June Timeline

1863
June 1, 1863

The Union Army began a series of raids along the Combahee River in Beaufort and Colleton counties that freed enslaved people. Acclaimed abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman participated in the raids as she worked as a spy along the S.C. coast.

1910
June 13, 1910

Dr. William D. Crum, a S.C. physician was appointed the U. S. minister to Liberia.

1939
June 6, 1939

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and a graduate of Spelman College and the Yale University Law School, was born in Bennettsville.

1944
June 16, 1944

George Stinney Jr., a 14-year old young man from Alcolu, is executed for the death of two white girls in his community. In 2014, Stinney’s conviction was vacated after a judge concluded that the original prosecution was marked by “fundamental, Constitutional violations of due process.”

1951
June 23, 1951

A three-judge panel in the Federal District Court in Charleston ruled in favor of the Clarendon County School Board and against desegregating schools in Briggs v. Elliott. Judge J. Waties Waring issued a dissent, declaring “segregation is per se inequality.” NAACP lawyers appealed the Briggs case to the U.S. Supreme Court and it became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

1954
June 22, 1954

Sarah Mae Flemming was hit and ejected from a Columbia bus for sitting in a seat reserved for white passengers, seventeen months before Rosa Parks.

1961
June 15, 1961

Approximately twenty African American students from Allen University and Benedict College were prevented from entering the Sesquicentennial State Park near Columbia by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. This incident was presented as evidence when the case was brought to court in the 1961 Brown v. South Carolina State Forestry Commission trial.

1963
June 5, 1963

Rev. I. DeQuincey Newman announced that the NAACP would stage massive demonstrations in eight S.C. cities unless negotiations began to “solve racial differences” over the integration of stores, restaurants, theaters, and public venues.

1964
June 22, 1964

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the convictions of students in Columbia who were charged with trespassing after seeking service at segregated lunch counters.

1985
June 21, 1985

Columbia attorney and former member of the General Assembly I. S. Leevy Johnson was sworn in as the first African American president of the South Carolina Bar Association.

2015
June 17, 2015

Nine members of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston (including the church’s pastor State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney) were killed in an attack of racist violence while attending Bible study.