Page 1 →Side by Side and All with Porches

Columbia’s Erased Neighborhoods Were Rich in Community

Aïda Rogers

It must have been a happy moment—maybe of elation—when the committee tasked with restoring the University of South Carolina’s historic Horseshoe realized they had access to free bricks. Their beloved landmark, an expanse of grand trees and architecturally important buildings, was in dramatic need of repair. Free bricks? What a windfall. Brick walls could be built to enhance special gardens. Brick walkways would look so much better, be more historically appropriate, than the asphalt pavement already in place.

Equally convenient, the bricks would be easy to get. They were practically on campus already, the remains of the oldest buildings of the four-acre Booker T. Washington High School. For fifty-eight years, those bricks had held up and held in thousands of students and a devoted faculty. But the Richland County District One School Board had voted. The building was too old; it would cost too much to update or build new somewhere else. The students, teachers, coaches, and counselors would go to newer schools in the district. The bricks would go to the Horseshoe. Elation? Or business as usual? Under pressure to finish their restoration by the country’s 1976 bicentennial, the committee acted as any practical, cash-strapped group would: They used what they had. And, as usual, business as usual for white decision-makers created heartbreak and bitterness for the people who loved Booker T. Washington High School, who fought loud and hard to keep it open. The idea of people walking on their school’s bricks—essentially walking on them—was too profound a metaphor. In truth, it was sacrilegious. Booker T. Washington High School, with its stellar academics, athletics, and arts, its legion of high-achieving alumni and tirelessly determined faculty, was closed and demolished in 1974. Its bricks were moved in 1975. The committee could meet their 1976 deadline. And “The Great Mother of the Black Community,” as science teacher and alumna Frankie B. Outten so accurately put it when she and so many others publicly protested its closure, went quiet.¹

Page 2 →My mother is driving my sisters and me to Columbia. It’s 1968, baby number four is coming, and she has regular obstetrician appointments to keep. For her children, the ride is long and boring until we cross the Broad River into the city. That’s when the view gets interesting. A row of houses, side by side and all with porches, cram next to each other on a slope. They look rickety, but I can’t look away. I somehow know poor people live there and that they’re probably Black, but it seems like a fun way to live—and so different from the carefully spaced, horizontal world of brick ranch houses and grass yards we occupy in our majority-white town.

I figured those small houses were “cabins”—I didn’t know the term shotgun house—and that the people in them visited each other all the time.² I envisioned lots of laughing and hanging over the porches. Fifty-some years later, I learned that I was right. Mrs. Ethel Livingston Pearson, a member of Booker T. Washington High School’s last graduating class, smiles when she talks about growing up on “the Hill.” Her “Hill” is the Wheeler Hill neighborhood, adjacent to the University of South Carolina. Although Wheeler Hill is not the neighborhood I remember from childhood—that was Arsenal Hill—they were similar. Most of the residents were tenants, Black, and poor.³

Page 3 →But poor is a relative term. It can have lots of meanings. You can be poor in money but rich in other ways. Wheeler Hill was rich in community. “We were really neighbors,” Mrs. Pearson recalls. “We were close and friendly, and you could reach across the porch and get what you need.” Her grandmother and her neighbor would swap yellow and white grits across their porches, she tells me. People would come out in the mornings to greet each other and then back out in the evenings to say good night. Physically close, they were emotionally close too. For the kids, “meeting up” was common practice. “We would meet up to go down the hill to high school or meet up to go up the hill to elementary school,” she explains.⁴ Wheeler Hill Elementary later was renamed after Florence C. Benson, who taught there. The schools, like the churches, unified the residents. Mrs. Pearson doesn’t live on Wheeler Hill anymore. She hasn’t for decades, and neither have her friends and neighbors, ever since the university began its slow encroachment into the neighborhood. But does a slow takeover make it any less disruptive? Isn’t a tsunami of development—no matter how gradual—still a tsunami?

You can find Mrs. Pearson and other Wheeler Hill old-timers—and some of their descendants—in one of the few places they have left in their cherished neighborhood. St. James African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church still stands, thanks to Ezra Wheeler, the Ohio doctor who bought land and settled here in the 1870s. Dr. Wheeler sold a plot of it to the church for a dollar, stipulating that it must be used for religious purposes.⁵ On Sunday mornings, it’s a joyful place to be. When a baby cries, Mrs. Pearson is thrilled. A new baby means a new member.

