Leevy’s Funeral Home

Generations of Greatness

W. Maclane Hull

Page 1 →Driving from downtown Columbia, eastward down Taylor Street toward Benedict College and Allen University, one will come across a striking building. Most likely, a pillar of slate at the corner, rising high above the rest of the building, will catch the eye. It is almost incongruous with the rest of the building’s yellowish painted brick 1950s design. One might then notice an overhang jutting almost out into the street, embossed with the words “Leevy’s Funeral Home.” Established in 1932, with the current building constructed in 1951, Leevy’s Funeral Home has been a center of the Midlands’ African-American community. Indeed, it has not simply operated as a funeral home but has also functioned as a center for political organizing. The funeral home was listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book from 1950 through 1955 because of its importance to the African-American community.

This essay is not simply about the Leevy Funeral Home but also about the life of its founder, Isaac Samuel (I. S.) Leevy Jr. Leevy was a major figure in South Carolina’s African-American community. He was a business and community leader, political activist, local civil rights movement icon, and a central figure in countless institutions within Columbia’s African-American sphere. His story is essential to understanding Columbia’s history. This essay also covers the history of the Leevy family and the funeral home after I. S. Leevy’s passing in 1968. It gives special attention to his grandson, Isaac Samuel Leevy Johnson who, inspired by his childhood working in the funeral home, entered politics, becoming one of the three first Black South Carolina legislators since the Reconstruction era, serving throughout most of the 1970s. He was a founding partner of Johnson, Toal & Battiste, a law office that he continues to run today. Furthermore, he took over the funeral home in 1995, which he now runs with his sons, Reverend Christopher Leevy Johnson and George Johnson.

Born in the small Kershaw County community of Antioch, Isaac Samuel (I. S.) Leevy Jr. (May 3, 1876–December 9, 1968) was the son of Isaac Samuel Leevy Sr. and Laura Hunter Leevy. He was one of ten children and grew up poor. His father was born into slavery. His mother was born free Page 2 →before Emancipation.¹ Growing up, Leevy attended Mather Academy in the county seat of Camden, taking odd jobs to pay tuition. During and after his time at Mather, Leevy was involved with the local church, opened a pressing shop, and served as a public school teacher before enrolling in the Hampton Institute in Virginia to learn to tailor. He graduated from Hampton in 1906, having achieved an academic degree from night school classes along with an industrial degree in tailoring. During this time, he kept in contact with Mary Kirkland from Kershaw County, who was then attending the South Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. After graduating from their academic programs, the couple married in June 1909. They had four children: Ruby Geneva, Isaac Kirkland, Carroll Moten, and Marian Naomi.² Mary became instrumental in his business and political life, always at his side and serving as his eyes when he started to lose his sight in the 1940s. She was always “active in the community and continued to devote her time to making the funeral home a continuing success.”³

Leevy first arrived in Columbia in 1907 on a visit to Allen University’s commencement. There he met Reverend Richard Carroll, a prominent South Carolinian best known for his annual conventions on race relations, which underscored the importance of economic development in Black communities. Reverend Carroll was a conservative in the same vein as Booker T. Washington, which endeared him to the white community in South Carolina, especially the editors of the white-owned State newspaper.⁴ Carroll invited Leevy back to Columbia and took him on as a protégé. Leevy traveled with Carroll to speaking engagements and civic race meetings. Their relationship gave Leevy meaningful engagement with issues related to civil rights and the pursuit of racial equality. It also brought other, more tangible benefits, as many of Carroll’s friends subsequently patronized Leevy’s tailoring shop.⁵

Immediately after moving to Columbia, Leevy began establishing his name through a series of business and social accomplishments. He coorganized the Negro State Fair Association of South Carolina with Reverend Carroll and Dr. A. C. Collins in 1908. Although segregated, Black state fairs had existed since Reconstruction. Carroll, Collins, and Leevy’s was the first fully funded annual event. This new Colored State Fair took place on the same fairgrounds as the then-whites-only State Fair one week after that event. The Colored State Fair—later, the Palmetto State Fair—included animal exhibits, marching band shows, and an annual football match between the two local HBCUs: Allen University and Benedict College. It ran every year (except 1919, on account of the flu pandemic) until 1969, when the fairs were integrated.⁶ One article from 1909 described the Colored State Fair as “the best exhibition of thrift and progress among the Negroes ever shown in South Carolina” and an example of community uplift.⁷

