Briggs v. Elliott, 1946-1971,

Launches Brown v. Board

Harry and Eliza Briggs signed first, followed by their children, when the black parents of Summerton, South Carolina, Petitioned first for “equal everything” and then for “nonsegregation” in Briggs v. Elliott, the first lawsuit of five composing Brown v. Board of Education. Photo courtesy of Nathaniel Briggs.

1929-1935

Attorney Charles Hamilton Houston builds the Howard University Law School into a training ground for civil rights attorneys who will work on strategies to end Jim Crow. 

See “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow” film clip.

And an excerpt on Houston from “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.”

1934

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) appoints Houston its special counsel. Houston believes the best attack on Jim Crow laws may be through the inequality of the nation’s segregated schools, long justified by the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Read Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

And an 1895 Plessy v. Ferguson document.

1934-1935

The NAACP debuts a documentary, filmed by Houston and Edward Lovett. The film shows the shockingly poor condition of South Carolina’s schools for black children, contrasting the brick school buildings for white children with the worn-siding, patched-roof shacks for black children. 

See the documentary “A Study of Educational Inequalities in South Carolina.”

1940

Thurgood Marshall, who succeeded Houston as NAACP’s special counsel in 1938, founds the NAACP’s legal defense fund, which will become the Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). 

1946

Levi Pearson asks the Clarendon County school superintendent for funds for a bus. Black schoolchildren walk nine miles from Davis Station to Summerton schools, one way. White children ride school buses and spit out their windows at the black children. Brothers Levi and Hammett Pearson and Joseph Lemon pay $700 for a second try at owning a school bus ($8,336 in today dollars). White children have buses, paved playgrounds, desks, schoolbooks, indoor bathrooms, auditoriums, water fountains, heating, and libraries. Black children have none of these, even though their parents pay taxes, too. 

April 15,  1947 

Jackie Robinson, the first black athlete in Major League Baseball, plays his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

June 29, 1947

Harry S. Truman becomes the first U.S. president to address the NAACP, delivering his speech from the Lincoln Memorial. Truman says he is convinced the nation has reached “a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens.”

See Truman at the Lincoln Memorial. Eleanor Roosevelt and the NAACP’s Walter White listen on the front row.

June 1947 

James Myles Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the NAACP, makes a summer speech at Benedict College and Allen University, side-by-side colleges for black students in Columbia. Hinton asks for plaintiffs for a bus lawsuit. Rev. Joseph Armstrong DeLaine takes the challenge home to Clarendon County, where he is a Methodist minister and educator. The Pearson brothers volunteer and meet with Harold Boulware Sr., a Columbia attorney and local NAACP counsel.

July 1947

Boulware mails the Pearson petition for a school bus to the board chairman of School District 26, the Clarendon County superintendent, and the secretary of the state’s board of education.

September 1947

Levi Pearson is referred to district trustees; no action is taken by them.  

Read a letter (likely via Boulware) from Levi Pearson to the school board.

November 1947

The district falsely claims Pearson dropped the issue. 

Read Boulware’s letter to DeLaine, asking if this is true.

December 1947

Pearson writes a letter to say the district’s claim is untrue; Boulware requests a hearing with the school board.

Read Pearson’s response, which says board members “assume too much” and refers them to Boulware.

February 1948

Boulware mails legal papers to the LDF for approval; the school board holds a hearing but takes no action.

March 1948

Levi Pearson sues for a school bus on behalf of his son James Pearson. District officials say he paid taxes in a different district, thus James is not lawfully enrolled and has no legal standing. Levi and Hammett Pearson have receipts for taxes paid in several school districts.

June 1948

The NAACP decides not to sue because of the confusion regarding school districts and withdraws the lawsuit. Pearson is denied credit, purchases of seed and other supplies, loans of equipment, and credit, all of this controlled by white farmers and businessmen.

October 1948

The NAACP state conference, at its annual meeting, announces “unalterable opposition to any form of segregated education. Equality of citizenship must begin in the school system.”

March 1949 

Marshall, Boulware, state NAACP members, and Clarendon County parents meet. Marshall says the NAACP no longer has an interest in bus lawsuits. The goal has become schools equal to those serving white children. The Summerton delegation persuades Marshall their petitioners can fulfill this task.

