Despite its significance to race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, South Carolina was the last state in the South to have its own Civil Rights museum. The absence was particularly glaring for photographer Cecil Williams, who documented much of the movement and eventually transformed his own home in the city of Orangeburg into a museum. Now, the city is creating an official museum dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement, using the decades of photos Williams has taken.
South Carolina’s Cecil Williams Civil Rights Museum is set to be relocated to a new home. The museum has been the passion project of Williams and the culmination of his life’s work documenting the Civil Rights Movement, , NBC News reported. Williams’ career as a photographer began in childhood when he took a picture of NAACP lawyer — and later Supreme Court Justice — Thurgood Marshall arriving to do work in regard to a segregation case. Williams caught the attention of Jet magazine, and he later worked with the Associated Press, although he was often excluded from segregated newsrooms in South Carolina. Williams, along with his wife Barbara and his sister Brenda, initially opened the museum in 2019, according to the museum’s website.
Earlier this year, it was announced that the museum would move and expand, with a renovated theater in Orangeburg selected as the new site for the museum and a total of $1.7 million in city and county funding allocated to the project, according to WLTX. Until now, the museum has been operated out of Williams’ converted home in a residential neighborhood in Orangeburg, holding over 20,000 photos and other items that will now be moved to the new location. The funding and renovation behind the new museum is part of the city’s Orangeburg Railroad Corner redevelopment project. City administrator Sidney Evering declared that “we want to do this project and make sure we do it right because it’s so important to our future but also that we are able to pay homage to our history,” WLTX reported in September.
Williams has spent much of his life documenting the Civil Rights Movement and later moments in the struggle for Black freedom and equality, particularly events in South Carolina. The city was the site of the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, where police shot anti-segregation demonstrators at a bowling alley, killing three people; shotgun shells and a bowling pin from that day are among the artifacts in Williams’ museum. In later years, Williams captured images such as the last campaign of longtime South Carolina senator and lead segregationist Strom Thurmond as well as the removal of the Confederate flag from the top of the Statehouse in Columbia, the state’s capital city.
Williams has also used his museum to document civil rights milestones in South Carolina that were later overshadowed by events elsewhere, such as the story of Sarah Mae Flemming, who was removed from a segregated bus in Columbia months before Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery. He also championed remembrance of the local school desegregation case of Briggs v. Elliott, which was later combined with a number of other cases in what became known as Brown v. Board of Education; Williams is part of a group seeking to rename the case to reflect that history.
For now, Williams will be keeping this history alive through his expanded museum. The new facility will not only preserve the history of race relations and the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina and nationally, but it will also serve as a reminder of how far the state and the country have come and how much work remains to be done.