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In 1921, Leevy also helped found the Victory Savings Bank—one of just four Black-owned banks in the nation through at least 1955–of which he was, at times, the vice president, president, and director.⁸ Leevy closed his tailor store and opened a department store in 1917, which also housed a barber shop, beauty salon, tailoring shop, and dressmaking shop. That store closed ten years later because of economic downturn, and he opened a furniture store, which closed in 1929.⁹

In addition to his business interests, Leevy became a powerful advocate for education. He pushed local school officials to improve the facilities and resources offered to Black students in the city’s segregated and unequal schools. By World War I, there was a dearth of high schools accessible to African Americans throughout South Carolina. In a state where barely half the white teenagers attended school, even fewer Black teenagers did, and Black schools received roughly ten percent of the state funding allocated to white schools.¹⁰ The only school available to Richland County’s Black children was Howard School, a two-story wood-frame building established in 1869 by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Soon after he arrived, Leevy petitioned the city to open a second African-American school. The city eventually agreed and built the Booker T. Washington School in 1916. It initially only served Page 4 →Grades one through ten, adding Grade eleven in 1924 and Grade twelve in 1947. Booker T. Washington was the only Black high school in Columbia from its opening until 1948 and was the first Black school accredited by the South Carolina Department of Education.¹¹ By the 1920s, a growing Black population in Columbia and white flight from the Waverly neighborhood created a need for a third African-American school. Leevy fought the city to allow Black students to attend the abandoned white Waverly school.¹² In 1936, Leevy helped establish another school with Charlotte Jackson in the Kendall Town suburb of Columbia. It was initially named the Jackson-Leevy Graded School, but Ms. Jackson withdrew her name, leaving it as the Leevy Graded School. A few years later the school was moved and renamed Carver Elementary School.¹³

In 1928, Leevy opened an Esso gas station at 1831 Taylor Street, which became a “nexus for civic activity and a haven for black travelers.”¹⁴ It included a gas pump and full-time mechanic. Leevy noted that he opened the station because “nowhere in Columbia … were Negroes engaged in the filling station business.”¹⁵ Four years later, he opened Leevy’s Funeral Home, housing it within the gas station’s building. He had previously operated a funeral home in the Ridgewood section of Richland County with partners Reverend H. M. Holloway of Brookland Baptist Church and P. M. Bowling.¹⁶ However, Leevy decided that the partnership was not working and that the funeral home would be more successful downtown. He dissolved the partnership and reopened the business, run entirely by himself, at the Taylor Street location. This served as his base of political, religious, and social operations for the remainder of his life. Leevy’s Funeral Home also included ambulance service, which was essential for Black communities at a time when hospitals often did not have them. Soon after he had established the funeral home, Leevy fought and succeeded to establish a Black chaplain and mortician at the State Hospital.¹⁷ In all of these activities, I. S. Leevy worked to fill the holes that Columbia had in its Black community.

Leevy’s choice of a funeral home was hardly accidental. The most prominent figures in Black communities in the Jim Crow era were often either church leaders or funeral directors, as these were among the few whitecollar careers available to African Americans.¹⁸ Indeed, funeral directing and undertaking was often the most accessible professional career available to African Americans post-Reconstruction, as preaching, teaching, and medicine had higher bars for qualification. Moreover, according to E. Franklin Frazier, undertaking was the only career that contained members of both the Black bourgeois and the professional classes.¹⁹ Funeral directors Page 5 →operated completely independent of white patronage, the only Black professional or businessperson aside from the preacher to be so racially self-sufficient.²⁰ When he opened his home on Taylor Street in 1932, Leevy joined several other Black entrepreneurs who had entered the mortuary business during the interwar years, including four others in Columbia: Champion & Pearson, Johnson-Bradley, Manigault & Williams, and Pinckney’s.²¹

