Abstract
The people and state of South Carolina have twice had a revolutionary impact on the history of the United States. In 1861 South Carolina fired the first shots in a war they hoped would preserve a society built upon the subjugation of one race by another, but which instead brought about the end of slavery. Almost ninety years later the actions of an extraordinary group of African Americans from rural South Carolina precipitated an immense growth of democracy in American society when they initiated the first in a series of lawsuits that the Supreme Court ultimately ruled as Brown v.