The truth of it is, nobody should have been surprised that Booker T. Washington closed. The people it served lived in neighborhoods close to the university, and the university needed space. The residents on Wheeler Hill needed only to look west across South Main and Assembly streets and down the Blossom Street hill to see what the university and city of Columbia could do. Their neighbors and classmates in the Ward One community had been scattered years before Booker closed. Their shotgun houses, café, small groceries, and churches were demolished—even their beloved Celia Dial Saxon School—so massive concrete could rise. Exhibit A: The Carolina Coliseum. The 12,401-seat arena, for years the largest in the state, signaled a new skyline for Columbia and the 1968 end of Ward One.

Like Ward One, Wheeler Hill had been self-sufficient. People had everything they needed—a community center, ball fields, churches, a small store, Page 4 →a beauty salon, even a cobbler. Residents were working class, and they obediently kept to themselves. They knew not to cross Wheat Street, which Booker fronted, because they weren’t allowed on the university campus on the hill above it—unless they worked there as custodians, groundskeepers, or in food service. Those were the rules until 1963, when the University of South Carolina (USC) admitted its first Black students since Reconstruction.⁶

For its part, the university was in a geographical and financial bind. Like many city-enclosed universities in the United States, post-World War II America meant rapidly growing enrollments. Veterans brought their GI bills; the baby boom brought more students. Those students needed dorms. Gyms. Classrooms. Ballfields. Married housing. USC, having gone from sixty-seven hundred students in 1962 to nineteen thousand five hundred in 1972, was strapped and chafing. Its rescue arrived in a series of midcentury federal urban renewal funds that allowed universities and cities to “fight blight” through “slum clearance.”⁷ USC was one of many colleges and Page 5 →universities in the country to use those terms and techniques to get the real estate they wanted, and so often, such real estate was owned by absentee landlords. Eminent domain gave the university, through its newly established, nonprofit Carolina Research and Development Foundation, the legal means to buy properties—acquire is the word regularly used—and then demolish them for their needs. The result today, in 2024, is dramatic. Ward One, which in 1965 tied with Arsenal Hill as Columbia’s most blighted neighborhood, is entirely a university property of behemoth buildings—the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center, the Darla Moore School of Business, the Koger Center for the Arts, and its Greek Village for sororities and fraternities. With the opening of the eighteen-thousand-seat Colonial Life Arena in 2002, the Coliseum became practically obsolete.

Wheeler Hill, considered the fourth-most blighted neighborhood, was much slower to change. Now it’s mostly residential—a tangle of narrow, winding lanes, large homes, and brick town homes. Vines cover brick walls with wrought-iron gates. Expensive cars front small, manicured yards. The original roads, unpaved, were rerouted. Few signs of shotgun houses here, and certainly no outdoor plumbing. But vestiges of those old communities remain. In Ward One, the long-languishing Palmetto Compress Building, a vast horizontal brick structure where cotton bales were compressed in the early twentieth century, was recently restored into student apartments. Photos of the old neighborhood line the walls, a project of Columbia SC 63, an initiative that recognizes the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 American Civil Rights Movement.⁸ On Wheeler Hill, a few original homes remain, owned by residents who could afford to not sell. And most noticeably, along with the railroad tracks and Benson School, St. James AME.

It was St. James that drew the attention of journalist Janet Kahler, who lived with her family two miles away in the Shandon neighborhood. Driving around Wheeler Hill in the 2000s with her daughter, Sophie, she pointed out the incongruity of an old Black church in a new white neighborhood. When Sophie entered the USC as a history and geography major, she started what became a four-year study of Columbia’s old, erased, and redlined neighborhoods. Her curiosity specifically about Wheeler Hill led her to plunder fifteen boxes and cartons of the university’s archives and about ten binders of documents and meeting minutes of the Columbia Housing Authority. Her painstaking research resulted first in a nine-page paper published in the January 2020 issue of the Journal of Historical Geography. Its headline was as explosive as the letter she uncovered: “‘Wipe out the entire slum area’: university-led urban renewal in Columbia, South Carolina, 1950–1985.”⁹ The Page 6 →words came from a letter written by university president Thomas F. Jones to members of Columbia’s city council and housing authority. Dated February 22, 1968, Jones put into writing what he and other local power brokers thought, said, and planned: “For many years it has been the goal of the University and the City of Columbia to attempt to wipe out the entire slum area of approximately twelve blocks known as Wheeler Hill.”¹⁰ Today, Jones’s words sound exceptionally brutal. For the people of Wheeler Hill, they were savage. Forcing people to leave their homes, even if a housing authority says that it will help them find somewhere else to go, is still eviction. Or in the case of a community, exodus.

