NEWS

NEWBERRY — Dr. Joe McDonald, professor emeritus of sociology at Newberry College, has detailed the largely unknown events of the Civil Rights Movement in Newberry in his new book, "'With All Deliberate Speed' - School Desegregation in Newberry: A Story of Protest and Resistance."

McDonald will give a free talk on his book Sunday, Sept. 17, at 3 p.m. at the Old Newberry Hotel, 1110 Caldwell St. in Newberry.

His book centers around the 1969 student boycott at Gallman High, the county's high school for Black students. He argues that this event was part of the national movement for equality, and was instrumental in bringing about reform in the rural community.

"It's good to know where your community has been, and how we got to where we are now, and I think this was an important event, really, in changing race relations," said McDonald. "Once this had happened, I think opportunities really opened up for the for the Black community, and so it really made its mark on our very history."

McDonald said that, despite his living in Newberry for over four decades, he had never heard of the boycott until a chance meeting in 2019.

"I was doing some work with the Newberry Literacy Council, an adult education program, and we were running some college-like seminars for people in the community. One of the participants brought his brother along, who was visiting from Alabama, and he just mentioned, during our discussion about South Carolina history, about the boycott at Gallman High. I thought, this needs to be written down, needs to be part of Newberry history," he said.

McDonald took several interviews with students and teachers, beginning with this one gentleman, who was one of the boycott's organizers. He pulled archived issues of the Newberry Observer and other papers around the state. He then tied the local movement to the events happening at the national level.

"The first chapter of the book starts back in 1896, with the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld 'separate but equal,'" he said. "That really began the whole Jim Crow era. Then in 1954, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally declared 'separate but equal' unconstitutional. But very little happend from 1954 to 1964, when Congress passed legislation demanding school desegregation. The Gallman boycott of 1969 is part of that story. The schools were finally desegregated in the fall of 1970.

"The students all refused to go to class the first few weeks of the semester. Some students stayed out the whole semester. The students organized marches. They appeared before the school board. They engaged in all kinds of things that were typical of the Civil Rights Movement at the time. It was civil disobedience. This was not just an isolated series of events. Newberry was part of the nation's history and the history of the movement. A lot of the older Black citizens know about this, but most of the other population, I don't think we know anything about these events, which have been sort of ignored up to this point," he said.

McDonald taught sociology at Newberry College from 2006 until his retirement in 2014. He and his wife, Mary, are the proud owners of the Old Newberry Hotel, having renovated and revitalized the historic property after years of abandonment.

Copies of McDonald's book will be available at the Sunday talk, and are also available from BookBaby, Amazon, ThriftBooks and Barnes & Noble.

Photo: Ted B. Williams / Newberry Magazine