State desegregation pioneer dies at 102

Viola Clark Pearson, widow of Levi Pearson, the first person to push in the courts for school equality in South Carolina, is being remembered for fighting the good fight alongside her husband.

Pearson, 102, died Jan. 25 in Manning, S.C., in Clarendon County.

Six decades ago, the couple began working with 17 other families to bring down segregation in South Carolina’s public schools.

Viola Pearson was born Jan. 1, 1910, in the White Oak area of Clarendon County to Joe and Susan Boyle Clark. She attended White Oak school and later a little wooden school next to Mount Zion AME Church. When she married Levi at 20, he was a widower with four children. The couple later had eight children together.

Viola Pearson was not one of the original petition signers who eventually made history when their Briggs v. Elliott case was folded into the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan.

Pearson didn’t see herself as a hero, although she told The (Sumter) Item in 2004 that she was flattered others did. She wanted simply to be remembered as a good wife, mother, grandmother and a lady of God.

“She certainly was all of those things,” said Sen. John Land, D-Manning. “She had an outstanding character, never had a bad thing to say about anyone. I just saw her a few weeks ago, and she was just as lucid as you or I might be. She loved people and loved her family and loved the Lord.”

She rarely talked much of the Briggs v. Elliott case or her husband’s participation in it. She felt that she and her husband did what was right. No more, no less. She would talk of memories of being afraid when Ku Klux Klan members drove their trucks into her neighborhood near Davis Station and began shooting. Many nights, she said, she and her husband would take turns sleeping so that one of them could keep watch.

“One evening they was out there blocking every fork of the road,” she said. “They said if he (Levi) come out, they was going to kill him, and (they said) if they catch him out in the woods, they was going to kill him.”

She remembered the hard times she and her family had when segregationists in Clarendon County took umbrage with her husband’s work. The family couldn’t get credit, fertilizer for their farm – anything.

“He was a farmer, and he planted wheat, but he couldn’t get nobody to cut that,” she said. “He cut logs in the woods, but he couldn’t get nobody to take it away, and it just rot on the ground. People wouldn’t sell him gas. He had the money, but they wouldn’t sell it to him.”

Levi Pearson’s push for educational equality actually predated the Briggs v. Elliott case. He petitioned for a school bus so his children wouldn’t have to walk the nine miles from the Davis Station community to get to school and nine miles home. His case was dismissed by a federal judge on a technicality: Although he had land in Clarendon County, his house did not sit on it. But the case served as a precursor to the Briggs case, and Levi Pearson went on to become head of the local NAACP. He died in 1970.

Land said Viola’s support is what kept Levi going.

“I think she was just there for him like any strong woman could be,” Land said. “I think he derived a lot of his strength from her.”

One of her happiest memories, she said, was receiving the Congressional Gold Medal on behalf of her husband in September 2004 in Washington, D.C.

Funeral services will be held at noon today at Mount Zion AME Church.

Pearson had 45 grandchildren; 75 great-grandchildren; 38 great-great-grandchildren; 21 great-great-great-grandchildren; and 11 great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

State staffers contributed.