In honor of Emily England Clyburn, this SC street has a new name
The weight of Emily Clyburn’s impact on Columbia will be forever memorialized in the community she called home for nearly 50 years.
Monday, in a quick ceremony, U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and his three daughters — Mignon Clyburn, Angela Clyburn Hannibal and Jennifer Clyburn Reed — together pulled a string to unveil a new street sign in Columbia’s historic Greenview community honoring their late mother.
“I believe City Council got this done in record time,” said Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin. “It’s so well deserved.”
Emily Clyburn — known as Ms. Emily to South Carolinians — died Thursday at the age of 80.
Services to honor her life were held in Columbia Sunday, then Charleston Monday, where her family grieved and celebrated her life with Gov. Henry McMaster and his wife, Peggy, members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 2020 presidential hopefuls.
In his brief remarks Monday standing at the corner of Juniper and David streets in Greenview, Clyburn said the couple — married for 58 years — moved to the community in 1972, assuming they would stay for about a year.
But then a decade passed, and then another, Clyburn said.
“And then it got to the point where the daughters took turns urging us to move,” Clyburn said. “I was OK with that. But not Emily. She made it very clear that she loved this neighborhood. She loved the Greenview (Park community) center, and nobody or nothing could take her away from this neighborhood but death.”
Looking at the mayor, Clyburn said Monday he did not know what his future held.
“But I know of this,” he said. “It’d be one thing to move off of Juniper Street. But I don’t see myself ever moving off Emily England Clyburn Way.”
