Newman guided South Carolina through Civil Rights battle years

Nearly a century lapsed between 1888 and the day South Carolina voted its next African-American state senator into office.

Elected in 1983, I. DeQuincey Newman established himself as a state leader years before taking his District 19 Senate seat. He defeated a white Republican, John Camp, to win the three-county district where the majority of voters were white.

Newman was a Methodist minister and an active Civil Rights leader. He helped organize the Orangeburg branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1943, participated in founding the Progressive Democratic Party and served as a delegate to several national Democratic conventions.

For the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, Newman served as the state field director for the NAACP, guiding South Carolina’s Civil Rights movement through years when the state avoided much of the violent racial strife that gripped the Deep South.

Along with contemporaries such as Matthew Perry – a lawyer before becoming the state’s first African-American federal judge – Newman was part of a movement that capitalized on both legal and social momentum for Civil Rights change.

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 11:06 PM.