A report says these Black SC leaders should have USC buildings renamed for them

If the University of South Carolina moves forward with renaming several buildings on its campus whose namesakes are being re-examined with the passage of time, several prominent African Americans could be set to grace university buildings instead.

The university history subcommittee of the commission examining building names agreed this week on 14 names of African Americans who could have buildings named after them if names are changed, according to a preliminary report. Those are:

• Robert G. Anderson
• Luther J. Battiste III
• James E. Clyburn
• Matilda Evans
• Ernest A. Finney Jr.
• Henrie Monteith
• Edna Smith Primus
• The Rollin sisters
• Celia Dial Saxon
• Robert Smalls
• James L. Solomon Jr.
• T. McCants Stewart
• Alonzo Townsend
• William Whipper

Clyburn is probably the most prominent name currently in the state. Starting as a young civil rights activist, Clyburn has served in Congress since 1992 and risen to hold the third highest-ranking position among U.S. House Democrats, currently serving as the House majority whip.

His name could be joined by other pioneers like Ernest Finney Jr., who as an attorney defended students charged during civil rights sit-ins and went on to serve as South Carolina’s first Black chief justice from 1994 to 2000. Finney died in 2017.

Other naming candidates have long been front and center in Columbia and Richland County. Matilda Evans was an Aiken native who left South Carolina to earn a medical degree and became the first woman in the state to practice medicine when she opened a Columbia practice in 1897.

The mixed-race Rollin sisters — Charlotte, Florence, Katherine, Marie Louise and Frances Ann “Frank” Rollin — advocated for women to be granted the right to vote in the aftermath of the Civil War. For years, the the “Rollin salon” at Senate and Sumter streets hosted interracial gatherings for a variety of social causes across from the S.C. State House.

Celia Saxon was born into slavery but graduated from South Carolina College in 1877 and spent the next 50 years educating and caring for Black children in the capital city. The Saxon School once stood on the site of the current Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center at Assembly and Blossom streets. Advocates for renaming the gym have long proposed Saxon as a replacement for the one-time segregationist senator.

Reaching back further in time, Robert Smalls has one of the highest profiles in South Carolina’s Black history. As an enslaved boat pilot operating in Charleston Harbor during the Civil War, Smalls navigated a daring nighttime escape past Confederate watchmen to link up with Union ships blockading the city. He went on to represent South Carolina in Congress during the Reconstruction period.

Other names are more indicative of USC’s own racial history. Robert Anderson, James Solomon and Henrie Monteith, later Henrie Treadwell, were among the first African Americans to enroll at the Columbia campus when USC reintegrated in 1963. Attorney and Carolina alumnus Luther Battiste co-authored the proposal that led to the creation of USC’s African-American Studies program.

USC’s Black alumni have gone on to national prominence. After she became the first Black woman to graduate from USC’s law school, Edna Smith Primus went to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend her own right to advocate legal action — in that case for women on welfare who were being coerced into sterilization.

Even earlier, McCants Stewart graduated from USC in 1875 and went on to promote education and civil rights from Hawaii, where he challenged the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act, to Liberia, where he served on the African nation’s Supreme Court.

One of Stewart’s classmates was Alonzo Townsend, a minister and educator who founded a Black-owned bank in Orangeburg, but who may be best remembered for a 1936 controversy when the USC Alumni Association refused to award Townsend a symbolic, gold-tipped walking cane normally given out to the college’s oldest living alumnus. Townsend died the next year, without receiving his cane.

The one name on the list without a direct connection to South Carolina is William Whipper, a Pennsylvania man who in the 1800s founded the American Moral Reform Society to advocate for the abolition of slavery, and who operated a stop on the Underground Railroad.

This story was originally published July 14, 2021 at 4:47 PM.