A Dream Deferred
Howard Sterling’s summer class of 6- and 7-year-olds couldn’t believe what they were hearing. The gasps were audible as a guest speaker told the St. Paul Primary School students how it had once been against the law for black and white children to attend school together. Little mouths dropped open when they learned that the legal battle to end racial segregation in America’s public schools began in the 1940s right there in Summerton, a town of just 900 people in remote, east central South Carolina. They learned how Reverend Joseph De Laine had led parent meetings at a church just down the road that culminated in a lawsuit called Briggs v. Elliott—the earliest of five cases rolled into Brown v. Board of Education.
To these kids, De Laine’s story sounded like something out of the movies. A black minister born in Clarendon County, he taught in one-room schoolhouses all around Summerton. As the Briggs case was being filed in 1950, he was transferred to a church in Lake City, 50 miles northeast. He kept the house he owned in Summerton until it was burned down the following year, along with much of his family’s furniture and keepsakes. Later, a car full of white gunmen attacked De Laine’s home in Lake City, and he returned fire, allegedly wounding five men. He fled that same night, eventually ending up in New York City, where De Laine was given shelter and a pulpit at an African Methodist Episcopal church. He would return to his native South Carolina only a few times, and as a wanted man. Well after his death in 1974, the minister was pardoned by South Carolina’s governor and later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Hearing how De Laine and others from Summerton had helped make history by filing a case that, 50 years ago, resulted in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision to end segregated schooling, a boy raised his hand. Like all of his classmates and almost every other student at St. Paul,...
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