South Carolina is a state in the coastal Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered to the north by North Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the southwest by Georgia across the Savannah River. South Carolina is the 40th most extensive and 23rd most populous U.S. state with a recorded population of 5,124,712 according to the 2020 census. In 2019, its GDP was $213.45 billion. South Carolina is composed of 46 counties. The capital is Columbia with a population of 137,300 in 2020; while its largest city is Charleston with a 2020 population of 150,277. The Greenville–Spartanburg-Anderson metropolitan area is the most populous in the state, with a 2020 population estimate of 1,455,892.
Orangeburg, also known as The Garden City, is the principal city in and the county seat of Orangeburg County, South Carolina, United States. The population of the city was 13,964 according to the 2010 United States Census and declined to 12,704 in the 2020 census. The city is located 37 miles southeast of Columbia, on the north fork of the Edisto River.
South Carolina State University is a public, historically black, land-grant university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. It is the only public, historically black land-grant institution in South Carolina, is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS).
Claflin University is a private historically black university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Founded in 1869 after the American Civil War by northern missionaries for the education of freedmen and their children, it offers bachelor's and master's degrees.
Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer and an arts educator.
Franklin Israel Moses Jr. was a South Carolina lawyer and editor who became active as a Republican politician in the state during the Reconstruction Era. He was elected to the legislature in 1868 and as governor in 1872, serving into 1874. Enemies labelled him the 'Robber Governor'.
Ernest Adolphus Finney Jr. was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice appointed to the South Carolina Supreme Court since the Reconstruction Era. He spent the last years of his life in Sumter, South Carolina. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
Leo Franklin Twiggs is an American painter and educator.
Matthew James Perry Jr. was an attorney and in 1979 appointed as the first African-American United States district judge in South Carolina, serving on the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina. In 1976 he had been the first African-American attorney from the Deep South to be appointed to the federal judiciary, which he served on the United States Court of Military Appeals. Perry established his career with civil rights litigation, defending Gloria Blackwell in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in her 1962 suit against her arrest for sitting in the whites-only area of the regional hospital while waiting for emergency treatment for her daughter. Other landmark cases included achieving the integration of Clemson University and reapportionment of the state legislature.
Bakari T. Sellers is an American attorney, political commentator, and politician. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives for the 90th District from 2006 to 2014.
Merton Daniel Simpson was an American abstract expressionist painter and African and tribal art collector and dealer.
William M. Halsey (1915–1999) was an influential abstract artist in the American Southeast, particularly in his home state of South Carolina. He was represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City (1948–53). His mural studies for the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Temple were included in Synagogue Art Today at the Jewish Museum, New York City (1952). His work was included in the annual International Exhibition of Watercolors, the Art Institute of Chicago. He had work in the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings (1953). A mid-career retrospective was held at the Greenville County Museum of Art in 1972 and then traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Florence Museum, Florence, South Carolina.
Alma Stone Williams was a musician, educator, music scholar, and pioneer in racial integration. Williams attended the 1944 Summer Music Institute. She was the first African-American student to be enrolled at Black Mountain College and the first black student to openly integrate a Southern white college.
Edwin Augustus Harleston was an American artist and founding president of the Charleston, South Carolina, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He is known for his realistic portraits inspired by classical paintings. He was excluded from the whites-only artistic movement known as the Charleston Renaissance.
Cecil J. Williams is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor whose photographs document the civil rights movement in South Carolina beginning in the 1950s.
Sigmund Abeles is an American figurative artist and art educator. His work embodies the "expressive and psychological aspects of the human figure; an art focused on the life cycle." He taught art for 27 years at various institutions including Swain School of Design, Wellesley College, Boston University, the National Academy, and the Art Students League of New York. Currently Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, Abeles works full-time in his NYC and upstate NY studios. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards for printmaking, drawing, painting, and sculpture, including Pastel Society of America Hall of Fame honoree in 2004 and most recently the Artists' Fellowship 2017 Benjamin West Clinedinst Medal. His work can be found in many public institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Abeles was one of three artists featured in Manfred Kirchheimer's 2012 feature-length independent film Art Is... The Permanent Revolution, on the history of the art of protest in prints.
Prior to the civil rights movement in South Carolina, African Americans in the state had very few political rights. South Carolina briefly had a majority-black government during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, but with the 1876 inauguration of Governor Wade Hampton III, a Democrat who supported the disenfranchisement of blacks, African Americans in South Carolina struggled to exercise their rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation kept African Americans from voting, and it was virtually impossible for someone to challenge the Democratic Party, which ran unopposed in most state elections for decades. By 1940, the voter registration provisions written into the 1895 constitution effectively limited African-American voters to 3,000—only 0.8 percent of those of voting age in the state.
Curtis Christopher Robinson was an American pharmacist and U.S. Army Air Force officer. He served as a fighter pilot during World War II with the 332nd Fighter Group's 99th Fighter Squadron, a component of the Tuskegee Airmen.
Robert Charles Bates, was an American architect, educator, and textbook author. He was an African American architect and helped design and build many of the Claflin University campus buildings, a historically black university (HBU) in South Carolina. He is thought to the first Black teacher of architecture at a HBU; and the first African American author of an architecture textbook.
Henry Nehemiah Tisdale is an American retired academic administrator, educator, and mathematician. He served as the 8th president of Claflin University, a historically black university in Orangeburg, South Carolina from 1994 to 2019.
