Summerton, South Carolina

Summerton is a small town in Clarendon County, chartered in eighteen eighty-nine. Its name came from a local planter family. But Summerton's deepest chapter is the one it shares with Manning: Scott's Branch School, where Black children attended a dilapidated one-room building without running water or a school bus while white students rode to a brick schoolhouse nearby.

The disparity moved Reverend Joseph DeLaine and the Briggs family to sue, launching the legal chain that reached the Supreme Court as part of Brown versus Board. Summerton today has fewer than a thousand residents, but its schoolhouse struggle echoes far beyond its borders.