Abstract

The Heat of Summerton

America's most famous school desegregation cases didn't begin in Topeka, Kansas: The five cases that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas actually began in rural Clarendon County, South Carolina. The first case originated in a little town called Summerton and the surrounding flat farmland in the deep east-central part of the state. Led by a country preacher and schoolteacher named Joseph De Laine, African-American families challenged the community's white establishment and Southern way of life, and would end up changing the world. Yet even though these families paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the integration of public institutions throughout the South and other parts of the country, in the end they largely failed to change the plight of black schoolchildren in their own town. The only signs that Summerton is where the Brown cases began are a state historical marker in disrepair at Liberty Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church outside Summerton (where De Laine's father was a longtime minister and several plaintiffs were members and are buried), and a brick-and-concrete marker in front of the old Scott's Branch High School, now the town's public middle school, across from the lot where the De Laine home stood before the fire.