Booker T. Washington, the famed leader of Tuskegee Institute and the Negro Business League concluded a seven-day tour of S.C. Prominent African American leaders joined him for visits to Greenville, Gaffney, Anderson, Rock Hill, Winnsboro, Camden, Columbia, Florence, Sumter, Orangeburg, Denmark, and Charleston.
Walter F. White, assistant secretary from the NAACP’s New York City office, spoke at Aiken’s Friendship Baptist Church. The Aiken branch of the NAACP was formed one year earlier.
Denmark Trade School (later technical college) began operation.
African American students in Greenville staged a peaceful sit-in at a segregated library.
Nearly seventy students in Florence continued protests from a prior day when they marched from Trinity Baptist Church to a local Kress store and demanded service at a lunch counter. When the students resumed their peaceful protests, 48 people were arrested for “parading without a permit.”
The South Carolina Council on Human Relations (SCCHR) announced the group’s support of
student-led sit-ins across the state.
Allen University student Simon Bouie and Benedict College student Talmadge Neal took seats in a booth at the Eckerd’s Drug Store in downtown Columbia and waited to be served. Bouie and Neal were charged with criminal trespass and convicted. Their convictions were overturned in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in June 1964.
During demonstrations protesting racial segregation in Orangeburg, more than one thousand students from Claflin University and South Carolina State College were water hosed and tear gassed by police during demonstrations. Three hundred and eighty students were jailed. The protest was a lead story in the New York Times.
NAACP leaders and African American students from across the state met at Zion Baptist Church and walked to the State House grounds. After singing religious songs and marching around the capitol, 187 persons were arrested for a breach of peace. In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions of those arrested in a landmark ruling, Edwards v. South Carolina.
Two NAACP college leaders, Lennie Glover and David Carter, were on a routine check of a sit-in at Woolworth’s in downtown Columbia when Glover was stabbed by an unknown assailant. Severely wounded, Glover eventually recovered and continued participating in demonstrations.
In response to the stabbing of Lennie Glover, African American students initiated a boycott of Main St. businesses in Columbia. The “Easter Lennie Glover No Buying Campaign” featured daily picketing and sit-ins.
Ordie P. Taylor Jr., Anthony M. Hurley, and Mable B. Ashe applied for a charter of incorporation for the newly organized Columbia Urban League, Inc.
More than four hundred African American hospital workers, most of them female, began a strike against the all-white administrations of the Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital for better wages and working conditions. The striking workers attracted support from national civil rights leaders, including Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young.
Angry white residents in Lamar, who opposed school integration, attacked three buses carrying African American students to newly desegregated schools in Darlington County. After being pummeled with ax handles, chains, and rocks, the buses were overturned. Eventually, state police dispersed the crowd with tear gas.
After Richland County school officials shared news about the closing of Booker T. Washington High School, students, faculty, and alumni denounced plans to sell the legendary school to the University of South Carolina. In a speech before the local school board, faculty member Frankie B. Outten described her alma mater as the “Great Mother of the Black Community.”