Bea shall overcome

 

 

Bea Rivers in front of the Clarendon Public School Administration Building. Portrait by Doug Gardner; Illustration by Deborah Lawrence.

I went to Summerton, S.C., USA, in May to attend a Rotary club meeting. The reason for my trip was to meet Rotarian Beatrice Brown Rivers. She is not a well-known public figure in the history of the civil rights struggle in America, but she is an important one.

A bit before 7 a.m., club secretary and treasurer Cleve Dowell and I met in the lobby of my motel. The Rotary Club of Summerton’s meeting took place in the cafeteria of a small Baptist church nearby. In 2004, Dowell and fellow Rotarians William Johnson and George Summers were members of the local Rotary Club of Manning when the new superintendent of the Summerton schools, Rose Wilder, expressed an interest in joining. It was then that they decided it was time to start a club in Summerton. The club was chartered in 2006, and all 27 of its members became Paul Harris Fellows because, according to Dowell, they planned it that way. The makeup of the club is unusual for a small Southern town – the membership is nearly half black, and one quarter of the members are women.

One of them, Bea, was part of the original fight for equal opportunities in the schools, and the Summerton club continues to stand up for education in the community. It holds a yearly back-to-school block party and, with help from a Rotary Foundation District Simplified Grant, gives each school-age child a backpack of supplies. The club also provides every third grader in the school district with a dictionary and runs the Reading Buddy program, which gives adults and children the chance to read together and discuss books over e-mail. It so impressed Oprah Winfrey that she sent the school district $50,000 to advance it and other programs. In spite of these worthy projects, and more than 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education , the Summerton schools remain almost completely segregated.

In the late 1940s, when Bea was 13, her involvement in Briggs v. Elliott (which became one of the Brown v. Board of Education cases) started with a school bus. Children of black families who lived outside of town had to walk up to 9 miles each way, rain or shine, through the pine forest – dodging thorns, bugs, and the occasional cottonmouth or rattlesnake – to and from Scott’s Branch, the single black school in Clarendon County. Black children weren’t too focused on education then; they had to cut their studies short to work in the fields. In those days, “the average black student went to school about five months a year,” says Bea. An African American family’s survival depended on every member’s hard-earned contribution in the fields. But at her house, Bea recalls, “my father didn’t have an education, and that made him impress upon us children that it was important.”

When the bus for the white students stopped running, it was promptly replaced. Then the Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, a teacher and African Methodist Episcopal minister, cobbled together $400 from the black community and bought the old bus. But it broke down again.

"It took until 1970 for much of South Carolina to comply with court-ordered integration, but by then nearly all the white students in Summerton had transferred to a private school."

This spurred DeLaine to further action. He convinced Levi Pearson, a friend of Bea’s parents who lived far outside of town, to sue the school district for transportation. Although the suit was dismissed on a technicality, the community was ready to keep going; families wanted their children to have exactly what the white children had. During the ensuing struggles, many people, including DeLaine – who was visited one night by people with shotguns and fired back, only to be charged with assault and battery with intent to kill – were forced to leave town. (DeLaine was posthumously pardoned in 2000 for those old charges and awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2003 for his “civil rights contributions to the nation,” along with Harry and Eliza Briggs, of Briggs v. Elliott , and Pearson.)

The first time “separate but equal” was debated in the Supreme Court was during the case of Homer Adolph Plessy who, in 1892, was removed from a railroad car in New Orleans and arrested for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890, which separated railroad passengers by race. Although the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy on 18 May 1896, his case marked the first post-Reconstruction use of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” provision in a legal challenge to segregation. In their final statement, the petitioners proclaimed, “We as freemen still believe we were right and our cause is sacred. … In defending the cause of liberty, we met with defeat but not with ignominy.”  Their position was vindicated when the Supreme Court upheld similar 14th Amendment arguments in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education .

The Summerton school bus entered history when a group of 107 Clarendon County residents, including Bea and her family, signed a petition demanding equal treatment for black students. This led to the case of Briggs v. Elliott , which brought suit against the chairman of the board of School District 22, R.W. Elliott. At a pretrial hearing, U.S. District Court Judge J. Waties Waring dismissed the case without prejudice and told the lawyers for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) that the case should be brought on segregation grounds, not unequal facilities. The amended brief was brought before the court, and a three-judge panel rendered a split decision, with Waring dissenting. The NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court, and Briggs was combined with the other cases that became Brown v. Board of Education . On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation and declared unconstitutional the doctrine of separate but equal. It took until 1970 for much of South Carolina to bow to court-ordered integration, but by then nearly all the white students in Summerton had transferred to a private school, sponsored by the local Southern Baptist Church.

Many people lost their jobs for signing the petition – eventually Bea’s father, who was a farmer but also the janitor at the white school, was one of them – and others left town. Bea’s parents, Thelma and Henry Brown, and their 12 children stayed put. Fortunately, Bea’s father possessed enough skills – gardening, blacksmithing, and syrup making – to continue to support his family. But Bea remembers that everyone in the black community agreed: “We’d had enough,” she says.

Bea left Clarendon County after her high school graduation in 1955 and went to Washington, D.C., to live with an older brother. There she attended a two-year business college, then earned a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from the University of the District of Columbia. Bea worked in D.C. for the federal government in the Labor and Commerce departments, then for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she served as the chief of state and local programs before retiring. In 1995, she decided to go home to Summerton.

In a 2004 documentary about the Brown case, With All Deliberate Speed , Bea says: “It was no speed at all. It was as if they” – meaning the white people in power – “said, ‘We gonna ignore this.’ As if to say, ‘The Supreme Court can’t tell us. You can pass all the laws you want to – we’re not gonna integrate these schools.’ That’s what they did. They were determined. A lot of the foot dragging even now is based on the fact that those people are still angry at black people for standing up for what they believed in.” She is now 73 and visits schools to spread her message. “I tell them, don’t worry about who is sitting beside you – worry about how well you can do.”