Descendants asking US Supreme Court to rename Brown v. Board of Education for SC case

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SUMMERTON — South Carolina civil rights icons are teaming up with a Camden lawyer hoping to accomplish something legal scholars think has never before been attempted — petition the U.S. Supreme Court to rename one of its landmark cases decided nearly 70 years ago.

Over the next three months, the group representing past plaintiffs and their descendants plans to file paperwork with the court to reorder the set of 1954 cases that outlawed segregation of public schools across the country.

They want the court to replace Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, with an earlier-filed but lesser-known case out of Clarendon County — Briggs v. Elliott — as the namesake, restoring South Carolina as the cradle of the movement to desegregate public education and returning what the group sees as stolen valor in that watershed moment.

"Everyone else lays down and says you can't do this," said prominent S.C. civil rights photographer Cecil Williams, who has been at the forefront of the effort. "The Supreme Court in its entire history has never renamed an already decided case."

"Many will call it crazy," he added. "It might be laughed out of court."

The group does expect pushback from the family of Linda Brown, the namesake of Brown v. Board of Education.

But to Williams and the 20 families who signed their names to the Briggs case, it is worth the effort to try to right what they view as an injustice.

"If this country is going to ever reconcile with its history, this is a good place, upon the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education," Williams said. "Because this was the epitome of a hijacking of the legacy, the history and the heritage of a group of people."

Though Brown v. Board of Education would be the case written in history books, South Carolina's case filed in May 1950 by the Clarendon County families was actually the first such case to be taken to federal court. The Brown case came nearly nine months later.

Briggs therefore should have been the named case, the group argues. Naming it after Brown breaks with how the court had historically approached consolidated cases, said the group's attorney Tom Mullikin, who in conducting research reviewed nearly 50 sets of past cases.

"I'm very comfortable saying this is a breach of the court's precedents," Mullikin said. "There's absolutely nothing in the record that would support this case being named Brown v. Board."

Those families and others associated with the effort were the first to take the risks associated with challenging White control and they did so in the Deep South at a time when Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Council and Jim Crow laws loomed large over the lives of Black South Carolinians. They lost homes and livelihoods. Some narrowly escaped with their lives.

Just a decade earlier, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was convicted and executed in Clarendon County after being accused of killing two White girls. The conviction was vacated in 2014, 70 years after Stinney died in the state's electric chair, when a court ruled that his trial had been unfair.

"There was no pretense about the harm (the families in the Briggs case) were putting themselves and their families in," said former State Rep. James Felder, who also is part of the effort to reorder the case. "And they knew that the weight of government was 100 percent opposed to what they were doing."

The families took the chance anyway.

A memorial for Harry Briggs in front of the Scott's Branch School in Summerton, SC, the focal point in the Briggs Vs. Elliot case. John A. Carlos II / Special to The Post and Courier

But for reasons unknown and theories of political pressure unproven, those trying the case at the Supreme Court would break with tradition and put the Kansas-based case in front of four other related cases when consolidating them, making the Clarendon County case a footnote rather than first in the minds of Americans.

Nathaniel Briggs, the son of the case's namesake, lives in New Jersey and said many people he speaks with there haven't heard of the case.

"You know it as Brown, but I know it as Briggs v. Elliott. That's an insult to me," the 75-year-old said. "That's my life's work. To tell it and to change it if I can."

Nathaniel Briggs the son of Harry Briggs Sr. the named plaintiff in S.C's Briggs v. Elliott case stands in front of the Scott's Branch School in Summerton, SC the focal point in for the Briggs v. Elliot case that was later consolidated as part of the Brown v. Board. John A. Carlos II / Special to The Post and Courier

Of course, the court has discretion over what cases it chooses to hear as well as how they are named, Mullikin said. But three years ago, after being approached by Williams, Mullikin began reaching out to Supreme Court scholars. When those experts told the group it was impossible to get the case renamed, they persisted and contacted the descendants and families involved in the consolidated case.

"We go into this matter with our eyes wide open," Mullikin said. "We're going to capture the interviews of the families and the last two living petitioners because if nothing else happens, at least we'll tell the story."