End of March 1949 

Eugene Montgomery, the state NAACP executive secretary, secures 50 potential plaintiffs. Leading ministers supporting a school desegregation lawsuit include DeLaine; Rev. James Washington Seals, of St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Summerton; and Rev. Eugene Edwards Richburg, of Liberty Hill AME in the countryside.

May 12, 1949 

Montgomery secures authorization papers from black parents in various districts in Clarendon County. 

June through September 1949

Summerton parents organize to protest actions of the Scott’s Branch principal, who is accused of charging extra fees, pocketing money from fundraisers, and firing teachers. In retaliation, DeLaine is fired from his principal’s post in Silver.

October 1949

The school board hears the parents’ complaints; the Scott’s Branch principal leaves town.

November 11, 1949

The NAACP’s “Equal Everything” petition, as DeLaine calls it, arrives for signatures. In all, 107 parents and children sign for “educational advantages and facilities equal in all respects to that which is provided for whites.” The petition says that School District 22 operates separate, segregated schools, with white children at Summerton Elementary and Summerton High School and black children at Liberty Hill and Rambay Elementary and Scott’s Branch High School, “solely because of their race and color.”

See the November 11, 1949 petition.

Parents sign the petition in Eliza and Harry Briggs’s home. The first to sign are Harry and Eliza Briggs and their children Harry J., Thomas Lee, and Katherine Briggs.

December 1949

Harry Briggs is fired from his job as a gas station attendant, Eliza Briggs from cleaning at a motel. Their mortgage is called due. Other petitioners also are punished. The family of sharecropper William Gibson is evicted, and Annie Gibson is fired from cleaning work at a motel. Robert Georgia’s wagon is repossessed. Senobia Hilton is fired from her post as a school cook. Hazel Ragin, a house painter, loses all his white customers. The family of Henry Scott, a sharecropper, is evicted. Mary and Louis Oliver own a café; vendors refuse to deliver supplies. Seals is fired from his additional posts teaching school and teaching veterans; wife Rebecca Seals is fired from school teaching. Lee Richardson, a sharecropper, is evicted. DeLaine, his wife, and two of his sisters are fired from teaching jobs. Willie Stukes Sr. is fired from his mechanics job. A plot to assault or kill DeLaine fails when DeLaine, who has been warned, pretends to have a gun, and a friend pulls up in a truck,, which he quickly boards.

January 1950 

The former Scotts Branch principal sues DeLaine for slander, asking for $20,000. The jury sets a fine of $4,200, which the judge reduces to $2,700. Warned in advance, DeLaine has transferred deeds to property he owns to avoid confiscation.

March 1950

A crop duster drops a KKK death threat in black residential areas.

Read the KKK-signed threat.

April 1950

A white man kills James McKnight, who stands by a roadside, likely thinking McKnight is a petitioner. In McKnight’s car, viewing the killing, are children and other relatives. When no witnesses besides the assailant are heard by the coroner and no charge is filed, DeLaine appeals to the FBI, which finds no civil rights violation. The KKK periodically surrounds the Seals’s home. DeLaine’s bishop transfers DeLaine to Lake City in Florence County.

May 16, 1950

Briggs v. Elliott is filed in federal court in Charleston.

June 5, 1950 

The U.S. Supreme Court decides two of the NAACP’s higher education lawsuits,  Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents. The separate and inferior school for Heman Sweatt – two professors in two rented rooms -- and the education restrictions imposed on George W. McLaurin -- segregated classroom alcoves -- violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Read Sweatt v. Painter, 339 US 629 (1950).

And McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 US 637 (1950).

July 1950 

The NAACP determines all public school lawsuits will ask for the “final relief” of “nonsegregation.” Judge J. Waties Waring dismisses the Briggs petition for equal schools so that the NAACP can file a desegregation lawsuit.

December 22, 1950 

Twenty adults and forty-six children sign the desegregation petition.

January 13, 1951

Willie Stukes Sr., who lost his job as a mechanic and then worked in his yard, dies when a car falls on him.