In addition to their relative independence, Black funeral directors were highly regarded by their communities. Their relationship with the dead and grieving made them “an agent of one of the most personal rites associated with the church,” requiring them to be the moral pillars of their communities.²² People often looked up to funeral directors because they knew them at a personal level. The importance of community, public grieving, and funerary practices within Black communities created close relationships among African-American residents and funeral directors.²³ According to the Reverend Christopher Leevy Johnson, funeral directors had a higher standing in Black communities than white ones because of the shared economic, social, and cultural histories specific to African-American communities. He noted that other ethnic funeral homes functioned in similar roles, such as those in Jewish communities, but only Black funeral homes had such a racially restricted client base.²⁴ This close relationship with their communities, cultivated through the extraordinarily personal nature of their work, equipped many directors to speak out on behalf of their communities and assume positions of broader public leadership. As Johnson noted, “even before the civil rights movement, Negro funeral directors were instrumental in spearheading voter registration drives, voter education projects, job placement, philanthropic activity and community service.”²⁵ Leevy’s grandson, I. S. Leevy Johnson, was fascinated by this role of funeral directors and similarly noted how death became “a magnet that drew the black community together.”²⁶

Throughout the Jim Crow era, African-American funeral directors were among the most politically active members of their communities. Suzanne Smith notes how Black funeral directors had a unique position to straddle the private and public spheres. They “used their public role as community leaders in a variety of ways, most notable to combat racial discrimination,” and this was prevalent throughout the nation from the end of Reconstruction.²⁷ Alcee Labat, the director of Labat & Ray in New Orleans, helped lead efforts against segregation amid the Plessy v. Ferguson trial. Charles C. Diggs Sr. also used his success and influence in the funeral business to run for office in Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s. More generally, funeral directors used hearses to drive people to polls, provided ambulances to rural areas,Page 6 →and—as in the case of Leevy’s—promoted voting rights efforts.²⁸ The fact that they did not rely on white patronage allowed funeral directors such as I. S. Leevy to become prominent activists with less fear of economic reprisal. Broadly, Black businesses in segregated southern cities promoted communal pride and helped keep local African Americans united in the face of racial oppression.²⁹ Funeral directors maintained an even more prominent stature in Black communities, again because of their more exclusive clientele and the extremely intimate nature of their work. These dynamics allowed many like Leevy to become local “race men,” or prominent men who “dedicate[d] their life to directly contributing to the betterment of Black people.”³⁰

In 1951, Leevy chose one of his sons, Isaac Kirkland “Kirk” Leevy, to construct a new gas station and funeral home. It replaced the building that had previously served as his gas station at the same location since 1930. After designing the building, Kirk hired several friends for the electrical, flooring, and brickwork. They began construction in August and completed the project by the end of 1952.³¹

From its completion, the building was striking. Most of the building is a two-story, flat-roof, stone structure, reflecting midcentury modern design. However, the southeast corner of the building features a slate, stacked-stone façade that extends several feet above the rest of the building. The second floor of this corner of the building contained a chapel, the stained-glass window of which can still be seen on the southern elevation. An overhang emblazoned with the business’s name covers the main entrance. Although Leevy closed the service station soon after the new building’s opening, the Leevy family retained one of the original gas pumps, which still stands in a recessed corner under this overhang. The pump represents both the origins of the funeral home and the reason for its inclusion in the Green Book. From 1950 through 1955, The Negro Motorist Green Book designated 1831 Taylor Street as a safe haven for Black travelers, listing it as one of Columbia’s service stations.

Leevy’s Funeral Home and service station was one of many Green Book sites in Columbia, one part of a vast, intimate network. Leevy’s business stood on the outskirts of the historic Waverly district, where Black residents opened businesses and even their homes to locals and Black travelers. Columbia’s first suburb, the Waverly district, was first developed in the 1860s and 1870s, and by the turn of the twentieth century had become the center of Columbia’s Black population. Roughly bounded by Taylor Street, Gervais Street, Harden Street, and Millwood Avenue, it was home to the city’s twin HBCUs, Allen University and Benedict College; the Good Samaritan-Waverly Hospital; an extensive civil rights organizing network; and most of Columbia’s Black professionals. These professionals opened groceries, health clinics and dentist offices, retail shops, restaurants, and pharmacies within Waverly, turning it into a relatively self-sufficient neighborhood open to the city’s African-American population.³² The Green Book eventually listed many of these businesses, including restaurants such as Magnolia, Treye’s and Waverly, and service stations such as Waverly’s Service and Thomas’s Drug Store.³³

