“An Advocate of the People” Exhibit

MODJESKA MONTEITH SIMKINS an ADVOCATE of the PEOPLE

By Katharine Allen, Director of Research

Simkins objects to a rezoning plan that allowed middle-class white parents living near Lyon Street to move their children out of three predominantly Black schools at a Richland School District One meeting on March 9, 1976. One parent claimed that this change would allow them to be more active in school affairs, to which Simkins replied, “If they can do so much good in a middle-class school, they could do far more in a school needful of such contact.” Image courtesy The State Newspaper Photograph Archive, Richland Library

RESIST examines the protracted legal and economic battle to end school desegregation. Historic Columbia collection

Over the last decade, Historic Columbia’s leadership and staff have taken bold steps to research and share new stories — ones that spotlight many unsung or previously maligned heroes while also refusing to gloss over people and systems that created and perpetrated injustice. The resulting reinterpretations at our sites often call into question the “truths” long held by many Americans: about the benevolence of enslavers, the incompetence of Black leadership, and the concept that Americans have always collectively sought to create a more equal and just nation. Although our work is always informed by scholarship and generally well-received, each new exhibit opening or tour brings with it some white visitors who want Historic Columbia to stop sharing “unpleasant” history, and most tellingly, who walk away upset that they were somehow tricked into attending “a Black history tour.” The common thread uniting these experiences, though, is not just apathy toward learning about people whose stories are historically underrepresented. It’s an unwillingness, often born of fear, to confront how white Americans have historically benefitted from, and thus continued to perpetuate, white supremacy. For doing so means questioning when, if ever, it ended.

As we began planning the permanent exhibit at the former home of Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the main curatorial team of myself, Graham Duncan, Kelly Kinard, and DJ Polite decided that it was no longer just forward-thinking, but necessary, for visitors to more fully understand how white supremacy has shaped the world we live in today. We also felt that it would be a disservice to visitors to believe that Simkins’ achievements were accomplished in a vacuum, nor were they, as with most actions by activists, celebrated by her white, and even some of her Black, contemporaries. For more than a year, we worked together to create an experience that invites visitors to touch, examine, listen, and reflect upon more than 100 archival documents created by Simkins and others working in this milieu.

Ultimately, we decided to name each of the three dedicated exhibit spaces for a different action: ORGANIZE, RESIST, and RISE UP. As visitors enter the first room, ORGANIZE, they are immediately confronted with the words of Simkins and former governor Benjamin R. Tillman, who both recognized the same truth: that the latter did not believe Black South Carolinians should have a voice in governance, and that he and other white men seized the legal power and made it so. This fact sets the proverbial stage for the space, where the breadth of source material allowed us to, for example, highlight how Simkins used her limited power to organize for access to health care and the ballot box, while ensuring that visitors could not look away from the inverse: white newspapers that chose language that justified lynchings and a white-only state legislature that organized explicitly against Black suffrage.

The other two rooms replicate this experience in very different ways. RESIST explores the years-long fight to end “separate but equal” schools and the massive resistance to desegregation mounted by “average” white citizens that came after the landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education. As she had in previous decades, Simkins found her own path forward, this time by leveraging media moments of her own creation. Among the artifacts on view is the Oct. 20, 1955, issue of Jet magazine, which features a call to action by Simkins that quickly raised thousands of dollars for Black school petition signers, and a mimeograph machine from the late 1940s, similar to the one Simkins used to mass produce a list of Orangeburg, South Carolina, stores to boycott in 1956 on account of their connection to the White Citizens Council.

In the exhibit’s final space, RISE UP, we chose to take a more holistic approach to Simkins’ final years, when she advocated for numerous progressive policies through the Richland County Citizens’ Committee. Here, we connected her advisement of the progressive, and therefore controversial, biracial Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) to her support and advocacy of direct-action protests by young activists a generation later, in the 1960s. To bring that connection into the present day, we commissioned filmmaker Mahkia Greene to create a short film juxtaposing the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre and the Black Lives Matter movement. Greene’s deft work ensures that as visitors turn to the exhibit’s final panel, A Matriarch’s Legacy, they carry new truths: that the passage of civil rights legislation in 1965 did not dramatically halt centuries of white supremacy, and that those who call into question this narrative do so at their own peril.

As Simkins’ own legacy shows, to participate in a movement that challenges power often leads to initial condemnation. But as she espoused, early and often, participation is the point, and anyone can do it. They must simply decide to join the fight.

Simkins created this list of Orangeburg businesses on her mimeograph machine in 1956. NAACP members and supporters placed copies on car windshields during South Carolina State University football games to spread awareness. Image courtesy of South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia

Simkins Exhibit Project Team

CURATORIAL Katharine Allen Graham Duncan Kelly Kinard DJ Polite

ACQUISITIONS & HOUSE PREPARATION Fielding Freed Kevin Jennings

HEAR THEIR NAMES A memorial to lynching victims voiced by Xavier Blake Thaddeus Davis Alison Summey Tanya Wideman-Davis

“RISE UP” A film directed by Mahkia Greene

SCHOLAR REVIEW & ADVISEMENT Candace Cunningham, PhD Ramon Jackson, PhD Henrie Monteith Treadwell, PhD Adrienne Monteith Petty, PhD