From the Upstate to the Lowcountry, African Americans have had a gigantic impact on the Palmetto State. Unfortunately, their stories are often overshadowed. Collected here for the first time, this selection of essays by historian Damon L. Fordham brings these stories to light. Rediscover the tales of Samuel Smalls, the James Island beggar who inspired DuBose Heywards Porgy, and Denmark Vesey, the architect of the great would-be slave rebellion of 1822. Learn about the blacks who lived and worked at what is now Mepkin Abbey, the Spartanburg woman who took part in a sit-in at the age of eleven and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s visit to Charleston in 1967. These articles are well-researched and provide an enlightening glimpse at the overlooked contributors to South Carolinas past.

Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Invisible No More seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Americans have shaped the development of the university. The essays in this volume span the full sweep of the university's history, from the era of slavery to Reconstruction, Civil Rights to Black Power and Black Lives Matter. This collection represents the most comprehensive examination of the long history and complex relationship between African Americans and the university. Like the broader history of South Carolina, the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the university's history, Black students, faculty, and staff have pressured for greater equity and inclusion. At various times they did so with the support of white allies, other times in the face of massive resistance; oftentimes, there were both. Between 1868 and 1877, the brief but extraordinary period of Reconstruction, the University of South Carolina became the only state-supported university in the former Confederacy to open its doors to students of all races. This "first desegregation," which offered a glimpse of what was possible, was dismantled and followed by nearly a century during which African American students were once again excluded from the campus. In 1963, the "second desegregation" ended that long era of exclusion but was just the beginning of a new period of activism, one that continues today. Though African Americans have become increasingly visible on campus, the goal of equity and inclusion—a greater acceptance of African American students and a true appreciation of their experiences and contributions—remains incomplete. Invisible No More represents another contribution to this long struggle. A foreword is provided by Valinda W. Littlefield, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, research professor of community health and preventative medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and one of the three African American students who desegregated the university in 1963, provides an afterword.

Discover the contributions notable Black South Carolinians gave to bring encouragement and inspiration to their communities. Did you know that eighty-eight years before Rosa Parks's historic protest, a courageous black woman in Charleston kept her seat on a segregated streetcar? What about Robert Smalls, who steered a Confederate warship into Union waters, freeing himself and some of his family, and later served in the South Carolina state legislature? In this inspiring collection, historian Damon L. Fordham relates story after story of notable black South Carolinians, many of whose contributions to the state's history have not been brought to light until now. From the letters of black soldiers during the Civil War to the impassioned pleas by students of "Munro's School" for their right to an education, these are the voices of protest and dissent, the voices of hope and encouragement and the voices of progress.

Extraordinary photos that reveal the social, economic, and cultural realities of the Black South A True Likeness showcases the extraordinary photography of Richard Samuel Roberts (1880–1935), who operated a studio in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1920 to 1935. He was one of the few major African American commercial photographers working in the region during the first half of the twentieth century, and his images reveal the social, economic, and cultural realities of the black South and document the rise of a small but significant southern black middle class. The nearly two hundred photographs in A True Likeness were selected from three thousand glass plates that had been stored for decades in a crawl space under the Roberts home. The collection includes "true likenesses" of teachers, preachers, undertakers, carpenters, brick masons, dressmakers, chauffeurs, entertainers, and athletes, as well as the poor, with dignity and respect and an eye for character and beauty. Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn received a 1987 Lillian Smith Book Award for their work on this book. This new edition of A True Likeness features a new foreword by Elaine Nichols, the supervisory curator of culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. A new afterword is provided by Thomas L. Johnson.

What happened when a former enslaved man took beat-up old instruments and gave them to a bunch of orphans? Thousands of futures got a little brighter and a great American art form was born. In 1891, Reverend Daniel Joseph Jenkins opened his orphanage in Charleston, South Carolina. He soon had hundreds of children and needed a way to support them. Jenkins asked townspeople to donate old band instruments—some of which had last played in the hands of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. He found teachers to show the kids how to play. Soon the orphanage had a band. And what a band it was. The Jenkins Orphanage Band caused a sensation on the streets of Charleston. People called the band's style of music "rag"—a rhythm inspired by the African American people who lived on the South Carolina and Georgia coast. The children performed as far away as Paris and London, and they earned enough money to support the orphanage that still exists today. They also helped launch the music we now know as jazz. Hey, Charleston! is the story of the kind man who gave America "some rag" and so much more.

Eastern North Carolina is a land of contrasts, and its crime stories bear this out. A lovelorn war hero or a stalker? Conniving wife or consummate homemaker? Murder or suicide? The answers can be as puzzling as the questions. Mystery author Cathy Pickens details an assortment of quirky cases, including a duo of poisoning cases more than one hundred years apart, a band of folk hero swamp outlaws, sex swingers and a couple of mummies. Each story has, in its way, helped define Eastern North Carolina and its history.

Master storyteller Sherman Carmichael is back with more mysterious tales from South Carolina--from Plantersville to Loris and from Beaufort to Clinton. Many of these stories have been told and retold throughout generations, like the red-eyed specter that roams the stairwells of Wilson Hall at Converse College or the haunted grave site of Agnes of Glasgow in Camden. In 1987, a construction company unearthed the bodies of fourteen Union soldiers from the Civil War--twelve of the bodies were found without their heads. The Abbeville Opera House has a chair that remains open to this day for a patron who visited long ago. Join Carmichael for these and many more rare and offbeat stories from South Carolina.

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823, despite an operating budget that ranked forty-fifth out of the forty-eight states with such large public hospitals. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror and chaos. Author William Buchheit details this history through the words and interviews of those who worked on the iconic campus.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018 Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018 Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.