In 1963, the Reverend Ralph Waldo Canty graduated from the Lincoln High School in Sumter, South Carolina, and joined a small group of students in the basement of a building on the campus of Morris College. There, they planned public protests against racial segregation in the city. The Sumter Movement held nighttime sit-ins and marches to involve working people and helped support staff stage a 1966 strike at Shaw Air Force Base for fair wages. 
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The youngest student on the first buses to depart Washington, 18-year-old Charles Person survived a vicious beating alongside John Lewis in Montgomery, Alabama.

College freshman David Dennis joined the Freedom Rides immediately after the Alabama highway bus burning, when the cost of the journey was starkly clear. He traveled from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi. 

Joan Browning attended the Georgia State College for Women and joined the Georgia Freedom Ride, traveling from Atlanta to Albany. Police arrested Browning and the other riders in Albany in December 1961. Their arrival and arrest started a wave of mass meetings and demonstrations. 

In this episode, they share their experience and why that campaign still matters.

When six-year-old Oveta Glover looked across her Charleston street, she did not understand why she could not swing on the school playground on the other side. For three years, her parents worked to open the elementary to her and other African American children. Oveta and her family endured slurs, intimidation, and threats of violence so intense that the children had to move from the city for a time. In August 1963, Oveta Glover walked into the school with her father, who held her hand and reminded her to “square your shoulders.”

Today, she recounts her experience and why that moment still matters.

As a native of Columbia, South Carolina, Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy knows the people and the history of the state's Civil Rights struggle. Now, he teaches his students about one of the era's signature First Amendment cases, Edwards v. South Carolina from 1961, whose legal importance endures today. 

Our Story Matters is a podcast that tells the remarkable, little-known stories of the people who struggled for civil rights in South Carolina. Our host is Dr. Bobby Donaldson, University of South Carolina history professor and director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research. The Center’s research has uncovered the stories of people living in our neighborhoods and cities whose battles changed their lives, our state, and the nation. Listen to them tell their stories in their own words.

On March 2nd, 1961, hundreds of high school and college students rallied from around South Carolina to the Zion Baptist Church at noon. They marched the six blocks from the church to the State House grounds in a demonstration that led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting our First Amendment rights. A notable number of the marchers were high school students, and nearly half of all marchers were young women. One of those young women was a dedicated activist at Greenville's Sterling High School. We welcome her today. Doris DeeDee Wright.