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By Michael Staton<\/b>
\nPhotography from the Joseph A. De Laine papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.<\/b> & Roy Jones<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div><\/p>\n
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The lifelong educator behind Call Me MISTER has devoted years to chronicling South Carolina\u2019s part in the U.S. civil rights movement<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> When Call Me MISTER\u00ae <\/span>was created more than 20 years ago to increase the pool of Black male educators in the teaching profession, Roy Jones, the program\u2019s executive director, expected most of his work to take place in classrooms. He never thought that decades later he\u2019d be spending so much time visiting crumbling homes, derelict former schools or churches that felt untouched by time.<\/p>\n But Jones has learned that in order to get to the bottom of history, a person sometimes has to go out and find it. Part of the reason Jones has succeeded as the head of Call Me MISTER is his ability to tie almost every aspect of the nationally recognized program to history.<\/p>\n Call Me MISTER, which has expanded to nearly 30 other institutions across the country, is housed in the Clemson University College of Education and provides tuition assistance and academic support to its cohorts of students. Just as important is the way the program encourages MISTERs to explore and know their own story in order to become truly effective educators.<\/p>\n To Jones, knowledge of self and history may be the most vital teaching tools for the educators he\u2019s devoted his life to preparing. This belief is why he has spent more of his time of late enriching the MISTER mission by digging up, learning from and chronicling the past \u2014 specifically, the role South Carolina played in desegregating the nation’s public schools and the civil rights activists responsible.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> \u00a0WATCH<\/b> \n Call Me MISTER: Why Clemson?<\/a> from Clemson University<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section> June 1948<\/p>\n Levi Pearson, with the assistance of Rev. Joseph De Laine, above, filed a lawsuit against the Clarendon County School District to secure a school bus for Black children to prevent his children from walking 9 miles to school each day. The lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Heading Down the Path<\/strong><\/p>\n During one<\/span> particularly fruitful trip to Summerton, South Carolina, Jones found himself on a dirt road blocked by a fallen tree. That road led to the abandoned Elliott plantation, formerly owned by a family of slave owners whose descendants would go on to fight to keep schools segregated.<\/p>\n Vaulting over said tree \u2014 in a suit and tie, no less, as this was an unexpected detour on his visit \u2014 didn\u2019t give Jones pause as much as the possibility of venomous reptiles did.<\/p>\n \u201cI am, let\u2019s say, averse to snakes,\u201d Jones says, his smile giving away the understatement. \u201cSo, I took a deep breath, I prayed and I headed down the path.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Shattered windows and warped, splintered wooden steps framed the home\u2019s front door, but to Jones, the surrounding landscape was just as intriguing. He saw a trench dug during the Civil War along the road leading to the former Elliott home. The story goes that the plantation owners had their enslaved workers dig the trench and then armed them to defend the home against Union troops that meant to burn it to the ground. The Union soldiers ended up being Black infantrymen, and when both sides recognized the situation, the battle was averted.<\/p>\n Jones wasn\u2019t in Summerton to study Civil War history but rather to get to the bottom of a conflict that would occur almost 100 years later in U.S. courtrooms.<\/span><\/p>\n Briggs v. Elliott (the defendant was a descendant of the same family that owned the plantation) originated in the town, and it was the first of five cases on the docket with the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Many don\u2019t realize that this South Carolina case predated Brown v. Board of Education by more than two years.<\/span><\/p>\n This trip and many others led to a MISTER leadership seminar in 2018 that featured descendants of people on both sides of the fight for desegregation appearing on one stage for peaceful reflection, all in service to a MISTER audience eager to absorb the past in order to effectively teach it in the present.<\/p>\n That session was a historic achievement for Clemson University and Call Me MISTER, but Jones didn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n He would continue meeting with historians who could shed light on events that changed our nation, events that prove the pivotal role South Carolina played in civil rights history. He would partner with others at Clemson to preserve these materials for posterity and create an annual series designed to illuminate a corner of history that had dimmed nearly to the point of total darkness.