Clarendon County: The Case Before Brown

Before Brown versus Board of Education, there was Briggs versus Elliott. And Briggs versus Elliott came from Clarendon County, South Carolina.

In the late nineteen forties, the Black families of Clarendon County were asking for something that seems almost impossibly modest in retrospect: a school bus. Some Black children had to cross a reservoir on foot, or row a boat, and then walk up to nine miles to reach school. In nineteen forty-eight, a boy drowned in Lake Marion trying to make that journey. Reverend Joseph Armstrong DeLaine, a local minister and teacher, began organizing parents to demand equal transportation.

What they found when they started looking was a disparity that ran far deeper than buses. In the nineteen forty-nine school year, Clarendon County spent one hundred seventy-nine dollars per year on each white child in twelve well-equipped schools. It spent forty-three dollars per year on each Black child, distributed across an estimated sixty-one single and two-teacher schools scattered across the county.

DeLaine connected the parents with NAACP attorneys, and what began as a request for a bus became a constitutional challenge to segregated schooling itself. Twenty African American parents signed on as plaintiffs. The lead plaintiff was Harry Briggs, a gas station attendant. The defendant was Roderick Elliott, the chairman of the local school board.

Briggs versus Elliott, filed in nineteen fifty, was among the first lawsuits of its era to challenge the constitutionality of racially segregated schools directly. When the Supreme Court bundled five school desegregation cases together in nineteen fifty-four, Briggs versus Elliott was listed first, alphabetically and by historical precedence. The case we call Brown versus Board of Education began in Clarendon County, South Carolina, with a mother who needed a school bus for her child. The plaintiffs who made that possible lost their jobs, had their homes threatened, and in some cases fled the county. Reverend DeLaine's house was burned and he had to leave South Carolina entirely. The price of challenging segregation in Clarendon County was exile.