Mann Simons Site | Let's Go!

The Mann-Simons Site, home to the same entrepreneurial African American family for nearly 130 years, traces the journey of Columbia’s African American community from enslavement through urban renewal. 

While only one house stands today, the Mann-Simons Site historically was a collection of commercial and domestic spaces owned and operated by the same African American family from at least 1843 until 1970. Midwife Celia Mann and boatman Ben Delane made this site their home by the early 1840s. Members of Columbia's small population of free people of color, the couple challenged social norms at a time in which most Africans and African Americans were enslaved. Successive generations of their family negotiated the eras in which the capital city evolved from Jim Crow into the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Threat of demolition in 1970 galvanized a grassroots movement that saved the remaining structure, which opened as a house museum in 1978.

Historic Columbia is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving Columbia and Richland County's historic and cultural heritage. 

Standards

• 2.E.4 Interpret data to show how geographic location and available resources impact economic decision-making.
• 4.1.CX Contextualize the experience of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans in South Carolina.
• 4.4.CX Contextualize South Carolina’s experience during the Civil War.
• 4.4.E Analyze the economic, political, and social divisions during the Civil War.
• 5.4.CE Analyze the causes and impacts of social movements in the U.S. and South Carolina.
• 5.4.E Analyze multiple perspectives on the economic, political, and social effects of the Cold War, Space Race, and Civil Rights Movement using primary and secondary sources.
• 6.5.CO Compare the global movements that resulted in the advancement or limitation of human rights during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Resources