Memories and insights of a lifetime fighting for Black freedom and social justice from a resident of Charleston’s center of civil rights activity. One man’s fight for the ballot, revealing the sacrifices of those who shaped the civil rights movement in the American South. Twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins chronicled by a longtime journalist through first-hand accounts. All stories of injustices endured during the years-long struggle for Civil Rights that happened nationwide in our not-so-distant history as told by three authors, all with recently published books through The University of South Carolina Press – Millicent E. Brown, Carolyn Click, and Claudia Smith Brinson. Join Robert Greene, President of the African American Intellectual History Society and Managing Editor of the journal Global Black Though, to moderate the way in which these lauded advocates interacted with different aspects of the civil rights movement, yet all crossing at various points of culture.
About Millicent E. Brown, Another Sojourner Looking for Truth
Dr. Brown is a lifelong community advocate and spokesperson for economic, social and educational improvements in exploited neighborhoods and communities of color throughout the South, the nation and the world. She specializes in ongoing analysis of the modern civil rights movement and explores social justice dynamics and intersections of race, gender, caste and class in contemporary society. Brown is co-founder and Project Director of an oral history initiative to identify the “first children”, like herself, to desegregate previously all-white schools (Somebody Had to Do It Project). She has held a variety of history and museum related faculty positions and serves as consultant for numerous museums, historic sites and social justice programs in South Carolina and beyond. Brown earned her Bachelor’s at the College of Charleston, her Masters in Education from the Citadel and achieved her doctorate at Florida State University. She has since held faculty positions held at Claflin University, North Carolina A&T State University, Guilford College, Hofstra University, Bennett College for Women and College of Charleston.
About Carolyn Click, The Cost of the Vote
Carolyn Click is a veteran journalist and a teacher. She began her career at the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg and went on to United Press International, where she was state capitol reporter, Virginia state editor and mid-Atlantic regional editor. She later reported for The Roanoke Times & World-News and The State in Columbia, South Carolina, where she was recipient of the James K. Batten Knight-Ridder Excellence Award in Journalism for coverage of civil rights. Since 2016, Click has taught in the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications and in the university’s Honors College. She is married and the mother of two adult children. She divides her time between South Carolina and her native Virginia.
About Claudia Smith Brinson, Injustice in Focus
Claudia Smith Brinson spent the majority of a 30-year journalism career with Knight Ridder at The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, working as a senior writer, national writing coach, columnist, and associate editor for the editorial page. From 2006-2016, she directed the Writing for Print and Digital Media major and an internship program and held the Harriet Gray Blackwell endowed professorship at Columbia College, also in Columbia, South Carolina. She won more than three dozen state, regional, and national awards for her journalism, was the first person to win Knight Ridder’s Award of Excellence twice, and was a member of The State team whose work on Hurricane Hugo was a Pulitzer finalist. She also reported for national newspapers and magazines, published essays in women’s magazines, and won an O. Henry for her short fiction. In 2020 the University of South Carolina Press published Stories of Struggle: The Clash Over Civil Rights in South Carolina. Brinson interviewed more than 150 civil rights activists to tell the stories of the petitioners of Briggs v Elliott, the first of five lawsuits in Brown v. Board; the students of the 1960 sit-ins; and the women of the 1969 Charleston Hospital Strike. In 2024 USC Press published Injustice in Focus: The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams, based on dozens of interviews she and Williams completed between 2021 and 2023. Eighty of Williams’s photographs accompany a deep portrait of him and the Orangeburg movement from the 1940s through the 1960s. Brinson is at work on a book on the important roles Black South Carolinians played in civil rights events of 1961, including the “jail, no bail” movement, the Freedom Rides, and the desegregation of public parks. You can read more about Brinson and Stories of Struggle at storiesofstruggle.com.
About Robert Greene
Robert Greene II is an Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. He is also the President of the African American Intellectual History Society, and Managing Editor of the journal Global Black Thought. Dr. Greene II was also co-editor, with Tyler D. Parry, of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina, and is currently working on a book titled The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964 to 2000. Finally, Dr. Greene II is the Lead Instructor for the Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights, and has written for publications such as The Nation, Oxford American, Jacobin, and The Washington Post.
