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After enrolling at the University of South Carolina in September 1963, students Robert Anderson, Henrie Monteith and James Solomon Jr. (left to right) walked down the steps of Osborne Administration Building and into Hamilton College where they registered for classes.
Photo courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
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Harvey Gantt speaks to the media after becoming the first African-American student at Clemson University in January 1963.
Special Collections Library, Clemson University
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Civil rights attorney Matthew J. Perry represented Harvey Gantt, as well as Robert Anderson, Henrie Monteith and James Solomon Jr., in their quests to desegregate public universities in South Carolina.
Photo courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
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Dr. Henrie Monteith Treadwell returned to USC last September for the kickoff events commemorating the school’s 50th anniversary of desegregation.
Courtesy of USC
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USC's Desegregation Commemoration Garden
The number three figures prominently in the garden space that the University of South Carolina has set aside as a permanent tribute to its historic desegregation. The new 6,000-square-foot garden, designed by university architect Derek Gruner, will be dedicated on April 11.
“We’ve got a really nice design that will transform the space into something that’s both present and, I think, poignant all at the same time,” says USC history professor Dr. Lacy Ford.
Located beside Osborne Administration Building, the garden will honor the three African-American students who were the first to desegregate USC—Robert G. Anderson, Henrie
Monteith (now Treadwell) and James L. Solomon Jr.
A three-stepped monument, symbolizing the steps the students climbed to register on Sept. 11, 1963, will be the focal point. Poetry from USC professor Nikky Finney will be inscribed
on the steps. They will lead up to three topiary sculptures designed by South Carolina topiary artist Pearl Fryar and will be linked together to represent unity.
Circling a seating area at the base of the monument will be three stone benches, encouraging contemplation.
“There needs to be not only some celebration and some hard reckoning, but also some reflection about what’s happening now and what we need to do in the future,” Ford says. “So we wanted to create a place of reflection, and we feel like this will be that place of reflection.”
—Diane Veto Parham
Garden plan courtesy of USC
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Henrie Monteith Treadwell and James L. Solomon Jr. broke ground for USC’s new garden space during a ceremony on Sept. 11, 2013. The garden is located beside Osborne, the building where USC’s first three African-American students enrolled in 1963.
Photo courtesy of USC
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Now retired, James Solomon Jr. was an honored guest, along with Treadwell, at USC’s kickoff events.
Photo courtesy of USC
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James H. Hollins Sr. was an 18-year-old African-American Marine stationed at Parris Island when he accepted an invitation, issued to all Marines at the facility, to attend classes at USC’s Beaufort campus. He enrolled on Sept. 12, 1963, the first African-American student on the extension campus. He was also among the first African-Americans to integrate the U.S. Marine Corps.
Hollins died Jan. 5 in Joliet, Ill., where he had worked as a tax accountant for 30 years before retiring in 2006. He was 85.
The USC Museum of Education has created an extensive exhibition, “1963-2013: Desegregation—Integration,” that commemorates the desegregation of the USC system. It is on display both on site at Wardlaw Hall on the Columbia campus and online at ed.sc.edu/museum/1963.html. The website exhibition includes a page devoted to Hollins’ story, as well as pages for each of the three students who desegregated the main campus.
Photos courtesy of Patricia Evans, USC Museum of Education
The University of South Carolina celebrates 50 years of desegregation
A girl of just 16, Henrie Monteith bravely shouldered a state’s hopeful expectations in September 1963.
On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 11, she climbed the steps to Osborne Administration Building on the University of South Carolina campus, alongside Robert Anderson and James Solomon Jr. Inside, the three of them became the first African-American students to enroll at the Columbia school since Reconstruction.
This dramatic moment was just one of many in that era. Only two weeks earlier, on a different set of steps, Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, D.C., voicing a growing public outcry for civil rights. Across the Deep South, segregation of public universities was collapsing—sometimes amid violent resistance. Battle after battle in the courts and in political arenas had led to the inevitable conclusion that public schools must open to all citizens, regardless of race.
