He established the first presidential commission on civil rights and his Justice Department filed criminal charges against Shull. In July 1948, following his commission's recommendation, Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces. An all-white South Carolina jury acquitted Shull, but the presiding judge, J. Waties Waring, was conscience-stricken by the failure of the court system to do justice by the soldier. Waring described the trial as his "baptism of fire," and began issuing major civil rights decisions from his Charleston courtroom, including his 1951 dissent in Briggs v. Elliott declaring public school segregation per se unconstitutional. Three years later, the Supreme Court adopted Waring's language and reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education. Richard Gergel's Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring, and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America's civil rights history.
The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 by Mark V. Tushnet
ISBN: 0807855952
Publication Date: 2005-02-28
The NAACP's fight against segregated education--the first public interest litigation campaign--culminated in the 1954 Brown decision. While touching on the general social, political, and economic climate in which the NAACP acted, Mark V. Tushnet emphasizes the internal workings of the organization as revealed in its own documents. He argues that the dedication and the political and legal skills of staff members such as Walter White, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Thurgood Marshall were responsible for the ultimate success of public interest law. This edition contains a new epilogue by the author that addresses general questions of litigation strategy, the persistent question of whether the Brown decision mattered, and the legacy of Brown through the Burger and Rehnquist courts.