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Among Waverly’s many Green Book sites were tourist homes, essentially the personal homes of African-American professionals in the city opened Page 9 →to travelers, especially civil rights organizers. Tourist homes were among the most popular places that “offered multiple options for African Americans looking to minimize the indignities of racism.”³⁴ Because they were private homes, the owners could better conceal them from racist reprisal. Dr. W. D. Chappelle Jr. owned a tourist home at 1301 Pine Street. Chappelle was a physician who operated the People’s Infirmary, one of the only sources of health care for Columbia’s African-American people, and his father, an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, had served as Allen University’s president from 1897 through 1899.³⁵ The Chappelle tourist home, operated by Dr. Chappelle’s wife, was listed in the Green Book from 1938 through 1940, 1947 through 1957, and 1959 through 1967. Simmie Hiller Smith operated another tourist home on 929 Pine Street, which was listed in the Green Book from 1947 until 1967. Smith, a dressmaker, hosted everyone from Allen University students to musicians such as Duke Ellington. In her basement, she taught locals and travelers alike how to sew. Smith died in 1955, and her daughter, Delores Hiller Frazier, continued operating the guest home along with her husband, Benjamin, one of the first men to desegregate Columbia’s fire department.³⁶ Beauty parlors and barber shops were also integral parts of the Green Book network and Black communities. These businesses provided “alternative public space[s] where patrons could meet, freely converse, and receive quality, convenient service without fear of the harassment and degradation that often awaited them in the white-controlled spaces of mid-century Columbia.”³⁷ Much like funeral homes, barber shops and salons were among the few avenues of entrepreneurship for Black men and women in the Jim Crow era. Holman’s Barber Shop—listed from 1939 to 1941 and from 1948 to 1955—was one of these. Lewis Holman began barbering while a student at Allen in the late 1910s, opening his first Waverly barber shop in 1928. He operated in various locations over the following decades before establishing a permanent spot at 2128 Gervais Street in 1945. Here, Black men played games, socialized, and discussed political issues, growing an interconnected civil rights community.³⁸ The same was true for women’s beauty salons. Ruth Collins Perry operated a beauty shop in Waverly at 1221 Pine Street, listed in the Green Book from 1939 through 1941. Beauty parlors like Perry’s provided safe spaces for “cultural and aesthetic expression in a society where beauty norms were defined by white standards.”³⁹ They also provided areas where Black women could socialize freely and politically organize. Black women were often the bedrock of civil rights organizing activity and much of their planning possibly took place in beauty parlors.⁴⁰

Page 10 →Green Book sites also flourished outside Waverly. Beauty parlors such as Amy’s and Obbie’s and restaurants such as Green Leaf, the Blue Palace, and Mom’s were all located on Washington Street in the city’s downtown area.⁴¹ Modjeska Monteith Simkins’s Motel Simbeth was one of the most well-known Green Book sites outside Waverly. Located roughly eight miles north on modern-day Two Notch Road, the Motel Simbeth appeared in the Green Book from 1956 until 1961 with a special “recommended” star. Throughout the years, it hosted countless travelers, including famous musicians, such as James Brown, who stayed at the motel whenever they performed in Columbia. The Motel Simbeth also served local Columbians searching for a safe space. Simkins’s niece, Henrie Monteith Treadwell; Robert Anderson; and James Solomon made history in 1963, when a judge ordered them admitted to the University of South Carolina, ending the school’s nearly one hundred years of post-Reconstruction segregation. While attending the University of South Carolina, Anderson and Treadwell stayed at the Motel Simbeth just to have some peace. The motel was later demolished, but Simkins continued to operate her home on Marion Street in Columbia as an “office, meeting place, and for lodging of civil rights associates.”⁴²

I. S. Leevy understood the responsibility he was undertaking as a funeral home director and continued to build his public reputation. Once he took over, he began to raise the profile of his funeral home, running advertisements in The State, Palmetto Leader, Lighthouse and Informer, and several other South Carolina newspapers. The advertisements promoted Leevy’s dedication to providing affordable and accessible service to even the most impoverished African-American people of the Midlands, stating “No Deserving Poor Refused.” Leevy’s grandson remembers: “I learned at an early age that my granddaddy was dedicated to improving the quality of life for everyone. He had a commitment to helping others…. And that was instilled in me from an early age.”⁴³

