ORANGEBURG | Legendary photojournalist Cecil Williams has witnessed seven decades of South Carolina civil rights history through his camera’s lens. His photos fill the South Carolina Civil Rights Museum, the only museum of its kind in the state.
The museum uses Williams’ gripping photos to tell stories of the state’s major civil rights demonstrations, court rulings and acts of defiance, such as the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston. Williams, his wife and sister, opened the museum in 2019 in his former home and darkroom.
The 88-year-old Williams, however, is perhaps better known outside of the state for a 1956 black-and-white photo of him drinking from a “white only” water fountain. The photo, a colorized version of which is this week’s cover image, propelled him in 2025 to pop icon status after he modeled a hoodie bearing the picture at the annual New York Fashion Week.
When Dr. Robin White, a Washington, D.C., veterinarian, saw the hoodie last year, she immediately decided to bring her 92-year-old mother, Jean White, to the museum to meet Williams. She also wanted to see the museum before Williams relocates it to a new and larger location in Orangeburg, a move that is nearly a year overdue.
Williams said he originally planned to transfer the museum’s exhibits in January to a new two-story building at the Railroad Corner, a redevelopment project across the street from S.C. State University and Claflin University.
Williams attributes the delay to a shift in national politics away from diversity, equity and inclusion programs that has made some government agencies and corporations hesitant to support Black causes. At least two major South Carolina manufactures and an energy company, which previously pledged support for the museum, are no longer answering his phone calls, Williams said.
Orangeburg County, he explained, is expected to issue a permit soon to occupy the new building. The installation of audiovisual, Wi-Fi and security systems also lagged behind, but may be completed soon.
S.C. launches a movement
White, a retired elementary school teacher from Washington, said she, like Williams, has a “militant” side that she got from her mother, Bernice Catherine Robinson, a Tidewater, Va., school teacher. In 1946, Jean White’s mother defied a bus driver’s order in Rosslyn, Va., to move to seats for Black riders at the back of the bus. As her 12-year-old daughter looked on, Robinson argued that ordering her to move violated her protection under the federal Interstate Commerce Clause that was established in a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The S.C. museum in Orangeburg tells a similar story of defiance on public transportation that occurred in 1955 when Sarah Mae Fleming of Eastover sat in a seat reserved for White riders. The White bus driver punched her in the stomach when he expelled her from the bus. The incident occurred in Columbia 17 months before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. That event launched the more widely known Montgomery bus boycott that lasted slightly more than one year.
Prior to 2019, most Southern states had civil rights museums, but South Carolina did not, Williams said. He and his family launched the museum “because we believe this is where the civil rights movement started,” he said. Fleming’s lawsuit against the S.C. Electric and Gas Co., which operated the bus service, is one of four events that qualifies South Carolina as a birthplace of the civil rights movement, Williams said.
Actions with consequences
Attention to civil rights injustices in the Palmetto State, however, started getting attention a few years earlier.
In 1946, a White police chief in Batesburg blackjacked and blinded U.S. Army Sgt. Isaac Woodard after the returning World War II soldier asked a bus driver whether there was time for him to use the restroom during a stop prior to the bus’s arrival in Batesburg. When the bus reached Batesburg, Woodard was arrested and beaten. The attack inspired President Harry S. Truman to desegregate the U.S. military.
A 1951 school desegregation lawsuit named Briggs v. Elliott, which was led by Clarendon County residents, became part of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision three years later was combined into Brown v. Board of Education that outlawed racially separate schools in the United States.
Lunch counter sit-ins and boycotts in 1955 at drug and department stores in Orangeburg predate similar protests elsewhere in the South, Williams said. The term “boycott” that was used to describe the year-long Montgomery bus boycott was borrowed from the Orangeburg protests, he added.
South Carolina generally is not recognized as a hotbed of protests because the mainstream media ignored civil rights events in the Palmetto State, Williams said. South Carolina also lacked a viable in-state Black press as compared to other Southern states.
Expanded exhibits
Within two months, Williams said he is planning to stage small events in the new museum’s auditorium and open its bookstore and gift shop. It might take another six months to move the museum’s 36 galleries to the new site, he added.
The existing museum is a comprehensive history of the state’s civil rights activities from 1940 through 1970. The larger museum will create additional space to expand each of the exhibits, Williams said.
Charleston’s civil rights history is displayed in the museum in many ways, Williams said. Civil rights icons Esau Jenkins and Septima P. Clark are prominent in the Charleston display.
A separate exhibit features the school desegregation narratives of Millicent Brown and Harvey Gantt, who were the first Black students at Rivers High School and Clemson University, respectively. The museum also presents the story of James Island resident Fred Henderson Moore, a student activist at the then-S.C. State College.
The Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III of North Charleston is recognized for demanding the removal of the Confederate battle flag from atop the South Carolina Statehouse.
“Charleston is unique because even before most of this history begins, (Charleston) had a degree of integration in Catholic schools and churches,” Williams said. “Black people attended the (Catholic) church along with White people, but they sat in a different area.”
The museum exhibits on Charleston and other locations in the state are as comprehensive as they can be in a building with limited space. Williams said he hopes that when the exhibits are moved to a much larger location it will take “its rightful place as the most authoritative and historically significant museum highlighting South Carolina’s pivotal role as the catalyst of the American civil rights movement.”
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