People march with a banner featuring key figures from the Briggs v. Elliot case during a parade at the Briggs v. Elliot the Spring Festival in Summerton, SC, on May 20, 2023. John A. Carlos II/Special to The Post and Courier

Residents of Clarendon County struggled with educational inequality in the years leading up to the Briggs case.

In 1946, Clarendon County farmer Levi Pearson asked the school superintendent to fund a bus for Black children, a number of whom had to walk 9 miles each day to school while the district had 30 buses for White children.

The following year, South Carolina NAACP President James Myles Hinton Sr., speaking at Allen University in Columbia, urged members to take up challenges to inequality. Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine, a African Methodist Episcopal minister and school principal in Clarendon County, took this message to heart.

When Pearson's request for a bus and funding was ignored, DeLaine urged him to file suit in March 1948. The case ultimately was be dismissed on a technicality. While Pearson owned land and paid taxes in multiple school districts, Clarendon County schools argued that the plot where his home sat was in another district.

But the Pearsons paved the way for future litigation.

Harry Briggs is honored by S.J. McDonald, chairman of the South Carolina NAACP executive committee, in June 1951. This photo was taken a few weeks after a three-judge panel in Charleston heard the case. Pictured are, from left: E.E. Richburg, Modjeska Simkins, J.W. Seals, the Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine Sr., Briggs, John McCray, J.S. (Flutie) Boyd, James Hinton, and Eugene Montgomery. File/South Caroliniana Library/Provided

Nathaniel Briggs was just a couple years old, too young to remember when his parents in 1949 at the urging of DeLaine, signed at the top of a petition to the Clarendon County School Board seeking equal resources for the education of their children as was spent on White children of the district.

But as Nathaniel Briggs grew up and the case progressed, he recalls another time coming home to a yard full of mules hitched to wagons and a smattering of old vehicles. He thought someone had been hurt. Instead, families gathered inside his home in Summerton to discuss legal strategy.

"That's when I started to realize change was going on in that house," he told The Post and Courier.

Until sixth grade, Nathaniel Briggs walked 150 yards from his home, which still stands at the corner of Hill and DeLaine streets, to the Scotts Branch school. Today, the letter B adorns an awning that hangs above a front window of the Briggs' house. A historical marker commemorating the case stands in the corner of the front yard, with an American flag fluttering above on a pole.

"They were willing to put everything they had on the line to make things better for the children," he said of his parents, Eliza and Harry Briggs Sr.

While the Supreme Court had ruled more than 50 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson, for segregation to stand, public facilities provided to Blacks and Whites had to be equal. But in small-town South Carolina that doctrine didn't seem to matter, Nathaniel Briggs said.

In addition to buses, White children had brick schoolhouses, paved playgrounds, new books, indoor bathrooms, auditoriums, water fountains, heating and libraries.

Scotts Branch, by contrast, was a wooden building. Parents in the rural area raised money to buy an older school bus that they struggled to keep running. Students burned coal and wood for heat in the winter and had to use outside bathrooms.

Beatrice Brown, whose family was second to sign the petition, recalls there were not even dividers for privacy and she would go all day without using the bathroom until she returned home.

"They were so arrogant that they said we’re not going to give you anything," Nathaniel Briggs said of the all-White school board — led by Roderick W. Elliott, chairman of School District 22.

In 1949, the district was spending $179 for each White student, $43 for each Black student, according to the State Archives. The school board attempted to justify this, saying Whites earned more money and therefore paid more taxes.

When the petitions to the Clarendon school board went unanswered, the Black families went to court. One of their lawyers was Thurgood Marshall, the renowned civil rights attorney who would argue the combined Brown v. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court — which he later joined as its first Black justice.

Nathaniel Briggs was too young to go inside the federal courthouse in Charleston in 1950 when the case was first heard by Judge Julius Waties Waring, known for his past rulings on cases related to voting rights and equality in higher education. But he remembers Clarendon County families meeting at St. Mark AME and caravanning to the Holy City. They stood in the hallways and on the staircases straining to hear what the judge would decide.

"My mother and father always said they did the right thing," Nathaniel Briggs said. "They never regretted signing, but it was a hard life."

