SCSouth Carolina Famous People

Two states still argue over where Andrew Jackson was born

Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, in the Waxhaws, a Scots Irish settlement sitting on a border nobody had surveyed yet. He said all his life that he was born at the South Carolina home of his uncle James Crawford, in what is now Lancaster County. North Carolina points to a site in Union County and has never conceded, so both states list him. He was president from 1829 to 1837. John C. Calhoun, born near Abbeville in 1782, was vice president under two different presidents and the only man before Spiro Agnew to resign the office, which he did in December 1832 to take a Senate seat and fight the tariff. Clemson University sits on his Fort Hill plantation. Edgefield County alone produced Benjamin Tillman, who engineered the 1895 constitution that stripped Black South Carolinians of the vote, and Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat candidate who held the Senate floor for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and served until he was one hundred. Six months after Thurmond died in 2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams said publicly that she was his daughter, born in 1925 to a Black teenager working in the Thurmond household. His family confirmed it.

Robert Smalls sailed a Confederate steamer out of Charleston Harbor

Smalls was born into slavery at Beaufort in 1839 and worked the Charleston waterfront as a wheelman. Before dawn on May 13, 1862, with the white officers ashore, he put on the captain's straw hat, gave the correct steam whistle signals as he passed Fort Sumter, took the armed steamer Planter out through the harbor guns with his family and twelve other people aboard, and handed her over to the Union blockade. He later served five terms in Congress, helped write the state constitution of 1868, and bought the Beaufort house in which he had been enslaved, allowing his former owner's widow to live out her days in it.

The school case that started in Clarendon County

Briggs v. Elliott began in Summerton in 1949, when twenty parents asked the county for a school bus for Black children and then, with the Reverend Joseph DeLaine and NAACP lawyers, sued over segregation itself. It became the first of the five cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education, and Harry Briggs lost his filling station job for signing. Judge J. Waties Waring, from an old Charleston family, wrote a dissent in 1951 stating that segregation in education was inequality by definition; he was shunned, had his house stoned, and left for New York. Septima Poinsette Clark, born in Charleston in 1898, was fired by the city schools in 1956 for refusing to renounce her NAACP membership, then built the citizenship schools that taught tens of thousands of Black southerners to read well enough to register.

Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Jackson and the reach beyond the state

Mary McLeod Bethune was born at Mayesville in 1875, the fifteenth of seventeen children of parents who had been enslaved, and walked five miles each way to school. She founded the school in Daytona Beach that became Bethune-Cookman University, led the Black Cabinet of advisers around Franklin Roosevelt, and in 2022 her statue entered the Capitol's National Statuary Hall as one of Florida's two, the first Black American to represent any state there. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville in 1941 and contested the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. Nikki Haley was born in Bamberg in 1972 to Punjabi immigrant parents, served as governor from 2011 to 2017, and then as ambassador to the United Nations.

Cheraw, Barnwell, and a town called North

Dizzy Gillespie was born in Cheraw in 1917, the youngest of nine, started on trombone and switched to trumpet; the town keeps a statue of him on the green. James Brown was born outside Barnwell in 1933 and moved as a small child to Augusta just over the Georgia line, which is why Georgia usually gets the credit. Eartha Kitt was born in 1927 on a cotton farm near the Orangeburg County town of North and left for Harlem at eight. Chubby Checker was born Ernest Evans at Spring Gully in 1941 and moved to Philadelphia, where he cut The Twist in 1960. Darius Rucker started Hootie and the Blowfish with three University of South Carolina classmates in 1986. DuBose Heyward, born in Charleston in 1885, wrote the 1925 novel Porgy about a tenement he called Catfish Row, then wrote the libretto when George Gershwin turned it into Porgy and Bess in 1935.

Althea Gibson, Larry Doby, Joe Frazier

Althea Gibson was born in 1927 at Silver, a Clarendon County crossroads, to sharecroppers who left for Harlem when she was three. In 1950 she became the first Black player accepted into the United States National Championships, took the French title in 1956, and won Wimbledon and the US title in both 1957 and 1958. Larry Doby was born in Camden in 1923 and signed with Cleveland in July 1947, eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson, becoming the first Black player in the American League and taking much the same abuse with a fraction of the attention. Joe Frazier was born on a farm at Laurel Bay outside Beaufort in 1944, youngest of twelve, and left for the north at fifteen; he beat Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971. Joe Jackson, called Shoeless Joe, grew up in the Greenville mill villages, finished with a .356 career average and was banned for life over the 1919 World Series. Charles Townes, born in Greenville in 1915, shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for the maser and the ideas behind the laser, and Ronald McNair of Lake City, who at nine refused to leave the segregated public library until he was allowed to borrow books, earned a physics doctorate at MIT and died aboard Challenger on January 28, 1986. The Lake City library carries his name.

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