This word: slum. It drags the ear, harms the spirit, insults a community. It’s code, Sophie Kahler writes, noting that “by the mid-twentieth century the terms blight and slum were used by government officials as synonyms for African American communities.” In Columbia at that time, eighty-one percent of the city’s nonwhite residents lived in six areas considered the most blighted. “The desire to wipe out slums, therefore, coincided with a desire to wipe out black communities.”¹¹ Her research has shown that the university, once it had built a gym and athletic fields across from Booker T. Washington High, didn’t need the Wheeler Hill property. The land in Ward One was enough. “There are documents where they explicitly say, ‘we don’t need it for campus but we need it to protect ourselves,’” Kahler said, when I interviewed her for an article about her research.¹² She was particularly struck by how a slow, decades-long development can erode a neighborhood. Her word: destabilizing.

As for slum, that word is also misleading. Basil Harris, a lifelong member of St. James AME, wants me to know that Wheeler Hill was not that. The Wheeler Hill of his 1970s childhood was more prosperous. Too many people outside the community think that it never changed after the 1930s, he says, when many photos were taken.¹³ In actuality, most photos were taken in the 1950s and ‘60s—at least the ones available for public viewing—when the “Fight Blight” movement hit full gear. Joseph Winter, housing inspector and then-director of the Columbia Rehabilitation Commission, documented those neighborhoods to justify urban renewal and neighborhood demolition. His photos have been collected and digitized by the university’s South Caroliniana Library.¹⁴ Winter captured scenes of children working diligently outside, trash piles on the side of their unpaved streets. Did they understand that by “fighting blight” they were helping the effort that eventually would displace them?

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Basil Harris’s family moved to the Eau Claire area north of Main Street. Others headed to neighborhoods on Bluff Road, in the shadow of the university’s Williams-Brice Stadium. Like most members of St. James, he hasn’t lived on Wheeler Hill in decades. Gentrification made it too expensive. But those are nice cars in the church parking lot on the last Sunday in February, and the sanctuary is spotless and just the right size, recently renovated with electronic screens to read the hymns. Harris, with his three master’s degrees from USC, wants me to know that his congregation is one of education. The church helped provide that education, with Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, and Christmas and Easter pageants. His sons have degrees from Claflin University and West Point. The current and past two pastors have doctorates. “That is the lineage of Wheeler Hill,” he declares.¹⁵

Harris, who lives in Irmo and works at the State Department of Education, knows his local history, so he knows the name Dorothy Perry Thompson, who grew up here a generation before him. She is the reason people know important things about Wheeler Hill. When Sophie Kahler did her research, Thompson’s dissertation was invaluable. In “Wheeler Hill and Page 8 →Other Poems,” Thompson describes her community and the people in it. I’m captivated by her work and irked that her books are out of print.

“I grew up in a calm, dangerous, simple, mysterious place and time,” she writes in her introduction, “‘Wheeler Hill,’ Columbia, South Carolina, 1950–65.”¹⁶ What follows are poem after poem about the people who inhabited her neighborhood in her time. They’re a colorful crowd—Pink, the bootlegger who “came from Philly/In a sharkskin suit and alligator shoes”; Sister Lakin with her drinking problem and friend Lally who kept her straight; Sonny on the chain gang; Benjamin Jefferson who “whistled in spurts/Of exaggerated life/To the rhythmical pop/Of his shoeshine rag.” In “Miss Juanita’s Beauty Salon,” Thompson describes how Brother Reese makes sure his Silver Satin wine is hidden inside his coat. He wouldn’t want the ladies inside—sisters Fannie Phelps Adams and Celia Phelps Martin—to see him take a drink. “I always turns my back!”¹⁷

Page 9 →Maybe only a poet can best get across what a lost place was. Her poems reflect childhood impressions and those that came later.

Spend any time learning about Wheeler Hill or Booker T. Washington High and you start recognizing the names. Fannie Phelps Adams and Celia Phelps Martin grew up on the Hill and were respected Booker educators. Their names are engraved on brass plaques on pews at St. James. Brother Reese would be crazy to drink in front of them, or “Miss Jeannette White/the licensed mid-wife/Who was getting her hair dyed.”¹⁸

Everybody knew everybody, and Dorothy Perry Thompson makes sure we know them too. Some of her “characters” are still on Wheeler Hill; namely, Latrelle Argroe, who’d “have parties for all the children/And make their costumes/For Halloween night.” Her husband, Mr. Hump, the plumber, “would fix people’s toilets/And let them pay/With what they could.”¹⁹ Calm and dangerous, indeed.

