African-Americans

As a senator, Butler supported civil service reform, a strong navy, and the elevation of the agriculture department to cabinet-level status. He also secured nearly $5 million in federal funds for South Carolina harbor and river improvements and public buildings. In 1890 Butler instigated a national debate with his introduction of a bill to provide federal aid to blacks who would emigrate to Africa. Responding to South Carolina’s agrarian movement, Butler shifted his position from that of a conservative Democrat to one favoring such Populist measures as the free coinage of silver and a federal income tax.

Although Butler served in the General Assembly from 1776 to 1789, his most significant political accomplishments came at the national level. In 1787 the legislature elected Butler to both the Confederation Congress and the constitutional convention scheduled to meet later that spring in Philadelphia. In the constitutional debates, Butler generally supported proposals for a strong central government, a single executive, and wealth rather than population as the basis of representation. He also championed South Carolina interests, especially slavery, and vigorously opposed the three-fifths compromise, arguing that slaves represented property wealth and should be counted fully for purposes of representation.

In 1927 Susan Butler opened a free library and reading room in Dart Hall, using her father’s books, folding chairs, and two tables. The reading room was open Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Dart served as librarian and operated the room with donations and at her own expense until the Charleston Free Library established the Dart Hall Branch in 1931. The Charleston County Free Library and its branches received money from the Rosenwald Fund and the Carnegie Foundation, while the Dart family rented the building to the county for one dollar a year. The Dart Hall Branch opened to the African American public with 3,600 books.

He is widely considered to be the first African American to have his medical findings appear in print.

By the late 1850s he was an active abolitionist and worked with famous activists such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney.

As with other outbreaks of racial violence in 1876, it involved white gun clubs and the African American militia, but Cainhoy ended with a difference: when it was over, more whites lay dead than blacks.

During his career Calhoun evolved from “War Hawk” nationalist to independent nullifier to strategist for a unified regional (southern) defense of slavery.

Callen is best remembered for her work as a nurse midwife, delivering more than one thousand babies and providing prenatal and postnatal care to mothers. Recognizing that lay midwives provided the only care for many of the African Americans in rural South Carolina, Callen sought opportunities for educating women in midwifery.

Laws concerning segregation prevented African Americans from utilizing the training ward at City Hospital. McClennan and his associates began efforts to create a hospital that was “owned and conducted by the colored people of Charleston.”

As a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, he served as chair of the education committee and advocated a statewide system of integrated public education. In 1868 he was elected secretary of state, becoming the first African American in the United States elected to statewide office.

During the latter years of the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, British commanders used African American slaves, freemen, and refugees in a variety of military capacities. Although employed primarily as laborers, black Carolinians occasionally were armed by the British and used in combat.

From seed to table, Carolina gold was the domain of the enslaved.

Throughout Carroll’s public career, his sharp intellect and stirring oratory commanded large audiences across the state.

Cow pens, cattle drives, and open range herding—distinctive characteristics typically associated with the American West—were important features of the agricultural landscape during the colonial period in South Carolina....Cattle ranching, a lucrative frontier occupation, appeared first in the lowcountry, where black bondsmen became America’s first “cowboys.”

Charleston was the first permanent European settlement in Carolina, its first seat of government, and the most important city in the southern United States well into the nineteenth century.

In its modern configuration, Charleston County is a long sliver of land—mainland and islands— bounded at the north and south by the South Santee and South Edisto Rivers. It has existed only since 1882.

In Charleston in 1969 issues of race, class, and gender coalesced in a strike of more than four hundred African American hospital workers, mostly female, against the all-white administrations of the Medical College Hospital (MCH) and Charleston County Hospital (CCH).

During the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more cast-iron elements were used to embellish Charleston’s iron gates and fences. These mass-produced elements were created mainly in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and shipped south to satisfy the new demand for solid, lifelike replicas of flowers, leaves, and branches that were favored during the Victorian period.

The activism and aggression against whites displayed by Charleston blacks set that city apart from others in the South during Reconstruction.

The clashes were in large measure due to white fears over a newfound assertiveness demonstrated by the black servicemen returning from World War I, and paralleled the hysterical antiforeign, antiradical “Red Scare” of 1919 and 1920.