Eyewitnesses to the Movement: Georgetown and the Civil Rights Movement

Description

• Speakers include:
  • Lorna Rainey, the great-granddaughter of Congressman Joseph H. Rainey, the first African American seated in the United States House of Representatives. He was enslaved in Georgetown, worked as a barber in Charleston, escaped to Bermuda in 1861, and returned to serve in South Carolina’s constitutional convention. He served in the state legislature before his election to Congress.  
  • Cleveland Sellers, Ph.D., a scholar and former president of Voorhees College. As a civil rights activist in the 1960s, he participated in the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, the Selma march, and served as the program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was wounded in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre in which law enforcement killed three unarmed students and severely wounded nearly thirty others. Sellers was charged and convicted but later pardoned.  
  • Cecil J. Williams, South Carolina’s foremost civil rights photojournalist. He captured images of iconic figures and events of the Civil Rights Movement, including Thurgood Marshall, Harvey Gantt, Dr. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, and others, across the state. He was the South Carolina photojournalist for Jet magazine, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, and other publications. He recently established the South Carolina Civil Rights Museum in Orangeburg.