Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era

Abstract

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-To-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers' activism in the spotlight-activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-The-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.