Septima P. Clark Expressway Marker

Columbia, SC

On September 11, 1963, the University of South Carolina admitted its first Black students since the Reconstruction era, ending decades of state-enforced segregation at the flagship university. The moment came amid the broader Civil Rights Movement, when courts and activists were dismantling the Jim Crow color line across Southern education, often against fierce local resistance. Unlike the violent standoffs seen at some other Deep South campuses, the integration in Columbia proceeded without the mob confrontations that made national headlines elsewhere. It marked a quiet but decisive turning point for higher education in the state.

Charleston, SC

In a cramped three-room house on a Charleston back lot, two brothers born into slavery began lives that would carry them to the front ranks of the fight for Black equality. Archibald and Francis Grimké were the sons of an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and grew up amid the hard aftermath of the Civil War before finding their way to Northern educations and national influence. Archibald became a lawyer, writer, and civil-rights leader, while Francis grew into one of the era's most respected ministers and moral voices. From this modest Charleston lot rose careers that shaped African American advocacy well into the 20th century.

North Augusta, SC

Erected by the state of South Carolina in 1916, this monument commemorates Thomas McKie Meriwether, the only white man killed in the Hamburg Massacre of July 8, 1876. In that episode, white paramilitary 'Red Shirts' besieged and attacked a Black state militia company in the Reconstruction-era town of Hamburg, killing several Black men, some of them after they had surrendered. The bloodshed was part of the broader campaign of armed intimidation that helped topple Reconstruction and restore white Democratic 'Redeemer' rule in South Carolina. Cast in the language of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, the monument stands today as a stark artifact of the Lost Cause movement that shaped how this history was publicly told.

Meriwether County, GA

In the segregated rural South, Black communities were routinely denied a fair share of public school funding, so they built and sustained their own institutions through pooled money, donated land, and volunteer labor. The Odessadale Elementary School stands in that tradition of Black self-help — a community in Meriwether County, Georgia, investing directly in the education of its children when the state would not. Decades later, alumni and neighbors organized to preserve the site and honor the school's place in local memory.