When USC, the last of the South’s flagship public universities to desegregate, acceded to the change, it aimed to do so without the riots, protests or bloodshed that had marred similar transitions in Mississippi and Alabama. The state and the nation were watching.
In that powerful, historic moment, the determined young Monteith—now Dr. Henrie M. Treadwell—was keenly aware of the many eyes watching her, but she was steadfastly focused, she says, on doing “what was morally right.”
“I needed to do well and study and graduate, because it would be a letdown to so many if I did not,” Treadwell recalls. “I felt no pressure. This was just something I needed to do, and I knew I would do it, and I did it.”
She was reminded recently that she had helped disarm the curious and watchful onlookers by declaring that there would be no violence. The new students’ enrollment took place peacefully, as she predicted and as South Carolina leaders had hoped.
Similarly, in January of that year, Clemson University had desegregated without incident when Harvey Gantt of Charleston enrolled to study architecture. And on Sept. 12, the day after Monteith, Solomon and Anderson entered USC, an African-American Marine sergeant named James Hollins registered for classes at USC–Beaufort, quietly integrating that campus.
“It was past time for the University of South Carolina to open its doors to all,” USC president Dr. Harris Pastides noted on Sept. 11, 2013, at the kickoff event for the university’s year-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of its desegregation.
STARTING LAST SEPTEMBER and continuing through April of this year, USC has planned a series of events that offer opportunities for remembrance and reflection about this turning point in South Carolina history, including a look toward the future. On April 11, USC will dedicate a commemorative garden beside Osborne building and wrap up on April 12 with a closing ceremony.
“We wanted the good, the bad and the ugly” included in the anniversary observances, says Dr. Valinda Littlefield, a USC history professor and co-chair of the committee planning the commemorative events.
“We wanted to commemorate, we wanted to celebrate. We wanted people to understand the historical significance but also to understand what happened at the time and to understand what’s happening now,” she says.
South Carolina’s path to desegregation was impacted, like the rest of the nation, by the pivotal 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that separate schools for different races was unconstitutional.
Here in South Carolina, prominent civil rights attorney Matthew J. Perry was fighting on the home front, successfully representing Harvey Gantt in the legal battle to secure admission to Clemson. In the summer of 1963, Perry also took up the fight in U.S. District Court to get Monteith, Anderson and Solomon into USC.
“South Carolina was the last state to actually desegregate,” says USC history professor Dr. Lacy Ford, Littlefield’s co-chair on the planning committee.
“Fritz Hollings gave a speech when he was in the governor’s office, in part of which he said that we’re out of courts and we’re out of time, so we have to do this lawfully,” Ford says. Having seen the handwriting on the wall, state and university leaders orchestrated a peaceable transition into the era of desegregation.
Within a decade of the universities’ desegregation, Southern public primary and secondary schools would also drop their resistance to integration, in some cases under pressure from the federal government and not always without incident.
Certainly racial tensions did not disappear in the wake of school desegregation, in South Carolina or elsewhere. In 1968, the state witnessed the tragedy of the Orangeburg Massacre, when three students were killed and many more injured in a conflict with police during a racially focused protest on the South Carolina State University campus.
Although USC’s 1963 enrollment of its first three African-American students had occurred smoothly, life on campus “was not all sunshine and roses,” Littlefield says.
Of the first African-American students, Anderson may have been most vulnerable to acts of hate and discrimination, she says. Solomon was a graduate student, a military veteran, older than the others and married, living off campus. Monteith was a Columbia resident with family nearby. But Anderson was from Greenville, the only black male living on campus, and he was targeted by students shouting obscenities and venting their anger.
“People bounced balls at his door all during the night, then they’d take off when he opened the door,” Littlefield says. “They threw things out the windows. They banged on the door. They gave him no rest. They called him names. All sorts of things happened, nasty things happened to him.”
Henrie Monteith Treadwell recalls those days as a lonely time, but she found her own strength and leadership abilities grew through that trial.
“I don’t know that I felt welcome, but I didn’t feel not safe or that people were out to get me,” Treadwell says.
