The story of the Reconstruction era at the University of South Carolina is remarkable. A previously all-white institution admitted Black men, established a Normal School to train Black women to be school teachers and welcomed Black faculty and trustees. Museum of Education director Christian Anderson talks about his ongoing research on that chapter of USC's past.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Remembering the Days, where we explore the stories and talk with the people who are part of the long history of the University of South Carolina. I'm Evan Faulkenberry, and today Chris Horn and I are talking with Christian Anderson, who's an education professor here at USC, and he has done a lot of work on the history of Reconstruction here at the University of South Carolina, which is that 12-year period after the Civil War ended and a period in which not a whole lot of people know a whole lot about.
So it was in the 1870s that South Carolina got a new constitution, and that turned the University of South Carolina into a very progressive university. In fact, we were the only university in the South, the only public university, that at least for a few years admitted Black students, which was a very big deal for an institution that had only admitted white students for its first 60 years.
Absolutely. USC was the only one with not only Black students, but Black faculty, Black trustees.
Let's get started with today's conversation.
Chris Horn: Christian, thanks for being with us today. Tell me about how you got interested in the history of higher education.
Christian Anderson: I was studying at the University of Utah, and I attended a lecture by Jack Newell, and it just sounded interesting. He was speaking about the American scholar, Emerson's essay, “The American Scholar,” and something about it. I know that sounds kind of boring, but for some reason, it just appealed to me.
So I did my master's with him but then when I was ready to pursue the Ph.D., I said, ‘Where's the best place to do that?’ And at the time, that was at Penn State with Roger Geiger. So I went there. I was the editorial assistant for the only journal dedicated to the history of higher education, and I just knew this was my lane, the history of higher ed. So then I got lucky enough to get a job here at a place that already had a historian of higher education, Katherine Chaddock. And so we kind of split duties. One would teach it in the fall. She would teach it in the fall. I would teach it in the spring.
Evan Faulkenbury: So that's your background in learning and thinking about being a scholar yourself in higher education. So then what is it about Reconstruction that grabbed your attention?
Christian Anderson: So it's a remarkable story, and I knew nothing about it before I came here. Nothing. I knew the general history of higher education, but the general histories of higher ed don't really talk about Reconstruction. At least they didn't in the past. And so when I came here, I started to get little inklings of it, learn a little bit here and there. But what really sparked my interest and got me really invested in it was when Catherine and I went to the History of Education Society conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she saw a plaque about Richard T. Greener, and she took a picture of it and showed it to her history of higher ed class, said, ‘Look at this that I saw about Greener, who was our first Black professor here.’ And Catherine will tell you, she didn't know that much about him either. She knew more than me, but not a lot. And the students said, well, why don't we have something about him here? And she said, that's a good question. So she comes and asks me after class, well, what do you think? Should we do something?
That's a very short version of the story of how we got started on this project to memorialize Greener. And along the way, we just started learning more about him. And the more I learned, the more I was hooked. I was like, this guy is fascinating. So I'm learning about him and researching him. She's learning about him and researching him. I'm working more on getting the statue, along with Lydia Brandt from art history. And she's involved in that, too. But she starts writing this biography of him. I'm reading sample chapters as she's working on it. And so, of course, he's just one part of the Reconstruction story. We have students, we have trustees, we have the community. We have the normal school, which I knew very little about. So just piece by piece, I start unfolding this story of what is Reconstruction in general, but especially what what was the Reconstruction era like at the University of South Carolina, and what did these alumni then go and do? Who were they? And it just became more fascinating. Every page I turned, I was like, there's more to learn.
Chris Horn: I get the sense that people don't really appreciate how unique the University of South Carolina was at that time. We were the only university in the South, the only public university in the South that actually admitted African Americans.
