TY - JOUR
AU1 - Winford, Brandon Kyron, Lenzie
AB - This rich and comprehensive institutional history reveals that it is a miracle that many of the historically black colleges and universities founded in the late nineteenth century survived at all. This is true because of the historical legacy of inadequate funding due to neglect and racism at the hands of white supremacist political leaders who oversaw the public system of higher education. William C. Hine argues that at every turn, South Carolina State University's black presidents performed a balancing act to ensure basic needs were met amid Jim Crow and Democratic party politics—the school had an all-white board of trustees until 1966. He brings to the forefront tireless men and women institution builders who made it possible for generations of black South Carolinians to receive quality public education. The book is divided chronologically into ten chapters shaped largely by the presidential administrations from 1896 to 1988. The latter date Hine marks as the end of segregation in higher education in South Carolina, when the state finally complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, bringing about sweeping desegregation at its public colleges and universities. In 1896 leaders founded the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina in Orangeburg with funds from the Morrill Land-Grant Acts. It received less funding than its white counterpart, Clemson University. The chapters detail the broad historical context of the period and assess the main features of any college: administration, board of trustees, faculty, students, growth and expansion, curriculum, and programmatic strengths. Chapters 1–3 cover the institution's infancy to becoming a full-fledged college during the World War I era. Its first president was the black Reconstruction politician Thomas E. Miller. The next three chapters cover the Great Depression through Brown v. Board of Education (1954). During these years, the school survived through support from private philanthropies such as the General Education Board. It maintained an important cooperative extension program that provided black farm families with much-needed aid. Chapters 7–10 cover the period from the 1960s to the final decades of the twentieth century. The school made great strides, becoming an accredited institution. In the latter part of the 1960s, students and faculty gained more independence from the authoritarian leadership of the administration. The faculty gained a tenure policy and organized a faculty senate with shared governance. Nevertheless, the campus came to a grinding halt in February 1968 amid student demonstrations aimed at public accommodations in Orangeburg. The governor called in the highway patrol and National Guard to keep students at bay, fearing potential violence and property damage. While the students gathered at the entrance of the school late one evening, patrolmen shot and killed two South Carolina State students—Samuel Hammond Jr. and Henry E. Smith—and a local high school student, Delano H. Middleton. The shots left another twenty-eight bystanders injured. After the Orangeburg massacre, a jury refused to indict the individuals responsible for firing into the crowd. By 1988, South Carolina State finally had a majority-black board of trustees and received university designation four years later. This book is timely given challenges facing historically black colleges and universities, many of which have lost accreditation with few prospects for reopening. The work is a powerful history of black higher education and offers a social, political, and economic overview of the state and its relationship to its black citizenry. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz780
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/south-carolina-state-university-a-black-land-grant-college-in-jim-crow-CJfIJmX5Mm
SP - 1102
VL - 106
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -