South Carolina and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

South Carolina has to date played a minor role in the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Greene's article revisits the history of civil rights with reference to the Palmetto State and, in the process, a fuller understanding of the complexities of the Civil Rights Movement begins to emerge. From the challenge of the Progressive Democratic Party over credentials in 1944 (preceding the better-known story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by twenty years) to the state's integral role in the rise of New Right conservatism in the late 1960s, Greene presents an alternative vision of the rise and fall of the New Deal coalition in the middle of the twentieth century. He highlights figures crucial to the struggle for African American self-determination. Women such as Modjeska Simkins and men like John H. McCray stand centre stage and demonstrate the various strategies employed by black South Carolinians in the struggle for civil and human rights. Overall, Greene focuses attention on a state that is often neglected in the standard narratives of the Civil Rights Movement.