Christian Anderson: Around the country, there were pockets of enrolling African American students. Of course, Harvard did. I mean, that's how Greener became the first Black graduate of Harvard. And here and there there were example. Oberlin was an outlier in Ohio. That's not the South. They had admitted African American students. I recently learned that Arkansas, during Reconstruction, admitted one or two students, who I don't even remember if they graduated. But there was nothing even remotely approaching what we did here,
Francis Cardozo becomes the first Black trustee in 1869. Oct. 7th, 1873. Henry Hayne enrolls, and he does it to open the doors. I mean, I don't think he really had an intention of going through four years of study. He was older. He was secretary of state. He did it to open the doors and he opened the doors. Faculty resigned, Henry Maximillian Laborde among them, who had been on the faculty for, I think, 40 years. A lot of students left and said, ‘I'm not going to be here if there's going to be African Americans.’ They wouldn't have used that word. Then more black students enrolled, and then soon it's 50 percent, and then it's more than 50 percent., probably 75 to 90 percent of the students in 1876 were African Americans. This is in the place that has been called one of the think tanks for secession, for creating the conditions to bring about the Civil War. Think about that. Think about the fact that you've got a Black professor who is friends with Charles Sumner, who was the most outspoken abolitionist in Congress and was hated, hated in South Carolina.
Chris Horn: And nearly lost his life because of a South Carolinian.
Christian Anderson: Because of a South Carolina College alum, Preston Brooks, who walked across from the House to the Senate and beat him with his cane. And that's what I'm saying is. It's just so shocking as you learn more and more about it and how remarkable it was.
Chris Horn: If you look at one of the early histories of the university, I think it was Edwin Green who was a history professor here, early 20th century. His treatment of that era is shameful when you think about it. I mean, he basically relegates it to an appendix in the book and talks about it being a radical university, and not in a good sense, radical. So one of our own history scholars is writing about it and, to use your words, calling the Reconstruction experiment a mistake.
Christian Anderson: So that's maligning the story. But then there's others who actively destroyed the story. So right now, if you go over to the South Caroliniana Library, the original library of the university, they have a display about Reconstruction. And on one end they have the ledger that shows the roster of students, among them Henry Hayne, you know, listed. And then a portrait of Greener. And then on the right is one of the most arresting, visceral, archival images or items that I've ever seen in all the archives I've ever visited. And that's the ledger of the Clariosophic Society, one of the debating societies that was founded right after the university was founded and right after it opened in 1805. And this debating society in its ledger would list the debates they had, who won, who lost, membership rolls, all that kind of stuff, minutes of their meetings. But in this ledger, when the white students returned in 1880 after the university was reopened, they tore those pages out. You can see where they just razored them out. They either threw them away or maybe used them to start their fire, you know, to warm their room that night. Who knows? But that history is gone. We will never, ever, unless we somehow come across someone's journal or diary that says, “Oh, I wrote down what we talked about in these debates.” We'll never know what the Black and white students and emphasis on Black and white. You know, there were Black and white students here studying together. We'll never know what did, what did they debate? What were they talking about? What was going on in their meetings?
Evan Faulkenbury: So here at South Carolina during Reconstruction, we sort of set the bar for what a democratic society could look like in higher education. So USC experimented, had Black students, Black faculty. But then in 1877, as you're pointing out, that's gone. The records are ripped away. So to preserve that history and tell that story, how did that start to come about?
Christian Anderson: There are certainly people who knew this story and who were working on it. Tom Brown, among them, other history professors. But I really think that the Greener statue, that project, I think, brought it into sharp focus. Because as we started working on that, Dr. Chaddock is working on her biography. And there was a dissertation about Greener by Michael Mounter, but as we all know, dissertations sit on dusty shelves. And no offense to all dissertation writers, present company included, once that project got underway and we were soliciting ideas for how we should go about this, should we have a statue, should we do something else? And then soliciting designs for the statue and then once it became clear, OK, this is what we're doing now, we're raising money for the statue. I think it just created more enthusiasm among us to do this research and to teach about it.
Chris Horn: This is the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction for the United States, but also for the university. How are we observing it as a university?
Christian Anderson: So last year, we did a few different programs to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction. First, we had a lecture about Francis Cardozo, that first Black trustee. Oct. 7, 2023, the actual 150th anniversary of Hayne enrolling in the university, we did a program in Rutledge College called Henry Hayne Day. We had the campus gospel choir sing to commemorate this. We showed Betsy Newman's film about Reconstruction at USC. It's an eight-minute film, she's trying to raise the money to turn this into a full-length documentary. And then we had a panel to discuss what Reconstruction means, what understanding its history means, what its legacy is. And then for November, which marks the 150th anniversary of when Greener arrived in November of 1873, we did Reconstruction tours where we highlighted the spaces where Greener would have lived and worked. He lived in Lieber College. He served as librarian for a while. This year we've continued it. Sept. 1, 1874, the Normal School opened. And so we did a program to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Normal School. And right now in the Museum of Education, we have an exhibit about the history of that Normal School.