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t just the MISTERs\u2019 story; it\u2019s everyone\u2019s story. But MISTERs in particular need to embrace it and understand it so that they can take it further and be about the business of changing lives,\u201d Jones says. \u201cAll of this effort is to ensure that this history isn\u2019t just retained but put to use, because a history unknown is a history repeated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> November 1949<\/p>\n Reverdy Well, below, senior class president at Scott\u2019s Branch High School, brings his concerns over the treatment of students at the school by its principal to De Laine and other parents in the community. De Laine was instrumental in recruiting the parent plaintiffs (including Harold Briggs) and enlisting the help of the NAACP.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Collecting Artifacts<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n A tsunami doesn\u2019t happen<\/span> out of nowhere; these waves occur because of an earthquake or volcanic eruption. The U.S. civil rights movement was a wave of change that was precipitated by numerous hardships and tragic events, many of which took place in South Carolina.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1946, white police officers in Aiken, South Carolina, blinded Isaac Woodard Jr., a decorated Black World War II veteran and South Carolina native. The officers were acquitted, which sparked outrage a full decade before Martin Luther King Jr. rose to prominence as a civil rights leader. The removal of Sarah Mae Flemming Brown from a bus in Columbia, South Carolina, occurred 17 months before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat.<\/span><\/p>\n A 1947 request by Clarendon County officials to provide bus transportation to Black students led to the 1949 Briggs v. Elliott case, which preceded all the cases that combined to form Brown v. Board of Education. No one event or group of people or place or case started the civil rights movement, and that landmark Supreme Court case didn\u2019t occur in a vacuum.<\/p>\n However, when events are plotted on a timeline in this way, South Carolina begins to look less like a footnote and more like an early and major player in the civil rights movement.<\/span><\/p>\n This was not lost on Cecil J. Williams, an award-winning photographer who documented the civil rights movement in South Carolina. The events that he witnessed from behind a camera have become increasingly lost to time \u2014 watered down by history books concerned with brevity or avoiding shame and embarrassment.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOur state played a major role \u2014 some would say was the catalyst \u2014 for the civil rights movement,\u201d Williams says. \u201cI saw it happening and just felt called at the time to document and save as much as I could.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n For decades, Williams retained all of his own photography but also collected any artifacts he could in the hopes of starting a museum; in 2019, he opened the doors of the 3,500-square-foot Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum located in Orangeburg.<\/span><\/p>\n The museum brings this part of state history to life through photography, correspondence and family heirlooms from individuals directly involved in civil rights history. The crown jewel is the Briggs family Bible, a massive book that was donated by Nathaniel Briggs and Catherine Eliza Briggs Smith, son and daughter of Harry Briggs Sr., the original petitioner in the Briggs v. Elliott case. In the next room are shell casings from the Orangeburg Massacre, the 1968 shooting of protestors by highway patrol officers on the South Carolina State University campus, which took place minutes from where Williams\u2019 museum stands today.<\/span><\/p>\n After partnering with Williams, Jones pulled in Clemson University Libraries to aid in preserving and archiving the museum\u2019s collections. Clemson Libraries is in the process of developing an online searchable database of the historical resources related to the South Carolina civil rights movement and will host all instructional materials.<\/p>\n Call Me MISTER will help develop those materials and offer professional development summer sessions for educators interested in delivering instruction across a variety of focus areas. The museum will share its physical location with Clemson for presentations, workshops, and seminars and participate in any mutually beneficial grant opportunities with MISTER.<\/p>\n Williams was one of the many journalists to document Harvey Gantt\u2019s arrival as the first Black student admitted to Clemson University in 1963. He says Clemson has made serious strides since then to make inclusion and equity a priority in its mission:<\/p>\n \u201cThe outreach and programs that Clemson brings to South Carolina make our state shine nationally. I was there when Clemson achieved peaceful integration with dignity, which contrasted with much of the violence that occurred in other places. That speaks to Clemson, its leadership at the time and [its] entire philosophy. I can see that this philosophy hasn\u2019t changed since then.