‘A man of courage’: trailblazing SC Black Judge Jasper Cureton dies at 84

Jasper Cureton, the first African American judge to sit on the S.C. Court of Appeals, has died. He was 84.

Born in Walhalla, Cureton in 1967 became the first of two African Americans to graduate from the University of South Carolina School of Law. He ranked second in his class.

Before becoming a Court of Appeals judge in 1983, he served as Richland County’s master in equity and a 5th Circuit family court judge. He also was a lawyer in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Cureton was one of six men elected by the Legislature to the Court of Appeals in 1983, the year the court was created.

In 2000, Cureton ran for a seat on the S.C. Supreme Court, but lost to Circuit Judge Costa Pleicones after four contested ballots.

In his 20-plus years on the Court of Appeals, Cureton’s friendship with a fellow judge, C. Tolbert Goolsby, was so celebrated that they decided to have their traditional memorial oil portrait painted together, friends said. The portrait hangs today in the Court of Appeals hallway in the court building on the State House grounds.

Both had been elected to the Court of Appeals in its first year, 1983.

Unstated in the portrait was a historical irony — Cureton had grown up in the days of segregation and only attended USC’s law school as a transfer student, since it was closed to Black students when he was a first-year law student at S.C. State University, the state’s only four-year public historically Black college.

Goolsby, as an assistant state attorney general in the 1960s, had prosecuted cases against those who fought for civil rights.

“Jasper Cureton was the most balanced individual I’ve ever encountered,” said retired Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Sanders, who served on the court with Cureton. “He was a man of courage, but more than that, he was a man of enormous good will.”

Cureton, Sanders said, “was not a Black judge; he was a judge.”

“Race played no role in his attitude toward life or toward his duties,” he said.

Columbia attorney I.S. Leevy Johnson, one of the first African Americans to serve in the 20th century in the South Carolina House, called Cureton “brilliant.”

“He had an analytical mind and could analyze complex legal issues and was a hard worker,” Johnson said.

This story was originally published December 7, 2022 at 3:20 PM.