Thanks to Thompson’s dissertation, we forever have in writing important facts about midcentury Columbia. She’s the one who tells us about the “Keep Out” sign on the wall that divided Wheeler Hill from Myrtle Court, the exclusive white neighborhood next door. From her poems, we learn that people on Wheeler Hill weren’t allowed to cross Wheat Street, because Blacks weren’t allowed on the university campus then. Her opening poem, “Wheeler Hill,” tells us plenty in its first two verses:

It was always there,

Just like us,

subject to the whims and wishes

Of the Almighty Whitey;²⁰

Juanita’s Beauty Salon is long gone, and Copeland’s Corner Store is much changed. A small grocery in Thompson’s earlier years, Copeland’s eventually became a gourmet grocery called the Purple Cow, distinctive for its large sign outside. Now that building houses DiPrato’s Delicatessen, a popular lunch and brunch restaurant. “A country club-type place,” Sophie Kahler describes it.²¹

Ethel Livingston Pearson grew up in a house where DiPrato’s parking lot is now. At St. James, I ask her if she ever eats there. “Yes,” she says, smiling. Page 10 →She’s had lunch there with colleagues. She doesn’t tell them she used to live there, but she always looks around and takes a moment to reflect.²² When I drive by after the service, I notice DiPrato’s filling up. It’s a beautiful day, one of those faux spring days that come every February. People are sitting at tables outside. They’re all white, and like at St. James, new construction is rising around them.

Dorothy Perry Thompson graduated from Booker T. Washington in 1962. She wouldn’t have been accepted to the university across the street, so she went to Allen University, a Columbia HBCU. Her 1974 master of arts in teaching, however, came from the USC, which integrated eleven years earlier. By the time she defended her dissertation in 1987, she’d been teaching in high schools for years, all while parenting three children with husband Johnnie Thompson, a Booker classmate. She was the second Black person to earn a PhD in English from USC and the first to do so with a creative writing dissertation. Having watched her Wheeler Hill disintegrate, she had plenty of material. Read her work from her dissertation through her last collection, published in 2001, and you’ll realize that while she’s reporting on a disappeared place and people, they’re ever fresh in her memory. In “Robbie’s Spirit at the Purple Cow (a visit, 40 years later),” she describes an encounter shopping at the boutique grocery long after Copeland’s Corner Store closed:

I did not know he would be

in there, among the flavors

and cellophane,

…

But up he came to meet me,

the round, bald head, the ready smile,²³

The poem continues with a description of how the merchandise is so different: chocolate mints instead of Johnnie cakes, “a kosher row instead of Robbie’s/cold cut case.” The place is so changed that, in the poem, Thompson tries to keep Robbie’s spirit from noticing.

I did not want him

to see out through

the plate glass window,

the front of the store,

where the small patch of grass

Page 11 →was dwarfed by a plyboard cut-out,

a life-sized bovine

fading to lilac.²⁴

Bobby Donaldson, USC associate professor of history, knows Thompson’s work. Director of the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, he and his students have studied Ward One and Wheeler Hill and befriended many of those displaced residents. “I think she recognized a responsibility to intervene on her neighborhood’s behalf,” Donaldson says, “and to tell the truth, it’s not an overwhelmingly positive portrait, but multidimensional about the characteristics of Wheeler Hill. She tries to set the record straight about a neighborhood that had been largely maligned.”²⁵

Thompson died in 2002, not long after she’d been promoted to full professor at Winthrop University. She was still in her fifties and a full-blown success, having published three books of poetry and helping establish Winthrop’s African American Studies program. Adored by her students, she was “mesmerizing” in the classroom, Donaldson says. Her written work is her legacy. “She uses her life as a window into African American life and culture in Columbia,” he asserts. “It is not an objective engagement for her; it’s deeply personal. Not only is it a history lesson but she’s pulling layers away from her own family. If she had not told the story, it would have been long buried.”²⁶ What a loss that would be. No poems about jukeboxes and fish sandwiches, women working as “pressers” and teens having parties in back yards. Who else has described what living in a shotgun house is like—and as important, getting it published for others to read? “It’s a real gift to her neighbors that she’s left—a landmark,” Donaldson says. “So much is gone, but it lives on in her work, her writing.”²⁷

And what is writing, particularly poetry, but music? Dot Perry, as her friends would have called her, was a singer, and as a child and teen, she did what my sisters and I did in our back yard, and what our mother and her sister did in theirs, and what girls the world over have done forever: sing and dance and put on a show:

Nobody had the go-go boots

And only Annette could fix her hair

Like the white girls did

… But we had the music in our heads

And Stine’s back porch

To use as a stage.²⁸

Page 12 →In “Hootenanny: The Whitening,” Dot and her friends were pretending to be on the popular WIS-TV show of that time. They did the jerk and the monkey, and for the “main attraction,” turned a tin tub upside down for one of them to“do/Her dynamite act.”²⁹

It’s the universality of this poem and so many others that win me over, that convinces me her work needs to be collected and reissued. In my writing and editing course, I always assign a young woman to read “Hootenanny” in class. Most of us can relate entirely, until the last three lines:

The lights dazzled our eyes

And the applause changed them

From brown to blue.

