“The schoolchildren’s parents knew a way out: education. During the first Great Migration, 1.6 million black Southerners left, escaping Jim Crow laws, deep poverty, and racial violence. But they left behind family ties, family land, and the tight communities they had created with kinship and religion. Many believed saying goodbye to home shouldn’t be the antidote. Equal opportunity, particularly in education, could fuel a better life wherever you lived.”

“Ferdinand Pearson walked seven miles, one way, from Davis Station to Mount Zion School, which had two rooms and one stove. ‘We usually gave ourselves two hours to make it,’ he said. Siblings Jesse and Piney Pearson walked nine miles, one way, from Davis Station to Scott’s Branch school in the town of Summerton. Piney cut cardboard to line their shoes, then wrapped the shoes in plastic. No one had a wool coat. The children wore homemade flannel underwear and layers of cotton hand-me-downs.”

“Jesse Pearson held dear Reverend [Joseph Armstrong] DeLaine’s warning at the second meeting at Saint Mark AME: ‘This will be rough. Some will fall on the wayside. Some will lose their jobs; I definitely will lose mine. If you are willing to go ahead regardless, I will go ahead.’ For Jesse Pearson it was a heroic, even biblical moment: ‘And the people said, ‘We will.’ He said, ‘Someone may die on the way. Would you go on?’ And we pledged we would go on regardless.’”

“The heat of white people’s ire focused on the Pearsons. They assessed exorbitant penalties: no bus, and now no combine, no seed, no fertilizer, no loans. No white farmer or distributor allowed the Pearsons to borrow machinery at harvest time or sold them the supplies required for farming. No one would gin Pearson cotton. Fertilizer dealers refused to sell Levi Pearson fertilizer; oil dealers refused to sell him oil. Black people were afraid to talk to the Pearsons; white people wouldn’t. The younger Pearson children worried that any food their parents purchased was poisoned. At night they listened as men fired shots at their homes and their fathers fired back into the air, announcing their readiness. When the gunfire started, their parents pushed them under the beds. When Piney Pearson was too afraid to sleep, her father would tell her, “Don’t worry. Say your prayers.’”

“A few more lines down the petition, Annie Gibson signed, as did her husband William and their children Maxine, Harold, and William Gibson Jr. The Gibsons were sharecroppers, often a lifetime arrangement. Their landlord kicked them off the land. William Gibson began work in a black-owned funeral home and farmed for others. Outspoken and outgoing Annie Gibson was fired from the Windsor Motel, known for a towering highway sign adorned with a bathing-suited woman arched into a dive.”

“‘My father had purchased a wagon, and [the seller] took back the wagon and threatened to take the mules to discourage him being affiliated with the NAACP and meeting with them.’ When threats against the petitioners increased, ‘He would say he was willing to die for his rights, and that was real.’”

“In October 1952, the DeLaine family’s former residence in Summerton burned to the ground. Only chimneys and the foundation remained in the morning’s smoky light. Neighbors told the family that the fire department refused to put out the fire. The home was one-tenth of a mile outside the city limits, three-tenths of a mile from a fire hydrant. An FBI report dismissed the refusal, saying the town owned no hose long enough to bridge the distance from house to hydrant and no Summerton law compelled a firefighter to put out a fire. Rumors said a local alcoholic was paid to set the fire.”

“The night of October 5, Saint James AME burned while Reverend DeLaine attended an AME conference in Charleston. The church, with brand new pulpit and pews, was destroyed within and its steeple and roof charred before firefighters stopped the blaze. Investigators determined arson was at fault. On October 7 the DeLaines received an anonymous letter, postmarked Lake City. ‘Several hundred of us have had a meeting and pleged our selves to put you where you belong, if there is such a place.’ The writer added, ‘I wonder if ever heard about the Negro Postmaster that was send to Lake City and was notified to leve. He refused. However he left, but in a coffin.’
This was a death threat, a reference to the 1898 murder of Frazier Baker, Lake City’s first black postmaster. Eleven white men set fire to the Bakers’ combined post office and home, then shot to death Baker and two-year-old Julia, held in mother Lavinia Baker’s arms. Lavinia Baker was wounded, as were two daughters and a son; two other children escaped without wounds. The survivors fled to a neighbor’s. The letter to Reverend DeLaine continued, ‘So we have decided to give you 10 days to leave Lake City and if you are not away by then rather than let you spread your filthy dirty poison here any longer. We have made plans to move you if it takes dynimite to do it. This is final.’”