USC Integrates: September Eleventh, Nineteen Sixty-Three

On September eleventh, nineteen sixty-three, three students walked through the gates of the University of South Carolina and registered for classes. Their names were Henrie Monteith, Robert Anderson, and James Solomon Junior. They were the first Black students admitted to the university since eighteen seventy-seven, when the gains of Reconstruction had been reversed and the university was resegregated.

Henrie Monteith was sixteen years old when she filed the lawsuit that forced the university's integration. She did not wait to be invited. She sued. The case moved through the federal courts, and when the university was ordered to comply, it did so without the violent confrontations that had marked integration efforts in Mississippi and Alabama. The transition at South Carolina was quiet, though quiet should not be confused with uncomplicated.

In nineteen sixty-five, Monteith became the first Black student to graduate from the university since eighteen seventy-seven, earning a degree in biochemistry.

Robert Anderson and James Solomon completed their studies and moved on. For years afterward, their names were not prominently commemorated. The university did not rush to celebrate what had happened.

In April of twenty twenty-four, the university unveiled a permanent monument on the Horseshoe honoring all three students. The sculpture depicts them as they were on that morning in nineteen sixty-three, walking from the administration building to the Naval Armory where they first registered for classes. The monument stands inside the same brick wall that survived Sherman's fire in eighteen sixty-five, on the oldest part of a campus that has been testing and then failing and then sometimes succeeding at its founding promise ever since.