In time, Leevy’s Funeral Home played an even greater role when it served as a central base for Columbia’s civil rights movement. Although Leevy himself never won elected office, he became one of midcentury Columbia’s leading African-American political figures. A fierce critic of the one-party system that had strangled Southern politics since the end of Reconstruction, Leevy believed in a competitive two-party South Carolina that would allow equal involvement of Black and white people, even in an era when the African-American vote was almost exclusively Republican.⁴⁴ Leevy attacked the conservative, “Lily White” faction of the Republican Party.⁴⁵ In 1944, after the Supreme Court’s denunciation of the Democrats’ white primaries in Smith v. Page 11 →Allwright, many Black South Carolinians, such as John H. McCray—editor of the Lighthouse and Informer, a local Black newspaper—formed the Progressive Democratic Party, hoping to win interracial support for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The national Democratic Party under Roosevelt wanted to make inroads with the African-American communities, and McCray’s efforts sought to shift the Democrats’ power in the South away from segregationists, such as Strom Thurmond, and toward a more progressive, racially inclusive party. With the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Progressive Democrats managed to register over fifty thousand African Americans to vote by 1946.⁴⁶ Leevy, however, continued to work for the Republican Party, hoping to attract the “many Negroes who still fondly cling to the hope that the party of Douglas and Lincoln will come into power again and champion complete freedom for them, a second Emancipation Proclamation.”⁴⁷

Under the Republican Party, Leevy ran in numerous local elections and worked to further establish the party among South Carolina’s Black communities. In 1940, “Tieless” Joe Tolbert appointed Leevy chairman of Richland County’s Republican Party to spread the Republican Party to South Carolina, which barely existed in the state.⁴⁸ Tolbert, a white man, had a somewhat sordid reputation among the African-American community due to his use of racist slurs in public speeches and his general lack of interest in growing the party by attracting Black voters. Still, he and the national party appreciated Leevy’s outspoken criticism of Democrats and his reputation as a respected businessperson.⁴⁹ Leevy believed in the Republican Party because of its role in Reconstruction, but he was never hesitant to criticize the party. For example, he called out the national party during the Eisenhower years for working with Dixiecrats and ignoring the South Carolina party.⁵⁰

Leevy ran for office multiple times, including for South Carolina’s Second District congressional seat in 1954. However, he faced intense opposition by the Progressive Democrats and McCray, mainly due to his association with Tolbert. Other members of the Progressive Democrats such as O. E. McKaine wished to work with Leevy and create an all-Black coalition but were overruled. Despite the opposition from McCray and lack of electoral victories, Leevy remained loyal to Tolbert and the Republican Party until 1964. It was Barry Goldwater’s nomination for president that finally caused Leevy to defect–Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the final straw.⁵¹

I. S. Leevy used both the original service station and the 1951 funeral home as the base of his operations to fight for voting and political rights. Page 12 →Independence from white patronage provided a valuable shield for voting rights activities. As civil rights activists escalated their registration and education efforts during the 1950s and 1960s, white reprisals likewise increased. Bob Moses, for example, was brutally assaulted outside courthouses in Mississippi for his efforts in the 1960s. Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered for working to register African-American people to vote. More locally, employers fired workers and teachers, including Charleston’s Septima Clarke, for refusing to give up their NAACP membership. George Elmore, owner of a Columbia five-and-dime and secretary for Richland County’s Progressive Democratic Party, faced death threats, burning crosses, and white refusals to restock his store after he successfully challenged the state’s Democratic Party’s barring of Black voters.⁵² In Calhoun Falls, Reverend Archie Ware was beaten with clubs and left for dead after casting a vote in the 1946 primary.⁵³ All African-American people in the South had to tread carefully in white society for their own protection, and Black communities were especially wary about voter registration.

