Cecil Williams & Civil Rights Photography — Talk & Photos with Author Claudia Smith Brinson

Author Claudia Smith Brinson will present a lecture on civil rights photographer Cecil Williams Wednesday, Nov. 5, 6 to 7 p.m., at the Charleston Museum.

As a child, Williams began photographing civil rights events. He went on to photograph Thurgood Marshall in Charleston for Briggs v. Elliott. He photographed mass arrests and tear-gas use (Orangeburg, 1960). He photographed protests at a segregated bowling alley and the aftermath when state troopers killed three students and wounded an untold number, on campus, in the Orangeburg Massacre (Orangeburg, 1968). He photographed the perceived end of the 1960’s protest movement (Charleston Hospital Strike, 1967-69).

In 2024, USC Press published Injustice in Focus: The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams, based on dozens of interviews Brinson completed with Williams between 2021 and 2023. Eighty of Williams’s photographs accompany a deep portrait of him and the Orangeburg movement from the 1940s through the 1960s.

This lecture is free for members and the public. Registration is encouraged. A donation of $10 is suggested.

Register online or call (843) 722-2996 ext. 235.

About author

Claudia Smith Brinson spent the majority of a 30-year journalism career with Knight Ridder at The State newspaper in Columbia, working as a senior writer, national writing coach, columnist and associate editor for the editorial page.

From 2006-2016, she directed the Writing for Print and Digital Media major, which she designed, and an internship program at Columbia College. She held the Harriet Gray Blackwell endowed professorship. Brinson won more than three dozen state, regional, and national awards for her journalism, was the first person to win Knight Ridder’s Award of Excellence twice and was a member of The State team whose work on Hurricane Hugo was a Pulitzer finalist.

She also reported for national newspapers and magazines, published essays in women’s magazines and won an O. Henry for her short fiction. In 2020 the University of South Carolina Press published Stories of Struggle: The Clash Over Civil Rights in South Carolina. Brinson interviewed more than 150 civil rights activists to tell the stories of the petitioners of Briggs v Elliott, the first of five lawsuits in Brown v. Board; the students of the 1960 sit-ins; and the women of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike.

Brinson is at work on a book on the crucial roles Black South Carolinians played in civil rights events of 1961, including the “jail, no bail” movement, the Freedom Rides, and the desegregation of public parks. Read more about Brinson and Stories of Struggle.