SPEAKING FREELY ON THE CAREER OF VICTORIA DeLEE, DORCHESTER COUNTY'S CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEER (PART TWO)

Victoria DeLee understood early in her life what it would require for Black people to take their rightful place in the American system: a decent education, and active participation in politics. Her career as a civil rights activist in Dorchester County reflects those two priorities.

(For Part One on Victoria DeLee's remarkable career see my previous post.)

On education, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) mandated school integration, but a decade after the decision, many schools were racially separate and vastly unequal in quality.

In Dorchester County, to conform with Brown, the school district offered a "Freedom of Choice" program which ostensibly permitted Black children to transfer to a white school. In practice, this was a sham. The process was made intentionally difficult for parents to navigate. Black families were told there was no room in the white schools, even though data showed that Black classrooms were more crowded than white.

So in 1964, DeLee filed the first federal lawsuit to desegregate Dorchester County schools. As she told Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker magazine, "I did it to get equal education, and I know that was the only way. This is when they started harassing me. This is when they started shooting in the house."

She received threatening phone calls and letters. Her car was followed. Her house was riddled with bullet holes. In 1966 it was burned to the ground. In 1970 she sought protection from the federal government after she received threats warning of "booby traps in your home and car," a message signed by "your loving friends, the KKK." (Rural South Carolina had been a hotbed of KKK activity since the 1870s.)

When Black children did get into white schools they were treated poorly by white teachers, harassed by other students, forced to sit in the back of the classroom, and cursed with the "n" word. Her own children were physically attacked on the school buses.

But her 1964 lawsuit led in 1970 to a federal judge ordering South Carolina schools to fully integrate and to drop the Freedom of Choice program.

(For a thorough study of the fight to integrate South Carolina's schools, see the doctoral dissertation produced in 2014 at the University of South Carolina by historian Luci Vaden titled, "Before the Corridor of Shame: The African American Fight for Equal Education After Jim Crow." DeLee is also one focus of the book Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights by Rosetta E. Ross.)

DeLee was not just committed to the education of Blacks in Dorchester County. She also took up the cause of 275 impoverished Native American children living in the Four Holes district. The school, whose graduates could neither read nor write, was the last segregated Native school in the South.

Through her efforts, which included picketing, marching, and organizing boycotts of white businesses, she managed to convince a federal judge to require admission of some Native children to Ridgeville's elementary school. A year later, HEW closed the Four Holes school entirely, which DeLee later turned into a day care center.

In the arena of electoral politics, DeLee was dissatisfied with the responsiveness of the Democratic Party to Black needs. She determined that the path to power within the party lay at the precinct level. She began to organize her fellow Blacks to show up at poorly-attended white precinct meetings and elect Black officers. She intended to turn them into a voting block that could not be ignored.

Her first test came in 1971 in a special election to fill the First Congressional District seat left vacant upon the death of L. Mendel Rivers. White Democrats in 1971 were not about to choose someone like DeLee as their candidate. Rather, they chose Mendel Jackson Davis, the godson of Rivers. The Republican candidate was James B. Edwards.

DeLee founded the United Citizens Party and ran in this special election with the campaign slogan "unbossed, unbought, and unsold."

She captured 8,029 votes out of some 80,000 cast. It was a remarkable showing for a new party and a new candidate. This helped convince reluctant white Democrats that Black voters should be embraced by the party to counter the rising popularity of Republicans. (Edwards lost that election to Davis but he would become Governor in 1974, the first Republican elected as Governor since Reconstruction.)

It is not a stretch to credit DeLee with helping transform the white, racist southern wing of the Democratic Party into the party of today, in which the Black vote is crucial to victory.

DeLee may not have had a college education, but she was very smart in other ways. She understood how to get the attention of white politicians in Washington.

She told Trillin in The New Yorker interview, "I found out one thing: writin' letters and phone calls don't get action. Best way to get action: go there [to Washington, DC]. They can't stand to see you comin' there. They'll act like they're glad to see you, but it's not. And when you come there, they will do things for you to get rid of you. And I knows that. And that's why always if it's a problem that really need to be solved right away, I just gets busy and go up there."

As we all grapple with the shocks of the Trump political era, Victoria DeLee provides a model for us all. That is, have courage, get involved, confront your opponents, and never take "no" for an answer.