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.
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 when 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.
Julianna Michelle Childs is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She was previously a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina from 2010 to 2022 and a judge of the South Carolina Circuit Court from 2006 to 2010.
The South Carolina State University School of Law was a law school at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, that existed from 1947 until 1966.
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.
David Garrison Hill is a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. He previously served as a judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals from 2017 to 2023.
