Randolph Cemetery: Buried in History

In October of eighteen sixty-eight, a South Carolina state senator named Benjamin Franklin Randolph was shot and killed on a railway platform in Abbeville County. He was on the campaign trail, speaking for Republican candidates and for the right of Black men to vote. Members of the Ku Klux Klan carried out the assassination. No one was convicted.

Three years later, in eighteen seventy-one, nineteen African American businessmen and politicians in Columbia formed the Randolph Cemetery Association. They named it for the murdered senator. Their purpose was to create a burial ground for Black Columbians, because the existing cemeteries were controlled by white institutions and routinely denied Black residents equal access.

In eighteen seventy-two, the association purchased three acres adjacent to Elmwood Cemetery in northwest Columbia. They buried there not only ordinary citizens but seven other African American men who had served in the South Carolina Senate or House of Representatives during Reconstruction, legislators who had helped write the eighteen sixty-eight constitution, who had voted for public schools and equal rights, and who were then systematically pushed out of power as Reconstruction ended.

The cemetery is a quiet three acres bounded by Interstate One Twenty-Six to the south and railroad tracks to the west. It is easy to miss. But what it holds is the physical record of a community that built institutions under extraordinary pressure, that named a cemetery for an assassinated civil rights advocate, and that preserved within its ground the memory of a democratic experiment that was crushed before it could fully take hold.

The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is part of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network.