Freedom road territory: The politics of civil rights struggle in South Carolina during the Jim Crow era

This dissertation is a history of the African American struggle for civil rights in South Carolina from the organization of the state's first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1917 through the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education , the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision that smashed the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow. Although institutional beginnings and legal victories guide its narrative course, its central insight is that the civil rights movement was and is a process, rather than an event with a discrete beginning and ending. It is, in effect, a collection of local studies that explore the ways in which African Americans struggled for survival, built and sustained local institutions, and continually negotiated the terms of community. It demonstrates, in turn, how local communities gave shape to a national black freedom movement that fundamentally challenged and worked to expand the meaning and practice of democracy in America.;At the center of the dissertation's argument for the inseparability of African American social history and American political history is a history of the NAACP. Although much maligned by contemporaries and present-day scholars for its top-down, bureaucratic, and legalistic approach to winning full citizenship rights for African Americans, this study suggests that there was no single NAACP. The key to understanding the organization, it maintains, is to begin understanding the relationship between its national office and its many local branches. In the forty years examined, the lines of power ran both ways; the national office shaped the lives and struggles of black South Carolinians and black South Carolinians shaped the tenor and agenda of the national organization. And while African Americans continued to demand the legal rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution, the NAACP became far more than a vehicle for securing access to formal civil rights. Indeed, black South Carolinians rarely, if ever, viewed their battles for civil rights as ends in themselves. For many, the struggle for civil rights was tied to a much larger struggle for self-determination and for the right to become equal participants in the decision-making processes that governed their lives. Through the NAACP, African Americans battled to defeat white supremacy and expand American democracy and, in doing so, they began clearing the way for a more expansive and still unfinished battle against inequality in all its forms.