So the Normal school was also a remarkable part of this story, in that Henry Hayne, Francis Cardozo and Robert Smalls, the Civil War hero, had served on the Education Committee of the 1868 Constitutional convention, which is what sets all this in motion. The Constitutional Convention paves the way for African Americans to be elected to public office. We have a majority Black Legislature, and one of the most important planks that they put into the Constitution was education. They wanted it to be free and equal, available to all regardless of race. And they wanted the university to be tuition free. And it was, there was no tuition. And they also created a public school system for the state of South Carolina. The first of its kind. But then they needed to train teachers. They needed a way to have teachers. And so they created a normal school. A normal school just means teacher training school. It's from the French term. And they said, well, it's going to be on the University of South Carolina campus. So it was held in Rutledge College and in the President's House.
And university faculty, Greener, Fisk, Brewer and the others taught in that Normal School, along with Mortimer Warren, the principal, and trained mostly Black women to be teachers. So on this campus, even though it was organizationally and technically separate, it was de facto part of the university, and it was certainly part of the same environment, what we now call the Horseshoe. You had the university and the normal school all in the same space, Black and white women and men in the normal school, Black and white men in the university, all in this same space. So that just adds another layer of just how incredible this is. And then some of these graduates go on to great things. Celia Dial Saxon teaches for 57 years in Columbia public schools, has the school renamed for her. The Blossom Street School is renamed for her. Unfortunately, in the ‘70s it gets torn down by the university as it expands west. Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen goes on to be one of the first Black female novelists in America and a great educator at here, at Allen University, and then in Texas. And then there's surely many other stories that we're trying to uncover and learn what these other graduates did. So that's another part of this remarkable story.
Evan Faulkenbury: The way that you describe Reconstruction at the University of South Carolina, we have things to be proud of, you know, in the ways that we had Black students, we had Black faculty, Richard Greener, Henry Hayne, the Normal School, things to look back and and say, 'Wow, you know, we really set the bar high for what the South could be and for in higher education.' But then we have things to not be so proud of, you know, and you talked about the records that are ripped out of the out of the record book and the way that after 1877, history was rewritten in a way to castigate Reconstruction. So we look back, we can be proud of some things. We can be not proud in some ways as well. So what's the way forward?
Christian Anderson: Well, I call the Reconstruction era at the University of South Carolina as our great what-if. It's the university's great what if. And I think it's one of the great what ifs in the history of higher education and indeed in the South, in the country. Because, like you just pointed out, it was this integrated university. And I'm not going to pretend that it was utopia. I'm sure it wasn't perfect, but all the reports talk about that it held to high academic standards, because some students weren't prepared, they even created a preparatory department to help them get prepared because they wanted them to live up to the high standards. And of course, asking what if, we can't change the past. We can't change what happened. But by asking what if we can say, well, what do we do now? What do I look at? That happened then and how would I apply that to what I want to do now? How should I as an individual and we as a community and as an institution, how should we act differently? As W.E.B. Dubois said, 'Reconstruction was a moment in the sun.' But then these rights were eroded and things went backwards. So how do we open up that new moment in the sun without closing it off and without falling back?
Evan Faulkenbury: Well, thank you, Christian, for joining us today and talking about Reconstruction at Carolina.
Christian Anderson: My pleasure. I'm glad to be here.
Chris Horn: I always enjoy talking with Christian Anderson. When he was telling us about the Normal School and about that brief period of time during Reconstruction, I really just find it fascinating.
Evan Faulkenberry: And it's because of people like Christian and other students and faculty and staff who have been here at USC in the recent couple of decades who have done the bulwark to remember that important history and make it less of an unknown and more of something to celebrate.
Chris Horn: Up next on Remembering the Days, we're going to be talking to Alan Piercy who wrote a book A Gamecock Odessey about the 20-year period in which USC was an athletic independent. A lot of fun stories and some that are not so fun, but just very interesting.
Evan Faulkenberry: We'll see you next time on Remembering the Days.