Leevy, however, remained undaunted. He founded the Lincoln Emancipation Club in the mid-1940s, using the funeral home for covert voter registration. The club pushed “all state and local religious, fraternal and various other secular organizations to strive for 100 percent registration of their respective membership by May 1956,” but was advertised as “a non-partisan and non-racial organization, dedicated to the establishment of at least a two-party system” to prevent unwanted retaliation.⁵⁴ Club members held annual Emancipation Day Celebrations, which served as registration drives, until 1960. After he opened the funeral home, Leevy convinced a member of the voter registration office to lend voter registration machines to the funeral home. Leevy then invited Columbians to learn about the voter registration process. Members of the Leevy family, especially I. S.’s grandson, I. S. Leevy Johnson, taught citizens how to use the machines. The goal was to prepare African-American voters to pass even the most rigorous tests white registrars could put before them.⁵⁵ Leevy also traveled to churches throughout the Midlands, imploring clergy and congregation alike to register and vote. When ministers complained of the mixing of politics and religion, Leevy responded, “Until we develop some civic and political leaders outside the church. We’ve got to involve church people in civic affairs [sic].”⁵⁶

Leevy had close relationships with many other local civil rights leaders and national organizations. He continued to work with the Columbia chapter of the NAACP, which he had helped found in 1917.⁵⁷ After Martin Luther King, Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Page 13 →in 1957, Leevy joined as an executive board member and representative of Columbia, positions he retained through the early 1960s.⁵⁸ These connections, along with his local stature, allowed him to host national figures. For example, in 1959, SCLC held their fall meeting in Columbia. During the meeting’s off-time, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other SCLC leaders congregated in the funeral home’s chapel, the only location big enough to hold them all. During the meeting, Leevy, the SCLC, and the Columbia community discussed voter registration methods.⁵⁹ Leevy was especially close to the legendary civil rights figure Modjeska Monteith Simkins, who described him as “my beloved compatriot with whom I maintained a glowing friendship for many years.”⁶⁰

By the time the new funeral home was constructed, Leevy’s sight had deteriorated badly, and he soon became completely blind. His wife, Mary, his son Kirk, and his grandchildren, including I. S. Leevy Johnson, helped run the business and took him to political events throughout the region. Mary Kirkland Leevy, his wife of fifty-six years, died June 17, 1965. Leevy passed away three years later, on December 9, 1968, at age ninety-one. His death received front-page coverage from The State, and memorials in various newspapers listed his many political and business achievements, painting him as a man who affected genuine change in Columbia.⁶¹

Isaac Samuel Leevy ran the funeral home until his death and its ownership remained in family hands. Dr. Carroll Moten Leevy, his son, oversaw the estate and appointed Leevy Johnson and Claude McCollom as co-managers. Carroll Leevy had graduated from Columbia’s Booker T. Washington High School and Tennessee’s Fisk University when he applied for medical school in 1942. The Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston barred him from attending, despite I. S. Leevy’s petitioning the state’s General Assembly. Instead, he attended the University of Michigan Medical School. He specialized in medical research, working with Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration’s National Advisory Committee and the US Army Specialized Training Program, earning his MD in 1944. He moved to New Jersey for his residency, where he remained for the rest of his life. Kirk Leevy, however, frequently overturned decisions made by Johnson and McCollom and convinced his brother Carroll to give I. S. Leevy Johnson an ultimatum: stay with Leevy’s or practice law.⁶² For someone raised in the funeral home, and who expected to spend the rest of his life there, it was a difficult but ultimately consequential decision.

Isaac Samuel Leevy Johnson was born May 16, 1942, to Ruby Leevy Johnson—I. S. Leevy’s daughter—and O. J. Johnson. His parents separated Page 14 →when he was young, and Ruby and her children moved into the funeral home. I. S. Leevy Johnson quickly became his grandfather’s main assistant. His family raised him with the expectation that he would take over one day; Leevy taught him about business, politics, community, and funerary practice. Johnson described his youth as “a combination of family and business, since we lived in the Funeral Home. The business aspect of our lives heavily influenced the family aspect.”⁶³ He was able to meet Martin Luther King, Jr., during the SCLC’s Columbia meeting and guided his then-blind grandfather at the 1956 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Johnson recalls being inspired by Leevy’s care for marginalized people. “He was my role model,” Johnson recalled, “and I grew up wanting to be just like him…. He always fought for the underdog.”⁶⁴