Thompson refers to “Hootenanny” as “white dreams” in her dissertation’s introduction.³⁰ But she was serious about her singing. From Booker’s 1962 yearbook, we learn that she sang with two school choral groups; her “ambition” was to be a dancer. From Professor Jo Koster, her Winthrop friend and colleague, we learn that Thompson often sang her poems; together, the professors would sing songs by The Marvelettes while walking their office halls.³¹

In high school, Thompson and her friends formed a successful girl group, The Dollettes. When Motown came calling, offering a contract, The Dollettes turned them down, Koster says. College was more important. Learning this, I start fantasizing about more than the publication of Thompson’s complete works. What about a Broadway show? A folk opera? Isn’t Wheeler Hill as colorful as Catfish Row, its characters as alive as Porgy, Bess, and Sportin’ Life? What kid didn’t present a coin at a store in exchange for a candy bar? Jo Koster suggests a less ambitious celebration: a reading of her friend’s poetry in the Booker T. Washington High auditorium. Thompson’s former students, she promises, would love to take part.

The USC campus has changed markedly since 1987, when, in her dissertation’s introduction, Thompson described how her grandmother was upset by new dorms obscuring her view. The university built those dorms, Bates House and Bates West, in 1969 and 1974 respectively. They still stand, but are overshadowed by the four-building circa-2023 Campus Village, complete with retail and dining. But what hasn’t changed is the geology. You can’t get past the hills. Long, tall slopes rise and fall throughout downtown and the USC campus. Railroad tracks cross at the top and bottom. Wheeler Hill, at Page 13 →three hundred one feet above sea level, rises about one hundred feet from Booker T. Washington High on Wheat Street. Before Ezra Wheeler built his house at the top, where a huge water tower now stands, the area was called Pickens Hill. There is no Wheeler Street in this part of Columbia; the “hill” is the top of Pickens Street in that neighborhood. Because of those hills, readers familiar with Columbia can recognize Thompson’s settings today.

In “Bo-Shang,” written for her brother James Arthur Whaley, she recalls the time his car broke down in the middle of Pickens Street: “not at the bottom where the Black folks live/but up on the hill near the Purple Onion Club/where the white two-stories/are pale, fat and silent.”

It wasn’t uncommon for poor people to live in hilly neighborhoods, Bobby Donaldson explains, because the terrain made home construction difficult.³² Arsenal Hill was located far enough away from USC to avoid the university’s expansion. But it wasn’t immune from city erasure. Now it encompasses the tranquil, shady governor’s mansion complex. Of the neighborhoods surrounding USC from that era, only University Hill has remained intact. Populated by whites who owned their homes, University Hill fought off USC’s encroachment. And it yielded a resident who, like Dorothy Perry Thompson, left reminders of what Columbia used to be. Edmund Yaghjian wandered Columbia’s minority neighborhoods, painting scenes of children playing on porches, housewives chatting, men gathered on corners. His oils, lacquers, and acrylics show them in working-class surroundings—railroad tracks, coal yards, dirt streets. In his circa-1955 Dumping on Wheat Street, we see a burn pile in the foreground, with two people and crooked houses crowded behind it.³³ Anyone looking at that painting in the twenty-first century knows that Wheat Street doesn’t look anything like that now.

For Yaghjian, born in Armenia in 1905 and raised in Rhode Island from age two, coming to Columbia was risky. He was a nationally exhibited New York artist; he’d graduated with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. But he was also a grocer’s son who grew up in a nineteenth-century clapboard house in a segregated Armenian community in Providence. Columbia’s low-income neighborhoods would have been familiar to him, wrote his granddaughter, Robin Waites, in a book dedicated to his work.³⁴ When Yaghjian accepted the offer from USC to teach in and chair its small art department, he made the most of it, helping establish the Columbia Museum of Art and teaching many students who achieved acclaim. From his arrival in 1945 to his death in 1997, Edmund Yaghjian would have seen those marginalized neighborhoods change or vanish and do his part to preserve Page 14 →them. Who today knows that tall, black “gasometers” rose high behind the church and shotgun houses in Ward One? Yaghjian leaves us that gift with his 1955 Morning on Huger Street.³⁵

