Who could have guessed the folks of the sweet red brick church just past the fields of soybeans on this sunny South Carolina roadside had raised such hell some 50 years ago. It was here in Summerton, South Carolina, that 19 members of the Liberty Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church became plaintiffs in the case of
Harry Briggs, Jr. vs. R. W. Elliot in U.S. District Court in Charleston in 1952. Although the case was dismissed, it and others led to the 1954
Brown decision that dismantled the "separate but equal" doctrine.
On this Sunday morning, four churches came to celebrate the arrival of the Voices of Civil Rights bus with a joyful mass of song and scripture. Among the congregants was Harry Briggs's youngest son, Nathaniel. He told us his family lived just 300 yards from their school, but his father felt he had to stand up for those families whose children had to walk up to eight or nine miles each way to school from their farms. And even after the farmers raised money to buy a school bus for their kids, the school board refused to pay for gas. School buses, gas-¡Vit was something available to all white children without question. Putting his name on the lawsuit cost Harry Briggs and his wife their jobs and years of harassment. Briggs had to move to Florida to find work and send money home for several years.
"We didn't have a phone, so my father would have to call the funeral home. Once a month we would all go to the funeral home to be able to talk to him," said Nathaniel Briggs. "I sometimes asked my father why he went through all he went through when his kids didn't have to take a bus to school. It was faith. He wanted to support those who lived in the country and had the same face he did. They were family and it was the right thing to do...once you start on a road like that, you can't go back."
Later this Sunday the Voices bus arrived for an ice cream social at Columbia's Bible Way Church. The church's 2,000 members enjoyed a two-hour service before some of them shared their stories of this area's tumultuous past.
Mattie Anderson Roberson, now 62, waited patiently to share her experience of January 1961, when she and several hundred classmates from South Carolina State University in Orangeburg attempted to march from campus to the local Woolworth's. They would not make it.
"A block from campus, we saw fire trucks hooking up their hoses waiting for us. We didn't know what they were there for. They put the hoses to us and the water was so fierce that it knocked us to the ground. We had a blind student walking with us and she fell down and they put the hose on her so hard the water was rolling her around like she was a ball...People on the street were spitting on us and they had the dogs on us. After that, they told us that they were taking us to jail."
With no room in the town's small jail, they were taken dripping wet to a cow pasture to stand in the winter cold while police trained shotguns on them. They waited, corralled, until university officials bailed them out.
"I felt dehumanized. I was so traumatized I never participated in a march again," said Roberson. "It did teach me that no one can take away your esteem and it made me really take a hold of my life and promise to try and impact as many people as I could."
Roberson, now retired, kept that promise. She taught middle school for 32 years in Brooklyn, New York.