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> December 1949<\/p>\n A plot to assault or kill De Laine fails in December 1949. Lawsuits for slander and further acts of violence against De Laine, including arson and attacks on his home, continue over the next six years despite De Laine moving to different parts of the state.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Chronicling Voices<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n The network of interstates<\/span> and highways between the Upstate and the Lowcountry has become a second home to Jones and Mark Joseph, program coordinator for Call Me MISTER. Their interviews with individuals involved in the fight for desegregation are a major part of the material being archived at Clemson, and much of the footage of these oral histories was shown at Clemson\u2019s inaugural Joseph and Mattie De Laine Lecture Series in October.<\/span><\/p>\n Joseph De Laine was born in Manning, South Carolina, and became pastor for a circuit of AME churches in Clarendon County and principal of the Liberty Hill School. He encouraged a group of citizens, including Levi Pearson and Harry Briggs (for whom the Briggs v. Elliott suit is named), to file the original suit in 1948 after being denied transportation for Black children who walked 9 miles to schools designated for them. \u201cWho knows what would have happened if Joseph and Mattie De Laine weren\u2019t there in Summerton, pushing and leading the way,\u201d Jones says, \u201cbut they paid for it. Their family was threatened with violence, their house was burned down by Klansmen and they were eventually run out of the state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Jones and Joseph heard these stories directly from De Laine\u2019s two surviving children, Joseph Jr. and Ophelia. The night their father returned gunfire during a 1955 attack on their home. The moment they learned the attackers were a mix of police officers and Klansmen. The day their father had to escape to New York.<\/span><\/p>\n Jones and Joseph dug deeper, learning of Reverdy Wells, a teenager whose frustration with the conditions for Black students at Scott\u2019s Branch High School motivated him to organize a group of fellow students to present their concerns to De Laine and a group of parents and citizens who would go on to create the original petition.<\/span><\/p>\n Wells\u2019 story proved to Jones and Joseph that, more often than not, drivers of change are our youth, something Jones feels MISTERs should recognize as they themselves are tasked with inspiring kids in schools across the nation.<\/span><\/p>\n Joseph compares his experiences on the road to how clarifying it was for him to finally dig into the details of the Brown v. Board of Education case upon its 50th anniversary. That was 2004, when Joseph was completing college as a MISTER at Claflin University.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFifteen years after I learned about school desegregation, I was a Black man working in education who was just learning about the Briggs case,\u201d Joseph says. \u201cIf Dr. Jones and I don\u2019t know about it and if most of the people living in the towns where these events happened don\u2019t know about it, why should I expect the average South Carolinian to know about it?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Jones and Joseph established an annual event along with a concrete way of archiving materials that were fast degrading. They wanted Clemson to become the \u201cgo-to place\u201d for knowledge on the subject, and they set about naming scholarships for Joseph De Laine, Mattie De Laine and Reverdy Wells that would assist students from Clarendon and Fairfield counties who seek careers in education.<\/span><\/p>\n For Jones and Joseph, this work is bigger than MISTER or even the field of education. They want this history consumed by anyone and everyone. As Jones says: Any \u201cthinking person\u201d can gain insight and make connections to their own day-to-day lives.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not as far removed from those times as we think,\u201d Jones says. \u201cWhen integration did finally happen, the system tightened up on its qualifications, and Black teachers lost their jobs and couldn\u2019t requalify. That\u2019s just one example. These lessons are for everyone, but they are especially there to influence those who have influence: teachers, parents, policymakers and leaders.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Image Source: AP Images<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> 1950\u20131951<\/p>\n Thurgood Marshall, top, lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. and Harold Boulware, bottom, a local lawyer, filed Briggs v. Elliott in the fall of 1950.