Robin Waites wrote her master’s thesis on her grandfather’s work. Some of his paintings, those not named by location, reflect a blending of what he saw on his walks along Columbia streets, she says. “Ordinary lives” interested him, Waites wrote in an essay for Yaghjian, a book that accompanied a 2007 retrospective of his work at the State Museum. “The ease and honesty with which he portrayed these subjects reveals a willingness to step across boundaries of race and class that were clearly drawn in Columbia in the 1950s.”³⁶

She too, has helped preserve the city’s neighborhoods. In her twenty years as executive director of Historic Columbia, she and Donaldson have collaborated to keep the stories of those neighborhoods alive, conducting and recording oral histories and videos. The Historic Columbia website includes an impressive array of online tours of African American neighborhoods and heritage sites.³⁷ One of Donaldson’s graduate students, Ashley N. Bouknight, has posted her research online. Titled “And Lest We Forget: Remembering Ward One,” it includes a fifteen-minute film with interviews of people who grew up there.³⁸ Some stories are of happy though crowded times in substandard housing. The film also includes photos from USC yearbooks. I find one from 1967 particularly upsetting: A Black man is pushing a dust mop across a basketball court, students all around. The caption above: “Halftime Entertainment.”³⁹ USC was four years past desegregation by then, one of the last in the South to enroll Black students. Some of the white students had a hard time accepting Black classmates, as evidenced by the 2022 student-produced, award-winning documentary, The Backbone, about Black female students at USC. One of them, Gail Bush Diggs, recalled her experience as homecoming queen. She received a crown but not the promised scepter; students threw ice on her when she came back into the stands. It was 1975.⁴⁰

Page 15 →That wouldn’t have surprised any of the Booker students. Those who walked to school from other Columbia neighborhoods before 1963 knew they weren’t allowed on the USC campus. Donaldson has heard them recall how they either walked long distances out of their way to avoid the campus or ran through it, risking verbal belittlement or getting hit with what university students threw at them. “There were all kinds of indignities hurled at them,” he says.⁴¹ But once on the Booker campus, the students were safe.

All that’s left of Booker now is its namesake auditorium. Built in 1956, it was in good enough shape for the university to keep and use for other purposes. Now, theater students are among those who use it. Booker’s faculty would surely gasp at a poster for a coming play: “Stupid F*cking Bird, which is ‘kinda based on The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.’”⁴² But they’d probably approve that it houses USC’s Trio program, which helps low-income and first-generation students. The Booker faculty was all about lifting their race. If you walk along the walls and study the large panels that tell the school’s history—all in its black-and-gold colors—you’ll see the stern faces of principals and teachers. They had impressive credentials and impressed upon their students the need to achieve. Required to visit every child at home, teachers posted their mottos, lesson plans, and goals on their bulletin boards. The Comet student newspaper reports alumni and faculty who’ve gone to Harvard; large photos show the student orchestra with boys in tuxedos and girls in frothy white gowns. Trophies for every sport and basketballs for the years when Booker won the state championship fill glass cases. The list of Page 16 →distinguished scholars, jurists, educators, physicians, and other professionals could fill a book—maybe ten—and so would its opportunities for students. Debate. Carpentry. Cosmetology. “The whole child” was Booker’s goal, and they offered night classes for parents, too. At assemblies during his 1932–45 principalship, J. Andrew Simmons, a Charleston native and Fisk University graduate, would recite Florence Earle Coates’s poem, “Thank God, a Man Can Grow.” The students learned to recite it too.

THANK God, a man can grow!

He is not bound

With earthward gaze to creep along the ground:

Though his beginnings be but poor and low,

Thank God, a man can grow!

The fire upon his altars may burn dim,

The torch he lighted may in darkness fail,

And nothing to rekindle it avail,—

Yet high beyond his dull horizon’s rim,

Arcturus and the Pleiads beckon him.⁴³

From its 1916 start in educating students in Grades one through ten, Booker’s leaders were ambitious. The school grew steadily over the years, expanding to include a cafeteria, labs, a gym, and an auditorium. It also achieved the rare and coveted accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. In 1940, the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes identified Booker as one of seventeen of “the most promising high schools” in a national study. Families moved to the city so their children could attend.⁴⁴ Parents who lived outside the city sent their children to live with a family member who did, so they could attend such an outstanding school. Who could blame them? Where else could Black children get opportunities as cultured as madrigal singing? Dorothy Perry Thompson sang with them. It was Columbia’s only public Black high school until 1949, when C. A. Johnson opened to relieve Booker, by then overcrowded. About seven thousand people graduated from Booker, and for many of them, earning that high school diploma was an achievement about which their forebears could only dream. Just as those who were gifted made names for themselves, those who didn’t continue their education contributed to their families, city, and state, Donaldson points out.

