The Persistence of Segregation in South Carolina
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth story in The Firsts, a five-part series about the children who desegregated America’s schools.
Millicent Brown could only be honest. It was the summer of 1960, and she was standing in front of the school board in Charleston County, South Carolina. She was preparing to enter the seventh grade. The row of men—all white—studied her as they lobbed loaded questions her way. “Don’t you like your teachers?” one asked. “Don’t you like your friends?” asked another. The issue that ultimately lay beneath these questions was simple: Why did a Black child want to attend a white school?
Sixty years later, Brown can remember how frustrated the interrogation made her. “How dare they try to make me speak ill of my Black community?” she says. But she didn’t bristle. “Oh, I love my teachers, and I love my friends, it’s not that at all,” she remembers saying. “It’s just that I know there are things and facilities that are made available to other schools that we don’t have. I’ve heard that there are lockers … I’ve never seen a locker in my life.”
Millicent had not been prepared for the meeting. Earlier that day, her father had told
