Celebrate Black History Month!

Join us in honoring African American History Month as we highlight the incredible contributions and achievements of Black South Carolinians.

South Carolina has been home to a wealth of trailblazers across various fields—from musicians and athletes to educators, politicians, and writers—whose stories of resilience, excellence, and cultural influence have shaped our state and our nation.

Discover South Carolina's Black History

  • Black Musicians: South Carolina has produced legendary artists whose music has influenced genres from gospel to jazz, blues, and hip hop.
  • Black Politicians: The state's rich political history includes trailblazing Black leaders who fought for justice, equality, and civil rights.
  • Black Educators: Pioneers in education who built institutions and fought for the advancement of Black students and communities.
  • Black Writers: South Carolina has been home to prominent Black authors whose works explore the African American experience and contribute to American literature.
  • Black Athletes: Athletes from South Carolina have excelled in sports, breaking barriers and becoming icons in their fields.

Notable Black South Carolinians from StudySC

Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie

Dizzy Gillespie

Portrait of Francis Lewis Cardoza

Francis Lewis Cardoza

Portrait of Ron McNair

Ron McNair

Portrai tof Septima Poinsette Clark

Septima Poinsette Clark

Portrait of Dori Sanders

Dori Sanders

Portrait of Larry Doby

Larry Doby

Portrait of Ulysess Dove

Ulysess Dove

Portrait of Althea Gibson

Althea Gibson

Selections from StudySC - Know Where You Live, the State Library's resource for students to learn about their community, South Carolina history, and the people who have made a significant impact on the state and the world.

Throughout the month, we invite you to explore the wealth of resources available through the South Carolina State Library. These materials offer a glimpse into the vibrant Black History, Arts, Culture, and Education that our state has to offer. Learn, celebrate, and reflect on the lasting impact of Black excellence in South Carolina.

Take a moment to delve into the remarkable legacy of Black South Carolinians—past and present—and experience the profound contributions that continue to inspire us today!
 

Cover of Historically Black: American icons who attended HBCUs

Historically Black: American Icons Who Attended HBCUs

Alonzo Vereen

The ultimate celebration of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), this first-of-its-kind illustrated anthology is tailor-made for devoted alumni, aspiring applicants, recent graduates, and more.

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Cover of Voices from Meadowbrook Park: Memories of Greenville, South Carolina's Historic Baseball Park (1938-1972)

Voices from Meadowbrook Park: Memories of Greenville, South Carolina's Historic Baseball Park (1938-1972)

Mike Chibbaro

In 1938 Baltimore businessman Joseph Cambria funded the construction of a new minor league baseball park in Greenville, South Carolina. It became known as Meadowbrook Park, and for the next 34 years, it was home to a scrapbook full of sacred baseball memories, including the day Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig came to town, a legendary tape-measure homerun hit by Ted Williams, and a game in which Mickey Mantle went five for five and signed hundreds of autographs for local fans. An impressive list of more than 40 Hall of Famers appeared at the historic park.

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Cover of Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy

Voices of Black South Carolina: Legend & Legacy

Damon L. Fordham

Did you know that eighty-eight years before Rosa Parks's historic protest, a courageous black woman in Charleston kept her seat on a segregated streetcar? What about Robert Smalls, who steered a Confederate warship into Union waters, freeing himself and some of his family, and later served in the South Carolina state legislature? In this inspiring collection, historian Damon L. Fordham relates story after story of notable black South Carolinians, many of whose contributions to the state's history have not been brought to light until now. From the letters of black soldiers during the Civil War to the impassioned pleas by students of "Munro's School" for their right to an education, these are the voices of protest and dissent, the voices of hope and encouragement and the voices of progress.

