Uplifting, Preserving and Connecting the Heritage of Black South Carolinians.
- Javar Juarez
- Mar 1
- 6 min read
Reflections from the 2026 South Carolina African American Heritage Commission Conference | By Javar Juarez
There are conferences you attend because you are invited.
And then there are gatherings you attend because you are called.
The 2026 Annual Conference of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission felt like the latter. Though this was my first time attending, prayerfully it will not be my last. Rarely do you find yourself in a room filled with people from every corner of this state — Black, white, and brown — united not by politics or partisanship, but by a single shared mission: the preservation of American history, and more specifically, the preservation of African American history in South Carolina.
For those of us who labor in archives, who walk neglected graveyards, who search courthouse basements and forgotten parishes for the written record of our people, the conference felt less like programming and more like communion. It was a gathering of those who understand that memory is not passive. It must be fought for. It must be curated. It must be protected.
Black South Carolinians: Reconstruction and the Architecture of Black Enterprise
One of the earliest sessions transported attendees back to Reconstruction-era Beaufort, to what was described as the “Port Royal Experiment” — the transformation of a slave society into a free one. There, newly freed African Americans did not wait for permission to build. They established businesses. They acquired land. They organized communities.
Prince Rivers, once enslaved, became a soldier in the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry and later opened a liquor store in Beaufort. He went on to become a co-founder of Aiken County, serving as sheriff and judge. Literacy became a tool of liberation, with institutions like the Penn School teaching freedmen and women to read and write so they could sign contracts, operate businesses, and count their earnings.
This was not a story of dependency. It was a story of agency.
And yet, as history reminds us, Reconstruction’s promise was not allowed to flourish uninterrupted. Political violence and legislative maneuvering would eventually constrict much of that early freedom.
Washington Street and the Black Business District
That theme of enterprise carried forward into the session on Columbia’s Washington Street Black Business District. Through the lens of photographer Richard Samuel Roberts, the audience saw thousands of images documenting Black life in Columbia during the Jim Crow era.
Roberts did more than take portraits. He documented tailors, grocers, department stores, barbers, and institutions that served Black families when segregation barred them from white establishments.
His work, now digitized after decades stored beneath a family home, provides one of the most comprehensive visual records of African American life in Columbia in the early 20th century.
Even during deprivation, Black Columbia built its own economic corridor. Community was not accidental. It was engineered through resilience.
Genealogy Beneath the Water
Another powerful session traced genealogical research beneath the waters of Lake Moultrie. A presenter detailed how 85 percent of death certificates in his Thompson family line listed burial sites on a plantation that now sits submerged.
What seemed lost was not lost at all.
Through oral histories, parish records, and Freedom of Information Act requests, buried stories resurfaced. The lesson was simple but profound: “There is a record about your ancestors somewhere. You just have to look.”
For those of us who have traveled the rural backroads of South Carolina documenting cemeteries and abandoned churchyards, that message resonated deeply. Over the past year, I have driven more than 30,000 documented miles across 32 counties. I have stood in places where poverty, illness, addiction, and generational neglect intersect.
Many of those communities are populated by descendants of enslaved Africans whose economic and political progress was violently interrupted during Reconstruction and systematically undermined during Jim Crow.
To sit in a room where scholars and community historians articulated what I have witnessed firsthand was both affirming and sobering.
The Inaugural Book Prize: George Elmore’s Courage
Among the most significant moments of the conference was the presentation of the Commission’s inaugural Book Prize to Carolyn Click for The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot.
Click’s work recounts how on August 13, 1946, George Elmore walked into his polling place in Columbia and attempted to vote in the Democratic primary. He was denied.
At that time, the Democratic primary was effectively the election in South Carolina. Since the end of Reconstruction, the segregationist Democratic Party had operated as the uncontested ruler of state politics. No Black man or woman had cast a meaningful ballot in decades.
Elmore did not retreat.
With the legal support of the NAACP and argued by Thurgood Marshall, Elmore v. Rice challenged the exclusion of Black voters from the Democratic primary. The ruling that followed struck down the all-white primary in South Carolina and reshaped political participation in this state.
It was a landmark case born in Richland County.
But victories in court do not shield men from consequences. Elmore endured retaliation. His business suffered. His health declined. The cost of the vote was not theoretical. It was personal.
To hear this history centered in Columbia — not as abstraction but as lived reality — was powerful.
The Keynote: Donaldson and Clyburn
The conference concluded with a dialogue between Dr. Bobby Donaldson and Congressman James E. Clyburn.
Congressman Clyburn reflected on growing up in Jim Crow South Carolina, on learning history not as dates but as lived experience, and on the violent backlash that followed Black political advancement in this state.
Dr. Donaldson, whose scholarship has profoundly shaped the preservation of African American history, received the Order of the Palmetto — South Carolina’s highest civilian honor — presented by Congressman Clyburn himself.
It was a fitting image: a historian of Black life in South Carolina being honored publicly for safeguarding memory that was once suppressed.
The Through Line
From Beaufort to Washington Street, from submerged plantations to the courthouse steps of Elmore v. Rice, the through line of the conference was unmistakable:
Black South Carolinians have always built this state.
Economically. Spiritually. Politically.
The sacrifices of enslaved Africans shaped the agricultural wealth of the Low-country. Reconstruction entrepreneurs transformed downtown districts. Jim Crow communities engineered their own economic ecosystems. Civil rights litigants challenged party structures that sought to exclude them.
None of this progress was accidental.
And none of it was free.
As I left the conference, I was reminded that preservation is not nostalgia. It is instruction. The story of George Elmore is not simply about 1946. It is about the perpetual tension between access and control, between citizenship and gatekeeping.
If we gather to preserve history, we must also gather to learn from it.
The cost of the vote has always been high in South Carolina.
The question is whether we honor that cost by ensuring political structures remain open, transparent, and accountable to the people they claim to serve.
History does not repeat itself mechanically.
But it does leave warnings.
And this conference ensured those warnings will not be forgotten.
The Columbia Urban Broadcast Network proudly congratulates South Carolina African American Heritage Commissioner and Conference Chair Charmaine Clowney on her outstanding leadership and continued impact.
Javar Juarez is an award-winning journalist, Editor-in-Chief of the New Progressive Journal, Executive Director of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), and President of the Broad River Business Alliance in Columbia, South Carolina. An accomplished community organizer and influential political leader, Juarez is known for building power, amplifying marginalized voices, and driving transformative change across South Carolina.
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