Harry Briggs, a Navy veteran, left the home he built for his family when Nathaniel was 9. The older children had graduated school and moved out of state. Trying to cheer up his youngest son as he left, Harry Briggs told Nathaniel he was now the man of the house.

"That's when my family came apart," Nathaniel Briggs said.

Harry Briggs was fired from his job as a gas station attendant during the holiday season in 1949 after signing the initial petition. His boss handed him a carton of cigarettes and told him he was no longer needed. Eliza Briggs was fired from her job at the motel serving the numerous travelers who used to pass through the town on Highway 301, then the main route between New York and Florida. Harry tried to farm, but the gins refused to give him a fair price for his cotton. He even tried painting houses under an assumed name.

White members of the community controlled all of the power structures in the county — the bank, the cotton gin, the stores, the post office and the school board.

That's when Harry Briggs left the state to find work. Eliza and the children followed later, boarding a Greyhound bus with a cardboard box tied close with rope as a suitcase, bouncing between Florida, South Carolina and New York, moving several times between boroughs.

"Mom had to keep making a home with each step," Nathaniel Briggs said.

The Briggs family home continues to stand in Summerton to this day but Harry and Eliza didn't return until the mid-'70s.

DeLaine, who had rallied the petitioners, lost his principal job. His home in Summerton, just across from Scotts Branch where his wife was a teacher, burned down as firefighters did nothing to put it out. He then moved to Lake City, where he was terrorized by KKK members driving by shooting at his house.

One night he shot back. Warned he would be lynched, he made his escape, eventually going all the way to New York where the governor refused to grant extradition.

In this 1950 photograph, the Rev. Joseph A. DeLaine and his family view the remains of their burned home and two outhouses in Summerton as the Briggs v. Elliott case progressed through the courts. About this time, U.S. District Judge J. Waties Waring issued his famous dissenting opinion declaring that "segregation is per se inequality." File/South Caroliniana Library at USC/Provided

The Brown family weathered the backlash longer than most. Henry Brown, a janitor at the White school in Summerton, kept his job until 1955. He had made himself valuable, playing piano at school dances and assemblies and working at a canning factory near the school. He would also mill sugar cane for extra money. After being fired, he raised livestock and vegetables to keep his family fed.

Beatrice Brown often helped her father at the school and saw firsthand the differences in the learning environment. Walking to school each day, she experienced racial hatred as White children leaned out bus windows throwing things and yelling racial slurs as they rode by.

At age 13, Beatrice Brown signed a petition to the school district she attended in Clarendon County seeking resources for Black children equal to that of White children. Today that petition is commemorated on placards outside the historic Scotts Branch School building in Summerton.

The seventh of 12 children, Beatrice was 13 in 1949 when she signed her name to the petition, just below her parents’.

"It took over my life," she said. "Things changed for everyone after that. It was like a different world."

Owning their own farm made the Browns more self-sufficient, raising hogs and preserving vegetables. The neighbors often turned to them for help.

"We fed a lot of people out of our garden and our smokehouse," Beatrice Brown said. "You were never turned away from our house."

Beatrice Brown said her parents' care for the community shaped how she lived her life and how she thinks about helping people.

Wanting to make a difference motivated her to get a college degree in special education from University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., living with her older brother who served in the Navy. She would ultimately spend a career in federal government, first as a clerk at the Labor Department and then working up the ranks at the Commerce Department, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and finally worked to recruit Native Americans for the CIA.

Education was important to the Brown family, with all but three of the children earning a college degree.

Beatrice's sister Ethel Brown earned a doctorate from Cornell University and taught for years at South Carolina State University. Both sisters eventually moved back to Summerton. Ethel later served on the school board, the same one that had once denied her an equitable education.

"They made the ultimate sacrifice for us," Beatrice Brown said of her parents. "They knew if they didn't stand up for us we would have the same problems they did. We can't forget the legacy they left for us."

The Rev. Joseph DeLaine helped organize a large group of plaintiffs in the Briggs v. Elliott case, which sought equality in education for Black students in Summerton County. South Caroliniana Library/Provided

Black families in Clarendon County had at first only sought equal education. By December 1950, they amended their petition to also seek desegregation. The change came two months before Brown v. Board of Education was filed.