In 1970, the state’s tricentennial, Booker integrated. White students from Olympia and Dreher High Schools arrived, including Cissie Jones, the daughter of the university president who’d wanted Wheeler Hill transformed.⁴⁵ Eventually, friendships developed and grew. Large photos on the school walls show Black and white students in groups, some looking chummy. A year later, an editorial in The State newspaper stated that Booker had achieved “a greater degree of understanding and cooperation than some of the other schools.”⁴⁶

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Booker’s last graduation was emotional. It followed a year of tense and angry hearings that faculty and families had with the school board, culminating with Frankie B. Outten’s testimonial, calling Booker the “Great Mother of the Black Community.” By then, the white students were Booker’s children too. “We may not have had a bright modern building, or a new science wing, or a theatre, or wealthy backers and their political influence, but when you’ve got harmony and togetherness and brotherhood and happiness in your soul, you’ve got just about everything,” valedictorian Bill Canaday, who is white, said that night. “Although our physical home may be torn down, no power on Earth can destroy our love for one another or break our proud spirit of oneness.”⁴⁷

When the school’s closing was commemorated ten years later, Canaday was back with an equally heartfelt speech. “The older I get, the more Page 18 →convinced I become that the years 1970 through 1974, my Booker T. Washington High School years, were the most important, formative years of my life,” he said that night at the Township Auditorium, where graduations were held. “I not only learned how to think, I learned how to feel…. We saw the walls of ignorance and hostility come tumbling down.”⁴⁸ When the news came that Booker wouldn’t be rebuilt or moved but closed forever, Assistant Principal Fannie Phelps Adams had to hide her tears so she could comfort angry, crying students. Underclassmen asked where they’d be going next year. Mrs. Adams had her answer ready: “No matter where it is, please go and graduate for me.”⁴⁹ Margaret N. O’Shea covered the school’s reaction for The State newspaper that February day. Mrs. Adams told her she’d been “telling the university for years they had ‘a laboratory in their lap, but they were interested in the land instead of the people.’”⁵⁰

When I arrived at USC in 1979, I knew nothing of this history. As far as I was concerned, the Coliseum had been there forever. Where else would the journalism school be? Or basketball games? Or concerts and big shows, like the circus? If a neighborhood had been there, it would have been news to me. Same for the Horseshoe. Like so many others, I tripped on those bricks regularly and kept on going, not thinking a thing about it. For me and my friends, there was nothing exceptional about attending the university. I came because I could: It had the state’s journalism school, affordable tuition, and, most tellingly, the willingness to accept me with my math SAT score. I should have been more appreciative.

Now I understand how much academic, geographic, and common sense it would have made for the Booker graduates who lived in Ward One and Wheeler Hill to keep on climbing up from their neighborhoods to enter USC. And I recognize that many of Booker’s brilliant students had little choice about what to do after graduation. Of course, they’d have to leave the South for other colleges and settle elsewhere. How can that loss be measured? It’s a thought Bobby Donaldson has turned over many times. “Here they are at one of the premier African American schools in the state and graduating at the top of their classes and not able to walk across the street and go to school.”⁵¹ Dorothy Perry Thompson was just one of them.

I don’t remember any racism as a student; in my time at USC, it seemed students from the Middle East were the largest minority. When I returned in 2013 to work for its truly wonderful honors college, I noticed nothing but friendly courtesy between all ages, races, and professions. In my class, I notice how easily some students use the four-letter F-word; to them, the N-word is off limits. After talking to Professor Donaldson, I realized how fast things Page 19 →can change, how ironic life can be. The dorm I lived in my freshman year, up one hill from Booker and another from the Coliseum, was demolished years ago. It was replaced by the new Honors Residence Hall, where I worked at two different times from two different offices. I was back in the very space where I’d lived and from which, Donaldson told me, USC students threw things at Booker students decades before I arrived. Decades later, he says, some of his students made friends with the elderly people who once lived in those erased neighborhoods, attending church services and Bible studies to learn more about that time and place. “Once you chisel the layers,” he says, “they find commonality. They’re separated by age, by race, by privilege and find things they have in common.”⁵² It’s important to understand, he says, that while the neighborhoods were erased, the people haven’t been.