After graduating from C. A. Johnson High School in 1960, Johnson enrolled in mortuary school. I. S. Leevy was fixated on the idea that students should live on campus, and the only mortuary program in the United States that provided dormitory space was the University of Minnesota. The two years at Minnesota were difficult for Johnson, being one of the few Black students on campus and being away from his family for the first time. Following the completion of his degree, he returned to South Carolina and enrolled at the local HBCU Benedict College while fulfilling a state-required two-year apprenticeship. He achieved a business degree at Benedict and enrolled at the University of South Carolina Law School in 1965. He hoped that training in law would allow him to better assist the funeral home and advocate for the communities it served. Johnson was able to pursue his law degree without having to split time with the funeral home, yet he faced immense pressure. He was only the second Black student to attend the law school; the first student had enrolled the previous year but did not finish. In 1968, Johnson became the first African American to finish the program. That same year, he married Doris Wright and lost his grandfather.⁶⁵

When faced with Kirk Leevy’s ultimatum, Johnson decided to continue his law practice. He opened the I. S. Leevy Johnson Law Firm and quickly developed a solid local reputation. In 1969, a group of prominent Black South Carolinians gathered at the Masonic Temple on Gervais Street to elect one of their own to the state’s General Assembly. Since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “the number of registered [African-American] voters mushroomed” to two hundred twenty thousand in 1970 but had yet to see major electoral victories.⁶⁶ Indeed, the state’s government had remained all white for the entire twentieth century. This group, which included Lincoln C. Jenkins, Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Reverend C. J. Whitaker and Page 15 →others, sought to change this unfortunate history. With support from the Democratic Party’s white faction, the group nominated Columbia lawyer James Felder, Charleston funeral director Herbert Fielding, Charleston political organizer James Clyburn, and I. S. Leevy Johnson to run for the South Carolina House of Representatives. Since the then-white supremacist Democratic Party had taken control of the state after the end of Reconstruction, one of the many ways they attempted to keep African-American people out of political office was decrying them as incompetent and unqualified for politics. Even after the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, South Carolina’s Black leadership focused on each candidate’s qualifications. Johnson was not only an accomplished lawyer; he also carried the prestige of the family name: “The name recognition helped: I was I. S. Leevy’s grandson.”⁶⁷

In 1970, I. S. Leevy Johnson realized his grandfather’s dreams. Johnson’s namesake had fought for Black voting rights for decades. He had tried to enter office to change things from the inside but never won an election. On November 3, 1970, Johnson, along with Felder and Fielding, was among the first African Americans in the century to be voted into the South Carolina General Assembly.⁶⁸ Looking back at those years, he recalled, “I just wish that [my grandfather] and my grandmother had been alive to see things they have allowed me to achieve,” crediting all the political and community work they accomplished during their lives as the reason he could achieve so much.⁶⁹ Johnson lost reelection in 1972 during a nationwide Nixon-Republican wave fueled by white backlash against the school redistricting measures that had integrated Richland County schools.⁷⁰ He won his seat back in 1974, serving until his political retirement in 1980. In office, he helped found the South Carolina Black Caucus, served as vice-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and introduced bills to make school textbooks free and expand the state’s Supreme Court.⁷¹

While Johnson was in office, Kirk Leevy continued to run the funeral home. In 1977, he approached Carroll about purchasing the business from the trust, but he died in 1978 before the sale could take place. His children, Gregory and Gloria Leevy, continued his dream, purchasing the funeral home in 1978 with a loan from First Palmetto Bank. Gregory, who returned home after touring as an actor, served as executive director, obtaining his funeral director’s license while Ben Piper and Robert Bostick oversaw the daily functions. Gregory was frequently absent, directing and performing at the local Trustus Theatre while Gloria was busy with her own law practice, leaving Piper, Bostick, and the staff to run the funeral home.⁷² Piper and Bostick would both leave in the early 1980s. Bostick partnered with Willie Page 16 →Tompkins, also a former Leevy’s employee, to open the Bostick-Tompkins Funeral Home three blocks away from Leevy’s. Bostick and Tompkins had been the public faces of Leevy’s, and the community began shifting its patronage to the people they knew. Leevy’s Funeral Home’s finances began to suffer, but Gregory and Gloria resisted selling, even to an interested I. S. Leevy Johnson. However, in 1994, Gregory and Gloria defaulted on payments and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1995, the presiding judge for their case, William Thurmond Bishop, began selling the funeral home’s assets. As the sole bidder, Leevy Johnson became the owner of Leevy’s Funeral Home in June 1995. Gregory continued to act and direct while Gloria continued her law practice, both later moving to Greenville, SC.⁷³

