Many owned businesses or worked at comparatively well-paying jobs in local factories. Their employers withheld federal, state, and local taxes from their paychecks just like their white counterparts. The vast majority of Summerton’s Black citizens were employed. This may sound like a rough life for impoverished rural students, but Summerton was not a poor town. Sometimes a student would just drown on the way.įound this article helpful? For more racial justice news and analysis, subscribe to the Colorlines newsletter today. When they arrived at school, they would have to chop wood for their unheated classrooms … if they arrived. Often, when the water was particularly high, someone would provide a raft to row their way across the Lake Marion Reservoir. On other days, rain would force students as young as 6 years old to wade across a stream to attend school. If the children were lucky, they walked as far as nine miles to attend one of the segregated schools in Clarendon County’s District 22. Their children were mostly just tired.Įvery day, young Summertonians maneuvered through one obstacle course after another, only to be rewarded with an inferior education.

In 1948, when only 16 states in America had outlawed segregated public schools, Black parents in the tiny hamlet of Summerton, South Carolina, where three out of every four residents were Black, finally got tired of being robbed by white people.

Black AF History by Michael Harriot