This page is primarily to assist individuals participating in the 2024-2025 LOHI Cohort who are researching Historic Black Towns and African American Settlement Communities. Still, it may be of interest to others who are interested in the topic.
Burke High School 1894-2006 by
In 1911, the Charleston Colored Industrial School opened its doors to 375 African American boys and girls, making it the first public high school for African Americans in the city of Charleston. Throughout the years, there have been several public high schools in the city that educated African American students. However, they all have closed, and Burke High School (formerly the Charleston Colored Industrial School) is the only public high school in the city that provides an education for children living on the Peninsula. This book explores the rich and unique history of the school from 1894 to 2006 and provides another perspective on the subject of education and African Americans in Charleston during 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Making Gullah by
During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about "African survivals," bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area's contemporary identification as a Gullah community. This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.
Maryville, the Audacity of a People by
Maryville, The Audacity of a People tells the story of how people who would be described as "essential workers" were able to buy land, organize themselves to create a formal government with a charter and elect officials in the era of Jim Crow. Yearly elections in February were held to elect the Intendant/Mayor, wardens, Board of Health, policemen, and a Postmaster/Postmistress. The story also emphasize the connection of Maryville/Ashleyville to the founding of Charleston, South Carolina in 1670. The book describes two extraordinary women, one white, Mary Richardson Moses Bowen Taft, who provided the land for what became the town and one African American, Mary Matthews Just, who became the soul of the Town. In order to provide for their needs, some persons operated stores and those with large amounts of land would rent a portion to others for farming. Societies such as The St. Andrews Improvement Mutual Society were established to assist its' members with resources during times of need such as illness or death in the family along with emotional support. While the larger community still searched for a way for all people to live and work together following the American Civil War, the Town of Maryville was an example of a place where an African American government presided over a community which also contained a few Caucasians and two Asians.
Paradoxes of Desegregation by
In this provocative appraisal of desegregation in South Carolina, R. Scott Baker contends that half a century after the Brown decision we still know surprisingly little about the new system of public education that replaced segregated caste arrangements in the South. Much has been written about the most dramatic battles for black access to southern schools, but Baker examines the rational and durable evasions that authorities institutionalized in response to African American demands for educational opportunity. A case study of southern evasions, ""Paradoxes of Desegregation"" documents the new educational order that grew out of decades of conflict between African American civil rights activists and South Carolina's political leadership. During the 1940s, Baker shows, a combination of black activism on a local level and NAACP litigation forced state officials to increase funding for black education. This early phase of the struggle in turn accelerated the development of institutions that cultivated a new generation of grass roots leaders. Baker demonstrates that white resistance to integration did not commence or crystallize after Brown. Instead, beginning in the 1940s, authorities in South Carolina institutionalized an exclusionary system of standardized testing that, according to Baker, exploited African Americans' educational disadvantages, limited access to white schools, and confined black South Carolinians to separate institutions. As massive resistance to desegregation collapsed in the late 1950s, officials in other southern states followed South Carolina's lead, adopting testing policies that continue to govern the region's educational system. ""Paradoxes of Desegregation"" brings much needed historical perspective to contemporary debates about the landmark federal education law, No Child Left Behind. Baker analyzes decades of historical evidence related to high-stakes testing, and concludes that desegregation, while a triumph for advantaged blacks, has paradoxically been a tragedy for most African Americans.
Resisting Jim Crow by
John McFall was born in Charleston, S.C. in 1878-the year after the disputed South Carolina gubernatorial election that marked the end of Reconstruction in South Carolina. He died in 1954-two months after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case handed down on May 17, 1954. This volume contains Dr. McFall's complete and never before published manuscript, in which he eloquently reports on events between those milestones. John McFall, the first of eleven children born to a Black couple in Charleston, was also among the first generation born in freedom in South Carolina. He witnessed the crippling of the economic strides citizens of African descent had made in the first decade after Emancipation. People of color were essentially designated second-class citizens due to being disenfranchised. John McFall tells a story rarely told: how legalized segregation was infused into a southern city and more. This future pharmacist tells about growing up in a tightly-knit family; playing on Charleston streets and waterways; attending Charleston schools. As a student working his way through college in Philadelphia, John was told that his color barred him from jobs for which he was qualified. Upon earning a Doctor of Pharmacy degree and returning home, he encountered similar challenges faced by other Black Charlestonians. Being intelligent and law-abiding were not enough. He was male, and he was over twenty-one. But he was not white. Therefore, he was not entitled to even the common courtesy of being called Mister or Doctor McFall by any white person, whether man, woman or child. Dr. McFall insisted on this courtesy as he navigated the color line and the white power structure for himself and the Black community. His defeats and victories provide insight into Black agency occurring in Charleston and other urban areas with imbedded state-sponsored segregation. While much has been written about the cruelties and the violence in the Jim Crow South, Dr. McFall's first-person account provides more "bricks" and "mortar" to assemble a more comprehensive view of our past.
The Preservation Society of Charleston is partnering with the Charleston County School District 20 Principal Collaboration Program, Burke High School Foundation and families of Black business-owners to elevate these important, yet underrepresented stories through the lens of personal experience.
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Access the digital collections within the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL). LCDL produces digital collections and projects that support research about the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and historically interconnected sites in the Atlantic World.
Access digital exhibits highlighting underrepresented race, class, gender, and labor histories within the Lowcountry region, and in historically interconnected Atlantic World sites.