She does remember Dr. H. Willard Davis of USC’s chemistry department handing her a packet of registration materials, wearing “such a warm and friendly smile, I could not believe it—but it was genuine,” she says. “I will always remember him as someone who broke the barrier right there.”
TREADWELL GRADUATED FROM USC IN 1965 with a B.S. in biology and went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University and Atlanta University, respectively, with postgraduate work at Harvard School of Public Health. She has had a distinguished career in public health and now teaches at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. Her professional areas of focus—helping underserved people find “health care homes” for primary care instead of emergency rooms, and helping men successfully reenter community life after prison—are closely tied to the lessons she learned from her own desegregation experiences.
Solomon’s pursuit of his Ph.D. was interrupted by an opportunity to establish, in partnership with a USC math professor, a fellowship program for training elementary school teachers. He devoted four years to that project, followed by a successful career in educational administration and state government, retiring in 1992 as the commissioner of the S.C. Department of Social Services. In his retirement, he serves as interim CEO of the Palmetto Development Group, a nonprofit that promotes economic development in the I-95 corridor counties.
“I wasn’t that concerned about not being liked or being treated badly” at USC, Solomon recalls. “I had a couple of professors I knew were obviously prejudiced and racist, but I expected that, and it didn’t bother me.”
After graduating from USC, Robert Anderson served in combat in Vietnam and later was a social worker in New York City and worked for the Veterans Administration. He died in 2009.
THOUSANDS OF AFRICAN-AMERICANS HAVE GRADUATED from USC since Treadwell, Solomon and Anderson opened the door—a fact driven home to Treadwell as she has participated in the anniversary events. Current students have tearfully approached her on campus to thank her for helping to broaden access to a college education.
Columbia attorney Tommy Preston, who in 2006–07 served as USC’s most recent African-American student body president, says Treadwell and her trailblazing peers made it possible for today’s students to attend college in a drastically different educational environment.
“Never once was there a time at USC that I felt like I had any different experiences as a student because of the color of my skin,” says Preston, now the chairman of USC’s Board of Visitors, the first person of color to serve in that role.
Harvey Gantt, now a Charlotte architect and former Charlotte mayor, participated in Clemson’s 50th anniversary observances during the 2012–13 academic year. His greatest satisfaction from the role he played in Clemson’s 1963 integration is the knowledge that “the opportunity to go to school there or anywhere in South Carolina is much better than it was in my day.”
“The fact that one has access now,” Gantt says, “means that a larger part of the responsibility for getting there lies with the students and the quality of the public school systems.”
Among the spring events planned for USC’s ongoing commemoration of its desegregation will be opportunities for alumni and others from different generations to gather and compare notes on how far the state has come in its efforts to provide educational access for all students, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or other factors, and what needs to happen next.
“There are still inequities,” Littlefield says. “You cannot ignore that although you’ve made progress, you have a long, long way to go.”
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Get More
To learn more about the historic desegregation of the University of South Carolina system and its anniversary observances visit:
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Desegregation anniversary events at USC:
FEB. 11, 6 P.M.
RUSSELL HOUSE BALLROOM
“Building the Future,” networking social and panel discussion of the black experience at USC
FEB. 19, 6 P.M.
RUSSELL HOUSE BALLROOM
Benjamin Todd Jealous, former president and CEO of the NAACP
FEB. 25, 7 P.M.
LAW SCHOOL AUDITORIUM
President’s Leadership Dialogue with Diane Nash, founding leader of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
FEBRUARY AND MARCH
Essay contest in public schools for grades 3, 5, 8 and 11
MARCH 27, 6 P.M.
SPIGNER HOUSE
I. DeQuincey Newman Lecture with Dr. Henrie Monteith Treadwell
APRIL 11
Desegregation Commemoration Garden dedication, adjacent to Osborne Administration Building
APRIL 12, 7 P.M.
KOGER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Closing ceremony and arts performances
THROUGH APRIL 14
“1963–2013: Desegregation–Integration” exhibit, USC Museum of Education, Wardlaw Hall