Child whose parents’ names defined SC’s equal education battle has died

Harry Briggs Jr., the Summerton child associated with the name on South Carolina’s landmark school desegregation case, passed away Aug. 9 in the Bronx, N.Y., at the age of 75.

He was remembered Friday during funeral services in Summerton, in Clarendon County, according to a nephew, Rashon Briggs.

Briggs’ parents, Harry and Eliza, along with other African-American parents asked the white school superintendent in Summerton in the late 1940s for a bus so their children didn’t have to walk nine miles to school and back each day. The superintendent’s denial lead to the Briggs et.al. vs. R.W. Elliott lawsuit, filed in 1950, that was later folded into the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation ruling.

The 1954 ruling struck down separate but equal education in the United States.