Modjeska Simkins: Columbia's Civil Rights Architect
Near Columbia, South Carolina
The house at two thousand and twenty-five Marion Street is modest. A Columbia cottage, one story, set back from the street on a quiet block north of downtown. Between nineteen thirty-two and nineteen ninety-two, it was one of the most important addresses in South Carolina's civil rights movement.
Modjeska Monteith Simkins was born in Columbia on December fifth, eighteen ninety-nine. She began her career as a teacher, but married women were barred from teaching in Columbia's city schools, so she left the classroom in nineteen twenty-nine. She found work with the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association as director of services for Black patients, a position she held until nineteen forty-two, when she was fired for her civil rights activity.
Her home became a kind of movement headquarters. When Black travelers couldn't book rooms in white-owned hotels, Simkins housed them. Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown versus Board of Education before the Supreme Court, stayed at the Marion Street house when local hotels refused him. Legal strategies were developed around her kitchen table. The house was also listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book.
As secretary of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP beginning in nineteen forty-one, Simkins grew the organization from ten local branches to one hundred and ten. She helped draft the legal declaration for the Clarendon County school case, which became one of the five cases bundled into Brown versus Board of Education in nineteen fifty-four.
The records here go quiet on the specific threats and reprisals she faced over decades of organizing under Jim Crow in South Carolina. What is documented is that she continued regardless. She hosted a radio program called "I Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Set on Freedom" every Wednesday evening for nearly eight years beginning in nineteen sixty-four.
She died in nineteen ninety-two at ninety-two years old. The house is now a museum operated by Historic Columbia and a National Register property.