February 28, 1951

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, another “nonsegregation” lawsuit, is filed in the US District Court for Kansas.

March 1951 

South Carolina Gov. James F. Byrnes, in a speech to white teachers of the S.C. Education Association (SCEA), promises white and colored children will not “mix” in schools. “This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s country.” 

May 1951 

Kenneth Clark, founder with wife Mamie Phipps Clark of the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem, travels to Summerton to do the “doll test.” The NAACP has searched for a way to make the point that segregation itself damages black children’s development. Clark offers Summerton children the dolls, asking them which is the “nice” doll or the “bad” doll, which is the doll resembling them. The majority of black children prefer the white doll.

Read “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children” by Kenneth and Mamie Clark.

See a child examining a white doll as Clark watches.

May 28, 1951 

Briggs v. Elliott is heard in U.S. District Court in Charleston. Marshall argues for the Clarendon County petitioners. More than 500 fill the courthouse corridors while hundreds more wait outside.

June 17, 1951 

1,500 attend an NAACP testimonial held at Liberty Hill AME to honor petitioners and lawyers.

June 23, 1951

The U.S. District Court denies an injunction to abolish segregation and grants an injunction to equalize educational facilities. The court gives the state six months to report. The majority opinion says segregation in graduate school is different, that seventeen states and the District of Columbia have required segregation of public schools for more than three-quarters of a century. The opinion says school segregation does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, but, instead, is a matter for state legislatures, rather than courts, because public schools are provided and paid for by the states. Judge Waring writes a ferocious dissent. He says the Fourteenth Amendment refers to “all persons.” He cites the sophistry, prejudice, warped thinking, and sadism of white supremacy. He writes, “Segregation is per se inequality.”

The plaintiff’s plea for an injunction that ends public school segregation in South Carolina is denied. However, the defendants must furnish equal education facilities to black students within the district and report back on progress within six months. The NAACP appeals to the US Supreme Court.

Read Briggs v. Elliott, 98 F.Supp. 529 (E.D.S.C. 1951).

See Waring’s dissent. 

August 1951

While the NAACP does not succeed in Kansas, either, with Brown v. Board, the District Court does agree that segregation harms black children. Brown is appealed to the Supreme Court.

October 1951 

An arsonist burns down the DeLaine home in Summerton; only the foundation remains. His insurance is collected by the court for the slander suit.

See the DeLaine family at the ruins of their home.

Before 1951 ends

The NAACP has filed Bolling v. Sharpe in US District Court in Washington, DC. The NAACP has filed Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart in US District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. And the NAACP has filed Dorothy Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward on behalf of 117 students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Virginia.

November - December 1951 

The state consolidates Clarendon’s thirty-four school districts into three, provides school buses, and accepts bids for a high school for black students.

Read “Separate but Equal? South Carolina’s Fight Over School Segregation.”

And “South Carolina’s Equalization Schools, 1951-1960.”

South Carolina voters (majority white, of course) approve a constitutional amendment to remove the state’s responsibility to provide public schools. Voters okay this 2-1, evidently preferring no schools to desegregated schools.

January 28, 1952

The Clarendon County School Board filed its required progress report in December 1951. A new Summerton high school is expect to be ready for September 1952. Buses are provided blacks school children. The District Court sends the report to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court sends it back for “further proceedings.”

March 13, 1952

On March 3, the District Court holds its rehearing on Briggs. Ten days later the court accepts the state’s building progress and prediction that education facilities and opportunities “will be equal to those afforded white persons” by September 1952. The court’s ruling does not require further progress reports.

Read Briggs v. Elliott, 103 F.Supp. 920 (E.D.S.C. 1952).

May 1952

Under appeal again, Briggs v. Elliott heads back to the U.S. Supreme Court.

December 9, 1952

The U.S. Supreme Court hears five cases regarding school desegregation: Briggs, Dorothy Davis v. School Board of Prince Edward County Virginia, Oliver Brown v Board of Education Topeka Kansas, Bolling v. Sharpe in Washington, D.C.,  and the combined Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart in Delaware. While Briggs was the first case filed and heard, the cases are consolidated under Brown v. Board. The court asks for reargument with briefs regarding the Fourteenth Amendment.

