South Carolina's challenge to civil rights: The case of South Carolina State College, 1945–1954

South Carolina State College was founded in 1896. As one of the Black institutions taking advantage of the Second Morrill Act of 1890, a large portion of the college's limited financial resources, its energies, and its programs were devoted to training students in agriculture, home economics, vocational trades, and in the education of teachers. These curriculums were considered appropriate for young Black men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When the civil rights movement began to challenge segregation in education in South Carolina in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the state's white leaders responded quickly and effectively by creating graduate and law programs at State College. To preserve the racial status quo and segregation in education, Governor James F. Byrnes subsequently raised funds, including one-half million dollars from the Rockefeller sponsored General Education Board, to improve long neglected facilities at State College. A sizable portion of the funds were devoted to the agricultural program. While the defense of “separate but equal” education by Byrnes and others ultimately failed, the changes fostered at State College did dramatically improve the institution in the 1950s and 1960s and brought a shift in its mission away from its traditional focus on rural and agricultural education for Black youngsters. By 1966, the college was nominally integrated. Paradoxically, in 1971 with enrollments declining and fewer students interested in pursuing agriculture as away of life, the agriculture program was discontinued. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1992