Resource: Clarendon County in Black & White: A Visit to the Home of Briggs v. Elliott, 50 Years After Brown v. Board of Education

As Brown’s fiftieth anniversary approaches on May 17, many eyes will turn towards Clarendon County to measure what has changed, and what has not changed, over the past five decades. Although Clarendon is still a largely rural, generally poor, majority-black county, Roberts’s success exemplifies how local politics have changed dramatically since the end of legalized segregation.

But unequal schools and economic disadvantage continue to hold back many of Clarendon County’s African-American school children. Indeed, just a few steps from Beulah Roberts’s office, another court suit aimed at winning equal-quality education for students in three dozen poor and heavily black South Carolina school districts is now being tried before Circuit Judge Thomas W. Cooper, Jr. Filed more than ten years ago, in 1993, the lawsuit’s proponents equate their case to Briggs and say that once again, judicial intervention is the only solution that can bring true educational opportunity to Clarendon County’s students.