In May 1951, the case went before a three-judge panel in Charleston. The judges called for equalization of the schools but not desegregation. In his dissent, Waring wrote that segregated schools were a constitutional violation because "segregation is per se inequality."

Kenneth Clark, a renowned psychologist in New York, traveled to Summerton as part of the case. He conducted a test to show how segregation damages Black children's development. He showed local children two dolls, one white and one black, and asking them which is the "nice" doll or the "bad" doll. The majority of Black children preferred the white doll.

This test was included as evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case in Kansas. Nathaniel Briggs' sister Katherine was among those who participated in the test.

The state, in response, passed a 3 percent sales tax to pay for upgrades to Black schools, including the brick Scotts Branch school building that still stands in Summerton.

Beatrice Brown, who at 13 signed a petition in Clarendon County seeking equal educational resources for Black children, speaks about her experience attending school in Clarendon County in the '40s and '50s.

The families appealed. In 1952, the case bounced back and forth between district court and the Supreme Court until it was combined with four other cases. While Briggs had been the first case filed and heard, the cases are consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education.

"Had it not been for Briggs, there'd be no Brown," said Beatrice Brown.

And unlike in Kansas, segregation was the law of the land in South Carolina.

"There's a bit of a black box in terms of how they decide to name a case," said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina.

That makes the point Mullikin is making hard to argue because there is no specific error to reference.

Like the Clarendon County families, the plaintiffs from the other cases in Virginia, Delaware and Maryland are largely lost to history, Black said. But even when it came to Brown v. Board of Education, very little was said in court about what the families went through.

To the justices, those facts and stories of unequal treatment didn't really matter. Justices were there to decide whether segregation itself was unequal. Black said this created an unusual situation not often seen in cases that make it to the Supreme Court.

Regardless of whether the group's petition to rename the case is heard, Black said he sees value in asking the high court for a ruling because it brings attention to the Clarendon County families.

South Carolina Civil Rights photographer Cecil Williams operates a museum in Orangeburg commemorating South Carolinians' role in the movement, including the actions of the 20 Clarendon County families whose federal lawsuit was among the cases that made segregation of public schools illegal.

"Their story is a very important one," Black said.

While DeLaine, Pearson and the Briggs were honored posthumously, awarded Congressional Gold Medals of Honor for the roles they played, Nathaniel Briggs said renaming the case would honor all families involved and may even spur some federal money to memorialize the town.

In Topeka, for example, the National Park Service oversaw the $11 million renovation of the former elementary school attended by Linda Brown, which is now a museum and national historic site. Nathaniel Briggs said he would like to see something similar for his hometown of Summerton, where residents have banded together to open a museum inside the Scotts Branch building.

The town of roughly 800 people sits near Lake Marion. It is known as the duck capital of South Carolina, and remains largely agricultural with no major industry. The school district is the largest employer in Clarendon County.

What it does have is its past — one Summerton residents continue to celebrate annually with a Main Street parade. Nathaniel Briggs said his mother returned every year for a memorial church service at Liberty Hill AME, where DeLaine's father once served as pastor.

Another historical marker stands in the shadow of the church. It notes that four acres was donated as a home for the church in 1887, by members of the Briggs family. It also cites that the church hosted meetings for those involved in the Briggs v. Elliott case and that 19 members of its congregation signed the petition, calling them "Pioneers in Desegregation."

The surnames of many who signed the petition — names like DeLaine, Oliver, Ragin, Richburg and Stukes — are carved into plaques adorning the church and on headstones scattered around its cemetery, which sits along a country road outside of Summerton.

"It's not a White thing or a Black thing — it's a South Carolina thing," Mullikin said. "I think that people in this state will rally around the fact that this piece of history was not only stolen from those families. It was stolen from the state."

Editors note: This article has been changed to correctly reflect the circumstances surrounding Rev. Joseph A. Delaine's flight from South Carolina.

Reach Jessica Holdman at [email protected]. Follow her @jmholdman on Twitter.

Jessica Holdman is a business reporter for The Post & Courier covering Columbia. Prior to moving to South Carolina, she reported on business in North Dakota for The Bismarck Tribune and has previously written for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash.

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