World War I (1914-1918)

In 1870 Greener graduated with honors, earning the distinction of being the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard.

As a historian, Gregorie demonstrated the validity of good local history and the importance of local records. Her heritage and training enabled her to present South Carolina’s history with intimacy and insight enriched with anecdotes and tradition.

Gressette earned special notoriety for his role in the debate over school desegregation. From 1951 to 1966, Gressette chaired a special legislative committee that led legal efforts to avoid desegregation in South Carolina. His influence on this committee was so strong that it came to be called the “Gressette Committee.”

Working as her father’s assistant and as mill bookkeeper, Gridley mastered the daily operations of management and administration. Following her father’s death in 1890, she assumed the position of mill president, the first woman mill president in South Carolina.

From 1903 to 1919, he served as president of the American Negro Academy, the leading intellectual organization for African Americans. After 1913 he devoted himself to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving until 1923 on its national board. Through 1924 he also served as president of the District of Columbia branch, becoming a key figure in the NAACP’s efforts to oppose racial discrimination at the federal level.

Obstetrics and pediatrics became the cornerstone of Guignard’s fifty-year medical career. Guignard became an instrumental force in the development of adequate obstetrical facilities at Columbia Hospital. She also established a training program for black midwives.

...the first state commissioner of mental health in South Carolina, and from 1964 to 1985, Hall's agency made significant advances in community care. He oversaw the creation of a comprehensive, statewide mental health-care delivery system that grew to encompass ten major inpatient facilities and seventeen community mental health centers.

A prolific artist, Halsey was active in arts organizations in the state, such as the Guild of South Carolina Artists, and his work was regularly included in a broad range of exhibitions across the Southeast.

His enthusiastic writing style and conservation ethic gained him a following among the state’s outdoorsmen and conservationists, and his work had a far-reaching influence on the public’s concept of game and fish.

In 1912 Hancock became the principal of Seneca Institute, a private coeducational school for African Americans in Oconee County. Stressing vocational education, this facility was modeled closely after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Harleston was a founding member of the Charleston chapter of the NAACP in 1917 and served as its first president; by the 1920s he had also established a solid reputation as a portrait artist.

In 1904 Harley was elected to the South Carolina House from Barnwell County and served until 1908. In 1910, he was elected mayor of Barnwell, but he was forced to relinquish the position in 1918 because of a ruling that railroad lawyers could not hold public office.

The Quaker Oats Company hired Harrington to travel nationwide portraying “Aunt Jemima” and ultimately made her a national celebrity.

In 1977, at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, a titled European bought one of Harris’s Indian head pots for the unheard of price of $350. This sale made the handful of Catawba potters sit up and take notice.

As governor he advocated the construction of concrete highways and higher educational standards in the public schools. He was a confirmed, enthusiastic prohibitionist and was dismayed that the Eighteenth Amendment received lukewarm support in South Carolina.

Haynsworth rose in South Carolina legal circles to become a federal appeals court judge, but he is best remembered nationally for his 1969 rejection by the U. S. Senate for a seat on the United States Supreme Court.

On April 14, 1948, he was appointed Director of the National Cancer Institute...Heller headed the institute for twelve years, a period in which federal financing for cancer research and treatment was greatly expanded.

From 1934 to 1936 Hemphill was headquartered in Columbia, where he supervised several New Deal projects, among them the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), in which he produced measured drawings of Robert Mills’s Ainsley Hall House.

In late 1963 President Kennedy decided to appoint Hemphill to the federal bench, United States Fourth Judicial Court. The appointment papers, however, were still on his desk when the president was assassinated that November in Dallas.

In 1920, with John Bennett and Hervey Allen, Heyward founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, an organization that initiated the great southern literary renaissance of the early twentieth century.