South Carolina in the civil rights movement

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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.^[1]

Jim Crow laws, legalized by the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), created a district color line across the South. African Americans were prohibited from using the same facilities as white Americans, and African-American children were prohibited from attending white schools; schools meant for colored children were typical of lower quality than white schools. Public segregation and voting restrictions were eventually reversed after the events of the civil rights movement in South Carolina and the United States during the 1950s and the 1960s.

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