Bitter Resistance: Clarendon County, South Carolina

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Plaintiffs
Some of the plaintiffs of the Briggs case and their
supporters, 1950
(Courtesy of Cecil Williams)

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Briggs
Harry Briggs’s name appeared first on the
complaint. A Navy veteran, he worked as an automobile mechanic. His wife, Eliza,
was a maid in a nearby motel. Like many who signed the petition, they were fired
from their jobs for their courage and eventually left Summerton to find work.

(Courtesy of Nathaniel Briggs)

Modjeska Simpkins
Outspoken and fearless, Modjeska Simpkins was one of
the leaders of the NAACP in South Carolina from the 1930s to the 1970s. In the
Briggs case, she helped draft the petition for integrated schools. As a member
of the board of directors of the black-owned Victory Savings Bank, she helped
arrange loans for some people of Summerton who lost their jobs for supporting
the case.
(Courtesy of Modjeska Simkins Collection, South Caroliniana
Library, University of South Carolina)

Harold Boulware
To pursue the complaint in court, Rev. Joseph De Laine
turned to Harold Boulware, the leading NAACP attorney in South Carolina.
Boulware knew that the national office of the NAACP was looking for school cases
to challenge segregation, and he invited Thurgood Marshall to South Carolina.
Boulware, also a graduate of the Howard University School of Law, was the first
African American to pass the bar in South Carolina since Reconstruction.

(Courtesy of Harolyn Boulware)

Clark conducting doll test

On May 24, 1951, Kenneth Clark, a psychology professor at City College of New
York, came to Summerton. Using dolls of different colors, he tested the children
of Scott’s Branch school to measure how they felt about themselves. He asked the
children to show him the “nice” doll, the “bad” doll, and the doll that “looks
like you.”

Ten of the 16 children said the brown doll looked bad. The results of these
tests strongly suggested that forced segregation damaged the self-image of
African American children.
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Testing documents

To probe the effects of segregation, Kenneth Clark asked the black children
of Summerton to color these drawings. After they colored the other items on the
page, he asked the children to color one of the figures to look “like yourself”
and the other “how you would like little children to be.”

Fifty-two percent colored the other child white or an irrelevant color. The
South Carolina case was the first time this kind of psychological evidence was
used in major school desegregation lawsuits. It would become a key argument in
the NAACP’s future cases before the Supreme Court.
(Lent by Kenneth Clark
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress )

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