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Cover of A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South

Audrey Thomas McCluskey

The world they inherited -- "Moving like a whirlwind" : Lucy Craft Laney, activist educator -- "The best secondary school in Georgia" : building the Haines Institute culture -- "Ringing up a school" : Mary McLeod Bethune's impact on Daytona Beach -- "Show some daylight between you" : Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the schooling experience of Memorial Palmer Institute graduates, 1948-1958 -- "Telling some mighty truths" : Nannie Helen Burroughs, activist educator and social critic -- "The masses and the classes" : women's friendships and support networks among school founders -- Passing into history : commemorations, memorials, and the legacies of Black women school founders -- Milestones and legacies.

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Cover of African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage and Excellence

African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage and Excellence

Lean’tin L. Bracks

This almanac is devoted to illustrating and demystifying the moving, difficult, and often lost history of black life in America. A legacy of pride, struggle, and triumph spanning more than 400 years is presented through a mix of biographies (including 500 influential figures), little-known or misunderstood historical facts, enlightening essays on significant legislation and movements, and 150 rare photographs and illustrations. Covering events surrounding the civil rights movement; African American literature, art, and music; religion within the black community; and advances in science and medicine, this reference connects history to the issues currently facing the African American community and provides a range of information on society and culture.

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Cover of Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

Sandra J. Graham

In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they laid the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century.

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Cover of Juneteenth Rodeo

Juneteenth Rodeo

Sarah Bird

In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders—legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey’s Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley—as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.

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Cover of Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

Alonzo Vereen

Recentering the development of industrially scaled Southern pottery traditions around enslaved and free Black potters working in the mid-nineteenth century, this catalogue presents groundbreaking scholarship and new perspectives on stoneware made in and around Edgefield, South Carolina. Among the remarkable works included are a selection of regional face vessels as well as masterpieces by enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who signed, dated, and incised verses on many of his jars, even though literacy among enslaved people was criminalized at the time. Essays on the production, collection, dispersal, and reception of stoneware from Edgefield offer a critical look at what it means to collect, exhibit, and interpret objects made by enslaved artisans. Several featured contemporary works inspired by or related to Edgefield stoneware attest to the cultural and historical significance of this body of work, and an interview with acclaimed contemporary artist Simone Leigh illuminates its continued relevance.

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Cover of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Nikole Hannah-Jones

The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture--including Linda Villarosa, Jamelle Bouie, Jeneen Interlandi, Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and Bryan Stevenson. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary cultre, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to understand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future.

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An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South

Regina N. Bradley

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, is one of the most influential musical groups within American popular culture of the past twenty-five years. Through Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton have articulated a vision of postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that combines the roots of funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith and spirituality, and Afrofuturism into a style all its own. This postmodern southern aesthetic, largely promulgated and disseminated by OutKast and its collaborators, is now so prevalent in mainstream American culture (neither Beyoncé Knowles's "Formation" nor Joss Whedon's sci-fi /western mashup Firefly could exist without OutKast's collage aesthetic) that we rarely consider how challenging and experimental it actually is to create a new southern aesthetic. An OutKast Reader, then, takes the group's aesthetic as a lens through which readers can understand and explore contemporary issues of Blackness, gender, urbanism, southern aesthetics, and southern studies more generally. Divided into sections on regional influences, gender, and visuality, the essays collectively offer a vision of OutKast as a key shaper of conceptions of the twenty-first-century South, expanding that vision beyond long-held archetypes and cultural signifiers. The volume includes a who's who of hip-hop studies and African American studies scholarship, including Charlie Braxton, Susana M. Morris, Howard Ramsby II, Reynaldo Anderson, and Ruth Nicole Brown.

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Upcoming Event

Author photo with cover of book The Cheese Biscuit Queen Kiss My Aspic

The Cheese Biscuit Queen - Kiss My Aspic! with Mary Martha Greene

March 25, 2025, 6:00 PM
Join us virtually at our next Speaker at the Center series on Tuesday, March 25th at 6:00PM with the Cheese Biscuit Queen, Mary Martha Greene, for a conversation about her recently released, "The Cheese Biscuit Queen - Kiss My Aspic!"

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