In 1990, USC established the Carolinian Creed. An “aspirational values statement,” it includes five promises beginning with “I will.” The fourth is “I will discourage bigotry, while striving to learn from differences in people, ideas and opinion.”⁵³ Earlier, it had taken other important steps, such as establishing its Department of African American Studies in 1971. Today, the program has a faculty of fifteen. Among other programs, the university’s Office of Access and Opportunity offers classes on stereotyping, which faculty and staff are required to take. Recently, it has taken more conspicuous action, although much of it has come after intense discussions, Donaldson reports. For instance, many university and community members supported renaming the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center for Celia Dial Saxon, whose school in Ward One it had acquired and demolished.⁵⁴ That didn’t happen. Still, in 2022, the board of trustees voted unanimously to name a new dorm, adjacent to Ward One, for her. It’s the first and only university building named after a Black person. Born into slavery, Saxon had graduated from the State Normal School on the USC campus during Reconstruction; she died grading papers at home, age seventy-eight.

The university also erected a statue of Richard Greener, Harvard’s first Black graduate and the university’s first Black professor, whom it fired after Reconstruction.⁵⁵ As with Saxon, memorializing Greener came “only after pointed discussions about renaming the Thomas Cooper Library after Greener,” Donaldson says.⁵⁶ The statue was placed near the library, which retained its original name. A garden commemorating the 1963 desegregation was created near the Horseshoe; a sculpture of the three students who integrated the university was unveiled in April 2024. The university’s Presidential Commission of University History, formed in 2019, has recommended that ten of thirteen campus names be changed.⁵⁷

Page 20 →In 2018, Booker T. Washington High was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In recent years, the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research has partnered with the African American Civil Rights of the 20th Century Program, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. To date, more than six million dollars in grants have been secured to complete renovations of the Booker auditorium and exhibit installations about the history of the surrounding African-American neighborhoods. A new building has been proposed for the empty lot beside the Booker Auditorium, an undertaking contingent upon final approval by the USC Board of Trustees and South Carolina Commission on Higher Education—and a successful development campaign, Donaldson says.⁵⁸

Fifty years ago, the Booker students and faculty were “absorbed” into the district. But they held on to their memories and, as their forebears would have appreciated, organized. Its foundation holds reunions and heritage banquets; it awards scholarships named for beloved teachers to descendants of Booker alumni. Its lauded John Work chorus presents concerts.

Then, in 2009, something incredible happened: Reverend Solomon Jackson, class of 1971, won the $259.9 million Powerball. He started sharing his wealth, giving first to Midlands Tech and Morris College, his alma maters. Then he gave $1.7 million to Booker. He’d grown up on Wheeler Hill, the first in his family to graduate high school. To support his wife and eleven children, Jackson’s father mowed lawns during the day and, for seventy-five cents an hour, worked as a custodian for USC at night. Numerous improvements were made with Reverend Jackson’s gift, including the addition of a special alumni room, which he named for Fannie Phelps Adams. For many, the most gratifying restoration may have been the most obvious. Off came the sand color paint the university had used to make Booker blend in. Then off came the gray-green color under that, the color one university president favored. And there it was—the Booker T. Washington auditorium in its original red brick, straightforward and purposeful as its founders intended.⁵⁹

As for the bricks from the rest of Booker’s buildings, the ones that had been transported to the Horseshoe to pave walkways and build walls—that didn’t quite work out. For all the excitement about them, the press materials and stories about the Horseshoe renovation with regular mention of the bricks coming from Booker T. Washington High, the result was, to use the restoration committee’s language, disappointing.⁶⁰ Many of the bricks were too soft. Some had crumbled and flaked. There were requests for silicone repairs. True, USC had also gotten bricks from another of its old buildings and some from Hyatt Park Elementary, which had been demolished by the Page 21 →district. But the university had always trumpeted Booker as the origin of those bricks. In the end, those bricks were turned sideways. It’s possible that nobody ever walked on them directly, in a sole-on-soul way.

Did that make the Great Mother of the Black Community laugh? Maybe it was time for her to rest. Maybe her work was done. Imagine the poem Dorothy Perry Thompson could have written about that. Or maybe, she would sing.

Aïda Rogers has worked in publishing for more than forty years. After working as a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines, she created and edited the anthology series State of the Heart: South Carolina Writers on the Places They Love (three volumes, USC Press). In 2018, her work on My Tour through the Asylum: A Southern Integrationist’s Memoir (USC Press) received a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Currently, she writes for the Carolina Family Engagement Center at USC and teaches “Finding Your Voice: Writing and Editing for Life” for the USC Honors College.