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The congressional redistricting in 1981 led to the election of I. DeQuincey Newman as the first African-American South Carolina senator since the end of Reconstruction. Here, he greets some of his new...
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Marion Gressett (1902-1984, see Marion Gressett And Hyman Rubin) was first elected to the South Carolina state Senate from Calhoun County in 1937. A powerful political figure during the 1950s and...
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The power and right of African-Americans to vote, guaranteed by the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been a major driving force behind many of the economic, political, and educational gains made...
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South Carolina native Jesse Jackson, born in Greenville in poverty, became an important national African-American leader because of his charismatic personality and his organization of African-American...
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In 1979, Nancy Stevenson became the first woman elected to the office of lieutenant governor. One of the roles of lieutenant governor is to preside over the Senate. Photo by Vic Tutte, March 1979...
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James B. Edwards descends the steps of the State House with previous Governor John C. West at his January 15, 1975, inauguration as the first Republican governor of South Carolina since Reconstruction...
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African-American protestors of segregation picket restaurants and stores on Main Street in Columbia, sometime around 1960, proclaiming "Together We Stand, Divided We Fall." Courtesy of the South...
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Since the end of Reconstruction, South Carolina had been regarded as the heart of the "Solid South," where only the Democratic Party elected officeholders on either the state or national level. The...
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In 1960, Richard M. Nixon attempted to appeal to South Carolina Democrats who were unhappy with their national party's choice for president, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. In a cartoon...
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The growing pressures brought to bear against legal segregation by the federal court system, that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in "Brown v. The Board of Education" of Topeka, Kansas...