Earned Vote

Blacks Learned Constitution, Earned Vote

…In order to form a more perfect Union…” The United States Constitution found racial segregation to be unlawful, but to guarantee women the right to vote, the Constitution had to be amended.

It was in 1947 that the all white Democractic party was declared unconstitutional and after that it was required that an individual be able to read a section of the Constitution to register to vote.

Mary Davis established a Civil Rights Schoool in her beauty shop on Arbutus Avenue in Union Heights to teach citizens to read the Constitution. She had been an 18 year old beauty school student in New York when she learned that she had civil rights. She was taught there what she could do about those rights without going to jail.

When she returned home, she founded the North Charleston chapter of N.A.A.C.P.

Men and women from her school would try to register to vote and a witness would go with them. Dr. Martin Luther King once spoke at her school. Deacon Henry Wright was one of those who helped to carry people to try to register to vote.

Picketing employers at Pinehaven Shopping Center to ask for equal employment opportunitieswas also organized at the school on Arbutus Avenue. Rev. J.S. Gaillard, Elder C.D. Brown and Bishop Aaron A. Moore carried young people in their cars to these protests. The last site to picketed in the north area was the supermarket at Ten Mile Hill.

Another crusader was Dollie Robinson. She and her husband, Henry, moved to Midland Park in 1924. After the 1947 ruling, she got copies of the Consitution and passed them out for citizens to learn, maybe even memorize, so that they could register to vote. One morning about 1 a.m. her two front windows were smashed with bricks.

Robinson explains that the frist voting was by “slips” and when machines were introduced, she was instrumental in getting one demonstrated at St. Paul’s A.M.E. Church and Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, both of which are on Rivers Aveue.

The only way that the Robinsons could give their children a high school education was to pay room and board for them to live near Burke High School. Their mother remembers those Sunday nights when the children were gone for yet another week.

She is now 80 years old and has been President of the Midland Park Precinct for 15 years.

Ronald McCollough was born in 1954 in Daniel Jenkins Homes, the son of Leon and Nellie. It was in that year on Monday, May 17th, that the Supreme Court said that it was unconstitutional to force him to go to segregated schools. It further ordered that segregation must end “withal deliberate speed”.

Ronald entered the 7th grade at Chicora Elementary School in the first year that it was integrated. The six mothers of those first Negro students spent the day waiting outside the fence. Other 7th graders, Pam Hughes and Faith Singletary, asked the teacher why they were there. The teacher assured the class that the mothers were there “to make sure their children were safe”. The mothers did not come back the second day.

When McCollough graduated from Chicora High School in the class of 1972 he confessed that the first day in the 7th grade he was terrified.