Manning, South Carolina

Manning is the seat of Clarendon County, incorporated in eighteen fifty-five and named for South Carolina Governor John Laurence Manning. The quiet county seat of roughly four thousand gained unexpected national significance when Black parents in Clarendon County filed Briggs versus Elliott in nineteen fifty, challenging school segregation. That case became one of the five consolidated as Brown versus Board of Education.

The Briggs plaintiffs, led by local NAACP chapter president Reverend Joseph DeLaine, faced severe economic retaliation for bringing suit. A marker near the old Scott's Branch school site commemorates the courage that helped overturn separate-but-equal more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act.