Novel Collaboration Guides Teachers On Historical Civil Rights Tour of South Carolina

South Carolina educators toured the state from March through June learning about historic schools and civil rights in a novel, virtual reality technology collaboration between SCETV and the Center for Civil Rights History and Research. The collaboration also will produce online resources for all state teachers and the general public.

Working within pandemic restrictions, 20 teachers attended five, day-long monthly tours of schools at St. Helena Island, Summerton, Lamar, Columbia and Edgefield as part of the Institute on Education and Civil Rights History. The novel sessions were staged entirely online with virtual reality tours of the historic schools, context from historical experts and interviews with participants in landmark moments.

“This institute could not have come at a better time for teachers,” said Daniel Stetson. “The tireless work of Dr. Donaldson and his team provided us with so many resources that can be taken straight to our classrooms. The ability to work with teachers from across the state provided support and encouragement in a year when it was most needed.”

He added, “It also motivated me to keep seeking the untold stories of our history.”

“The pandemic forced us to rethink the institute,” said Dr. Bobby Donaldson, history professor and director of the Civil Rights Center at the University of South Carolina, “and the partnership with Salandra Bowman’s team at SCETV allowed us to create the VR videos that bring eyewitness testimony of historic events directly to students statewide and beyond.”

The schools provided a wide-ranging tour of South Carolina’s history from Reconstruction in the Low Country to late desegregation in 1970s Lamar:

● The Penn Center school on St. Helena Island educated newly freed people before the end of the Civil War;

● Bettis Academy in Edgefield formed in 1881 to provide basic education and skills training and eventually expanded into a junior college in 1933;

● Columbia’s Booker T. Washington High School high standards inspired students and trained many of the city’s Civil Rights luminaries, including attorney and federal judge Matthew J. Perry Jr.;

● Scott’s Branch parents in Summerton joined the Briggs v. Elliott lawsuit, the core of the 1954 Brown v. Board desegregation cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court; and

● Lamar High School, under a federal court order to desegregate with no further delay, was the site of a White mob attack on two school buses of African American children on March 3, 1970. The 200 rioters wielded chains, bricks, and ax handles to assault the buses. The students escaped, but the rioters flipped over the buses.

The educators at the Institute included individuals from grades four through 12, in departments of social studies, media, English language arts, and guidance counseling, and a wide range of career experience, according to coordinator Rebekah Turnmire of the Civil Rights Center. The participants created grade-tiered lesson plans, which will be compiled into an Instructional Guide for Education and Civil Rights History in South Carolina distributed to all South Carolina school districts by the South Carolina Department of Education as well as be made available to the public via the Civil Rights Center’s website and SCETV’s Know It All website as part of the “Let’s Go!” series. The project received a nearly $60,000 grant from the 2020-2021 African American Instructional Materials Fund of the state Department of Education.

“We get to do a different type of preservation, capturing a moment of a historic site and the structure, and preserving a story. For the site and the students, no matter where they're located and no matter their funding they can go to these important places,” said Turnmire, a history doctoral student and graduate researcher at the Center. “We also encouraged historical research on the teachers' own schools.”

At the Center, Donaldson and Turnmire worked with Emily Cochran, Jennifer Melton, and LaTasha Saunders for the collaboration with SCETV’s Bowman, interim vice president of education, and the Knowitall.org staff of Tabitha Safdi and Leslie Leonard for production. Frenchie Brewer of the University narrated the tours.

The Center for Civil Rights History and Research was founded in 2015 with the donation of Congressman James Clyburn’s papers to tell South Carolina’s remarkable, little-known story.