October 1953 

Earl Warren becomes chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

December 7-9, 1953

At sunrise, spectators line up to hear the arguments of Brown v. Board before the Supreme Court; DeLaine gets in. He hears Marshall and Spottswood Robinson argue for the Clarendon County petitioners. Marshall observes that “for some reason, which is still unexplained, Negroes are taken out of the mainstream of life in these states.” The Court, he says, must consider not what is reasonable to the S.C. Legislature but what is reasonable given the Fourteenth Amendment.

Read “School Segregation Cases - Order of Argument.”

February 1954

The Supreme Court justices’ discussions end with unanimity. They maintain secrecy while Warren writes the opinion himself.

May 17, 1954 

The U.S. Supreme Court announces its decision in Brown v. Board. “Does segregation of public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe it does.” And “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Segregation deprived the plaintiffs of equal protection of the laws, guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.” But further arguments must take place in 1955 before the Supreme Court will deliver an implementation rule.

Read Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

June 1954 

South Carolina decrees that state aid will end to any schools accepting black students as transfers to all-white schools. At the Summerton school board meeting, parents argue about closing schools immediately.

June 1955

Ku Klux Klan activity in Lake City includes Operation Shoot ‘Em Up, with attacks on the DeLaine family, their home, and their church.

July 15, 1955

187 more plaintiffs are located for the desegregation lawsuit, despite the violence and economic punishment. South Carolina’s attorneys argue for more time. Marshall says the state shouldn’t ask for time to continue violating the law. The District Court decrees the Constitution does not require integration; it “merely forbids discrimination.”

August 1955

Clarendon County trustees tell Marshall they will close schools rather than integrate them. With NAACP support, black parents in Elloree, Sumter, Orangeburg, Florence, Hopkins, Charleston, and Mount Pleasant also file petitions for desegregated schools. Segregationists form White Citizen’s Councils whose members impose economic retaliation called “the squeeze” or “the freeze.” At school’s start white men guard the still segregated schools with rifles. 

August-September 1955

Four members of the Richburg family are fired; vendors won’t supply Oliver’s Café again. Rev. Richburg of Liberty Hill AME is fired from his teaching job. School janitor Henry Brown and his son are fired.

October 1955

DeLaine receives a death threat followed by his church burning down and attacks on the family home. Under gunfire Mattie DeLaine escapes to a neighbor’s; DeLaine fires at a car holding three assailants, then drives toward Florence, escaping to New York City. 

November 3, 1955

DeLaine is indicted for assault with a deadly weapon. 

December 2, 1955 

DeLaine turns himself in to federal authorities in New York City. The Justice Department and New York refuse to treat him as a fugitive to be extradited.

February-March 1956

The state Legislature approves closing state parks and state-supported colleges if desegregation is attempted. The Legislature also passes a resolution approving White Citizens’ Councils’ efforts to continue the “American way of life.” Legislation prohibits any city, county, school district, or state entity hiring anyone belonging to the NAACP. 

October 2, 1955

Rev. Seals’s house burns down. The house is underinsured, and he holds no insurance on furnishings.

1957

Relief efforts provide clothes and other goods to petitioners. Fund raising creates a reserve fund to provide petitioners loans through the black-owned Victory Savings Bank in Columbia. The Pearsons and others found the Clarendon County Improvement Association to help black farmers.

1958-59

As the school year begins, only 777 of 3,000 Southern school districts are desegregated.

July and September 1959

Summerton and Manning parents ask for student reassignment to schools serving only white students.

1964

The Civil Rights Act authorizes the Department of Justice to file desegregation lawsuits.

1965 

Five black students enroll in all-white Summerton High School.

1966

Rita Mae McDonald becomes the first black student to graduate from Summerton High School after the Justice Department investigates harassment intended to prohibit her graduation.

Hear Rita Mae McDonald’s sister.

1970-71

South Carolina schools desegregate when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals orders the implementation of a U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare plan. Only 24 of 2,261 black Summerton students have attended an all-white school. Summerton High School closes rather than accept black students.

Read “Judge Bids H.E.W. Force 17 States to Desegregate.”

And “With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty.”