<\/p>\n Lawyers across the country filed subsequent lawsuits that would be combined in the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. the Board of Education, Belton (Bulah) v. Gebhart, and Davis v. County School Board were filed in 1951. Bolling v. Sharpe was filed in 1952.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> \u00a0WATCH<\/b> \n Digging into the Past<\/a> from Clemson University<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section> A Different Gear<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Over the 20-plus-year<\/span> history of Call Me MISTER, Roy Jones has given countless speeches to rooms full of young, aspiring educators from diverse backgrounds. He has talked about the importance of the program and how it is designed to more accurately mirror in the teaching population what exists in the state\u2019s population of students.<\/p>\n With every speech, Jones knows he must inspire not only the MISTERs but also the MISTER leadership present. He has a gift for providing context for an auditorium full of people or a single person sitting across from him. In both cases, he puts the same amount of effort into getting his point across.<\/p>\n But during Jones\u2019 first visit to the Cecil J. Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum, when he addressed a room full of MISTERs from Claflin University, something was different. The same off-the-cuff, conversational approach to the audience was there, but every statement was marked with a need \u2014 a desperation \u2014 for those in attendance to understand the importance of the subject at hand.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember turning to the person next to me that day and saying \u2018Look in his eyes. Something else is driving,\u2019\u201d Joseph says. \u201cThere\u2019s no question in my mind that once Dr. Jones got started on this work, he found a different gear.\u201d<\/p>\n Jones admits that the 2018 leadership seminar profoundly impacted him, but it was the loss of one of its speakers, Joseph C. Elliott Sr., mere months after he presented to MISTERs that truly helped him find that \u201cgear.\u201d<\/p>\n Elliott was a historian, teacher, writer and grandson to Roderick W. Elliott, who served as chairman of the Summerton school board named in the Briggs v. Elliott lawsuit. Elliott recognized that his grandfather was on the wrong side of history. In 2017, he petitioned for a statue honoring not his grandfather, but Joseph De Laine. No one forced him to push for that, just as no one forced him to appear on stage to talk about it; he laid it all bare in order to educate and help others learn from his experience, his perspective and his grandfather\u2019s mistakes.<\/p>\n Just months later, that life and all that perspective were gone. After Elliott\u2019s passing, Jones began to feel real pressure to move faster.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people go, history goes with them, and I know I\u2019m not immune to that clock; it\u2019s ticking above my head, too,\u201d Jones says. \u201cIf I\u2019m a gambler, I\u2019m not going to leave the table until I\u2019m totally spent; I\u2019ll stay as long as I\u2019m able, and that all by itself keeps me going.\u201d<\/p>\n When Jones travels to certain parts of the state, he sees people still struggling with a lack of resources and often a lack of teachers in classrooms. The problems facing these communities are complex and multifaceted. A big part of the solution is education, and an integral piece of education is understanding a place, a people and all the history that is tied to them.<\/p>\n When Jones visits Summerton, he sees people who don\u2019t realize they\u2019ve been living their lives at ground zero. They don\u2019t know they live at the site where something big started. When he says \u201cDe Laine\u201d or \u201cBriggs\u201d in casual conversation with a fellow educator or even someone who calls South Carolina home, he wants them to be recognized, at least a little. For MISTERs, he wants those names to be known.<\/p>\n Jones remains on the journey to institutionalize this knowledge at Clemson so it can be a place where anyone, anywhere can access and learn from it.<\/p>\n \u201cTake time to find out what you don\u2019t know. And what you do know, take time to share,\u201d Jones told the MISTERs on that first visit to the Cecil J. Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. \u201cThat\u2019s how you sustain yourself and bring the next generation forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>
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\nWhy Clemson?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n
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\nDe Laine and his wife, Mattie, worked with then-chief legal counsel to the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice.<\/span><\/p>\n
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\nDigging in the Past<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n
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