Struggling to Learn offers a tragic, hopeful history of public school integration in South Carolina. Combining history and memoir, Thomas creates a narrative in which resilient African Americans and a few white actors worked tirelessly to improve educational opportunities. These brave individuals faced considerable resistance and danger as they sought “to build an egalitarian society.” In telling her history, Thomas counters the proposition that South Carolina, in contrast to other southern states, earned a “reputation for peaceful transition” toward integration. Although her arguments are compelling and well documented, a similarly comprehensive investigation of other Deep South states, particularly Mississippi, might challenge her claim.

Thomas depicts the various obstacles Black families confronted while striving for advancement. As she confirms, the events of the postslavery period are critical for understanding South Carolina’s later civil rights struggles. Both the state’s 1895 constitution and the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling segregated the state’s public schools and effectively erased whatever progress had been made during Reconstruction. “By 1916,” Thomas argues, “South Carolina, ignoring the ‘separate but equal’ principle mandated in Plessy v. Ferguson, spent 9.4 times more per white student than per Black.” Racial disparities between rural schools and urban schools were even sharper. In 1920, South Carolina provided the lowest expenditure per student nationally.

Black families had to adapt while persevering. In Orangeburg, the Rosenwald School Program exemplified Black people’s dedication to education. The program, funded by John D. Rockefeller Sr. and other northern philanthropists, provided construction funds “to support programs that used the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education,” but Black citizens still had to put forward matching monies “to get schools built.” According to Thomas, “Black people had to deed their own money, land, and labor to local public-school systems.” By 1932, Orangeburg residents helped build eighteen schoolhouses with Rosenwald support.

Thomas addresses other triumphs that coincided with hurdles. For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Page 234 →(NAACP) and Thurgood Marshall achieved equal teacher pay, but South Carolina legislators prevented many Black teachers from overcoming the “step” standards required for pay increases. At the same time, South Carolina civil rights advocates fought provisions that ensured all white teachers in Black schools. Thomas details the courageous Black citizens of Clarendon County who risked their livelihoods and lives to combat the egregious separate and unequal public school policies, especially the district’s failure to provide bus transportation for Black students.

Still, Black children experienced profound inequities as is evidenced in Briggs v. Elliott, which originated in Clarendon County. Briggs became the most decisive of the five cases that resulted in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling, the most momentous legal breakthrough to assault Jim Crow segregation. Thomas provides a nuanced description of Brown’s consequences. In particular, she addresses local white resistance and efforts by the state’s leadership to preserve Jim Crow. “Looking at the civil rights era merely as a time of heroic action,” Thomas contends, “overlooks the tenacity of segregationists and leaves us unprepared to understand contemporary racism.” As Thomas confirms, “all the [Briggs] petitioners suffered, losing jobs, having long-term debts called in for repayment, and being unable to obtain supplies or equipment to carry out their trades or till their soil,” and one plaintiff participant died mysteriously. Unsurprisingly, the Brown decision resulted in many southern whites harassing Black advocates of integration. Public school employees could lose their jobs if they joined the NAACP. Even white advocates, including Chester Travelstead, the dean of education at the University of South Carolina, found out the danger of speaking out on behalf of public school integration. His advocacy resulted in his dismissal from the university.

In 1956, Thomas’s family moved to Orangeburg and thrust themselves into the local civil rights movement. “Black activism,” Thomas affirms, “was not the product of ‘outside agitators,’” even though national notables, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., visited Trinity Church in Orangeburg and met with Thomas’s father, who served as president of Claflin University. Thomas remembers King as the most striking of the civil rights leaders: “I remember the power of his delivery, the fevered pitch of his crescendos, and most impressively the ecstasy with which the packed audience shouted in enthusiastic assent.”

King’s presence was indicative of the shifting social and political climate of the 1960s. The forces perpetuating segregation would soon confront the fiercest storm of those frustrated with the slow pace of change. In 1963, the Page 235 →breakthrough matriculation of Harvey Gantt into Clemson University, followed by that of Henri Monteith and two other Black students at the University of South Carolina, created a ripple effect that quickly reached Orangeburg. At the height of the civil rights transformation, Thomas’s parents bravely enrolled her in Orangeburg High School, where she became one of only thirteen Black students. Although Orangeburg High School provided superior educational opportunities, most Black parents were hesitant to involve their children in the “harsh racial realities” that could arise with integration.

Thomas hoped for a new beginning at Orangeburg High School, but she soon faced raw, vicious racial discrimination. As she recalls, “my fledgling hopes for friendship or at least tolerance immediately died…. The students’ response to our presence seemed to be an organized effort to resist by harassing us in whatever way was possible, using such means as catcalls, mocking and twisted faces, racial epithets, spitballs, and other creative mechanisms.” The only positive aspects came from Orangeburg’s high academic standards and three supportive teachers.

Thomas found some solace when she enrolled at Furman University. As a grassroots civil rights participant in Orangeburg, she had merely endured. At Furman, she could thrive, or so she hoped. The private university had recently integrated, and, despite its “pro-slavery roots,” Furman embraced “relative liberalism.” Still, barriers existed. White students “were not hostile,” but they “were not particularly friendly, and very few reached out” to Black students. While at Furman, Thomas limited her activism to styling her hair in a “natural Afro,” reading voraciously, and congregating with other Black students, especially the campus’s first three Black female students.

In 1968, the Orangeburg Massacre and the assassination of Dr. King convinced Thomas to transfer to Michigan State University. After seeing King’s casket in Atlanta, Thomas told her parents that she would “rather drop out of college than stay in the South.” Now a participant in the Great Migration, she left her home state to attend a university that promised greater tolerance and offered a “major in something that I cared about.”

Struggling to Learn tells a story of the passionate perseverance for Black education. It provides a detailed account of the “destructive and constructive forces” that formed South Carolina’s present-day public educational institutions. In doing so, the book advocates for racial cooperation, harmony, justice and acceptance in the spirit of the Baha’i Faith, which Thomas first embraced at Furman. Thomas affirms that dire circumstances remain for Black South Carolina students, but her concluding message looks toward a time when Page 236 →“enough people support change not only in structures but also in their hearts.” For Thomas, the struggle for educational and racial equality persists.

Jason Kirby, Francis Marion University