South Carolina Research Resources: Slavery and Civil Rights in South Carolina

A movement culminating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that aimed first to end the slave trade, and then to abolish the institution of slavery and emancipate slaves.

A trade in Africa which started in ancient times. Slaves were sent across the Sahara and were traded in the Mediterranean by Phoenicians; Graeco-Roman traders in the Red Sea and beyond traded slaves from E Africa to Egypt and the Middle East.

US Supreme Court decision of 1857 which denied ‘blacks’ (African Americans) US citizenship and made slavery legal in all US territories.

In U.S. history, the executive order abolishing slavery in the Confederate States of America.

Gullah is a term that describes the language and the descendants of African slaves who live in the Carolina low country and on the coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia.

From Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia
Called the “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” the Port Royal Experiment was an effort by federal officials, military officers, abolitionists, teachers, and missionaries to demonstrate that freedmen could be converted from slave labor to free labor.

Institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services.

From Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World
The largest slave uprising in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion confirmed the worst fears of white South Carolinians and prompted a variety of reforms in slaveholding society.

In U.S. history, loosely organized system for helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada or to areas of safety in free states. It was run by local groups of Northern abolitionists, both white and free blacks.

From Black Firsts
1868 • The South Carolina General Assembly was the first state legislative body with a black majority, when it met on July 6, 1868. There were eighty-seven blacks and forty whites in the lower house.

"Civil rights are guarantees of equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law regardless of race, religion, or other personal characteristics. "

From Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
Sec. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

The civil rights movement was a struggle to fulfill the promise, made in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, of full citizenship and equal opportunity for African Americans

From Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience
This tragedy took place on February 8, 1968, less than two months before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, but did not receive the same level of media coverage.

From Bridgeman Images: Peter Newark American Pictures

Credit: Female servants using brooms of bambusa on Latimer's plantation, Belton, South Carolina, 1899 (b/w photo), American Photographer, (19th century) / Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library

From Bridgeman Images: Peter Newark American Pictures

Credit: Field workers on the Hopkinson plantation, South Carolina, 1862 (photo), American Photographer, (19th century) / Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library