Before he purchased his grandfather’s funeral home, Leevy Johnson continued his successful legal career. In 1975, he expanded his law firm, partnering with one-time law school classmate and then law professor, William T. Toal, and a recent Emory Law School graduate, Luther J. Battiste. The new Johnson, Toal & Battiste P. A. was the first integrated law firm in South Carolina. Toal was white, and the firm hired paralegals and clerks of all races. Johnson, Toal & Battiste focused on fighting for poor and marginalized people and developed a reputation for being, in the words of former South Carolina Chief Justice Ernest Finney, “articulate, prepared and on the cutting edge on the issues which are of vital concern to the African-American community.”⁷⁴ After a heart attack and finding distaste with political campaigning, Johnson resigned from elected office in 1980 and focused on his law firm. In 1983, the South Carolina Bar elected him as its secretary, and in 1985, he was unanimously elected president, the first Black lawyer to lead the Bar.⁷⁵ Johnson worked to improve the image of lawyers in the state and give hope to Black communities. He embraced his blackness “because it offers hope to black people who may have questions about the sincerity and determination of the judicial system today.”⁷⁶ His reputation as a lawyer grew nationally throughout the rest of the century. Even superstar attorney Johnnie Cochran allegedly described himself as “the I. S. Leevy Johnson of Los Angeles.”⁷⁷

Johnson was also prominent in education, much like his grandfather. Governor Dick Riley appointed him chair of the Trustee Board of South Carolina State College (SCSC) in 1980, a position he held for ten years. He then spent an additional five years on the board as a regular member. SCSC saw unprecedented growth under his leadership, achieving university status in 1990.⁷⁸ Johnson resigned from the board in 1995, in part because of the Page 17 →institution’s financial scandals. His main reason, however, was that he had finally purchased Leevy’s Funeral Home after three decades of waiting.

After becoming the sole owner of the funeral home in June 1995, Johnson appointed Ben Piper as manager and worked to gain back the community’s trust. His statewide reputation certainly helped. He remodeled the home, “bought a new fleet of cars, landscaped Lincoln cemetery, and purchased uniforms for the staff.”⁷⁹ Johnson revived his grandfather’s tradition of helping all those in need, donating services to those who passed in tragedies. Even when offered Matthew Perry’s vacant district judge seat, Johnson turned it down to focus on the funeral home.

I. S. Leevy Johnson continues to run the funeral home, along with his law practice. Leevy’s Funeral Home purchased a neighboring car maintenance shop in 1999, converting it into a chapel. In 2005, the space between the Funeral Home and new chapel was covered and converted into parking for the Funeral Home’s fleet of vehicles.⁸⁰ It remains a family practice. Johnson’s son, Reverend Dr. Christopher Leevy Johnson, is president and managing director; and another son, George Johnson, is general counsel for the Funeral Home and managing shareholder for Johnson, Toal, and Battiste. I. S. Leevy Johnson’s wife, Doris Wright Johnson, has worked as the funeral home’s public relations director in addition to her career as an educator at Booker T. Washington High and Benedict College.⁸¹

Johnson has received various high honors for his careers in politics, law, and funerary practice. In 1999, he received South Carolina’s highest civilian achievement, the Order of the Palmetto, recognizing his achievements, and in 2003, Interstate 277 was named after him.⁸² I. S. Leevy Johnson would perhaps consider his greatest, or at least most personal, achievement to be inducting his grandfather, I. S. Leevy, into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame in 1996. In his speech, Johnson credited his grandfather with all his success and eulogized him, saying, “Let no one here say that this is the last tribute of respect that he’ll pay him, but let every moment of every day be spent in honoring all that Mr. Leevy stood for.”⁸³

W. Maclane Hull recently earned a PhD in history at the University of South Carolina. He completed his master of arts in public history in 2021. His research focuses on the rise and intersections of mass incarceration and hiphop culture in the United States. He successfully nominated Leevy’s Funeral Home to the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.