The Education of Harvey Gantt

Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate!

Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate!

[sirens wailing] (Phylicia Rashad, narrating) Southern states fought the desegregation of public schools with massive resistance, and South Carolina was the last to comply.

But in 1963, Harvey Gantt integrated Clemson College, peacefully.

His success did not come without struggle.

On January 28, 1963, 20-year-old Harvey Gantt headed for his first day at Clemson College.

NAACP attorney Matthew J. Perry drove him to Clemson, along with his father, Christopher Gantt, and the Reverend A.R.

Blake, pastor of Harvey's church.

It was the end of a journey and the beginning of the desegregation of South Carolina's public schools.

Harvey Gantt grew up in the segregated South.

South Carolina's constitution required separate-but-equal schools for blacks and whites.

(male speaker) There was no equality.

The last statistics on segregated schools, 1960, we were spending, the state of South Carolina, 50% more on every white student than on a black student.

There was nothing close to equality.

(Rashad) The Gantts lived in Charleston, South Carolina.

Harvey's father worked at the naval shipyard, providing a stable life for the family.

We were comfortable living in the segregated society.

You know, we knew we walked past white elementary schools to go to our schools.

The same for high school.

We sat at the back of the bus.

We did those things obediently and didn't feel badly about living in a segregated society.

Of course, we were younger children.

We didn't see the rightness or wrongness or morally what was going on.

(Rashad) Harvey was the oldest child of Christopher and Wilhelmina Gantt.

While they may have protected their children from the full impact of life under Jim Crow, the Gantts were well aware of the need for change.

Christopher Gantt was a member of the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, led from 1941 to 1958 by the Reverend James Hinton.

As Harvey Gantt was growing up, the South Carolina NAACP won many civil rights battles.

They take on equalization of teachers' salaries.

They are successful.

They take on the issue of the racial violence.

They pursue issues of the right to vote and make an effort to crack open the Democratic Party.

By 1948, as a consequence of the NAACP's work, African Americans are now able to vote for the first time as Democrats in South Carolina.

And in the late '40s, the State Conference of the NAACP and the national office of the NAACP began to work in a more concerted effort to challenge the question of inequality in schools.

(Rashad) In rural Clarendon County, inequality was stark.

White children rode the bus to school, while black children had to walk.

A group of black parents circulated a petition demanding equal educational advantages for their children.

The first to sign were Harry and Eliza Briggs.

Their petition was denied, and the NAACP filed a lawsuit known as "Briggs versus Elliott."

The national office of the NAACP sent Thurgood Marshall to Charleston to argue the Briggs case.

Cecil Williams, 11 years old, was there with his camera.

(Williams) All I knew was that this big lawyer from New York was coming down to this big, important case.

And so as he was stepping off the train with his Samsonite suitcase, I snapped that picture.

(Donaldson) "Briggs v. Elliott" becomes part of the "Brown v. Board" decision and becomes a defining moment in the civil rights story in the nation.

(Gantt) I can still see the headlines from "The Charleston Evening Post" that said segregation was unconstitutional.

That kicked off a whole set of discussions, what I call "dinner table conversations," about rightness, wrongness, and issues of race.

We were influenced by my father, who took us to speeches by civil rights leaders who came to town: Roy Wilkins and James Farmer and people like that.

So we had a growing awareness of civil rights.

(Rashad) But state leaders and businesspeople began to devise ways to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling.

(Donaldson) Rather than a state agreeing with the ruling of the United States Supreme Court, there was a determined effort to resist, and the massive resistance movement came all along the Atlantic seaboard during that period to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling.

(Burton) Massive resistance, particularly formulated in Virginia and in South Carolina, it was gonna use the courts to fight every opportunity to desegregate.

(Rashad) The state legislature authorized the creation of the South Carolina School Committee, headed by state senator Marion Gressette, to lead the official fight to maintain segregation in the public schools.

(Donaldson) The NAACP took the court at its word, and it kept pushing forward, in the courts and media, trying to persuade the state to fall in line with the rest.

And many people suffered because of their association with the NAACP.

People were fired from their jobs.

A member of the NAACP could not be a schoolteacher in South Carolina.

Do you feel that the drive for integration is coming... (Rashad) In 1959, South Carolina senator Olin Johnston expressed widely held views about the NAACP.

I do not think that the colored people themselves are behind this drive.

I know it's not true in my state.

I think it is outsiders, the NAACP and other left-wing groups, that are pushing the matter at the present time.

If they were left alone, we would have no agitation in the South for integration.

(Rashad) In the late '50s and early '60s, J. Arthur Brown of Charleston headed the South Carolina NAACP.

His daughter Millicent Brown helped to desegregate the Charleston schools.

(Millicent Brown) The NAACP was a reform organization.

And while some people, they throw that word revolutionary out very loosely, the truth is, this was not an organization trying to overthrow anything.

When the Klan would ride by and threaten and taunt, when they burned a cross on our front steps, that was frightening, but it still never got to the point of whether or not we were gonna stop our advocacy.

I don't think stopping was ever even discussed.

(Rashad) Harvey Gantt attended Burke High School in Charleston.

When he was a junior, he joined the NAACP Youth Council.

(Gantt) Then in February of 1960, the sit-ins occurred in Greensboro, and the rest is history because then we got involved substantially.

(Rashad) During Harvey's senior year at Burke, students from North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro staged a series of sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

(Gantt) The sit-ins at A&T State University in Greensboro set off-- we would say today a viral reaction that spread to college campuses all over.

We were watching this as NAACP Youth Council members and saying, "Why can't we as high school students "protest the wrongness of segregation "at our lunch counters that we go in every day "and can't sit and have a Coke like everybody else.

Let's do it here."

(Donaldson) This sentiment is percolating among young people, many of whom were already involved in NAACP, young people who in 1960 were saying, "Wait, six years ago, "the United States Supreme Court "said schools should desegregate "'with all deliberate speed.'

That was six years ago."

And so in Greensboro, they sit down.

In Rock Hill, they sit down.

In Columbia, they sit down.

In Denmark, they sit down.

In Charleston, in April, Harvey Gantt and his cohort, they sit down.

So I think it's a call to action.

It's an awakening for young people all across the South.

(Gantt) We started to learn about nonviolent civil disobedience from Martin Luther King and watching SNCC workers who were treated horribly at lunch counters and other places on freedom rides, and we said, "We're gonna have to have "the fortitude to be nonviolent.

We cannot be violent."

And that was the issue amongst the group.

We as young people just got caught up that this is important work.

And you just don't spend a lot of time worrying about, you know, what are the consequences.

(Gantt) We decided we'd approach S.H.

Kress's, which was a company that we sat in at.

We were going to be fed or be arrested.

So we weren't fed, and, sure enough, we were arrested.

(Rashad) The students were freed on bond, and a few months later, NAACP lawyer Matthew J. Perry took their case.

He came and had a session with us to let us know that this was going to be tried in federal court.

It was gonna be a part of a number of cases developing across the Southeast.

(Donaldson) And so his job is to be a legal architect.

But he needs clients, and so the students at Burke High School, the students all across the state really become the witnesses he needs to really dismantle Jim Crow policy and segregation.

(Gantt) Here was a young civil rights attorney who was fearless, and it just seemed that the whole world was beckoning out for us to take advantage of those opportunities.

(Rashad) Clemson Agricultural College opened in 1893, an all-white, all-male military school.

In 1955, it became civilian and co-ed.

And in 1958, it established its School of Architecture, the only one at a public college or university in South Carolina.

Architecture was Harvey Gantt's field of choice.

In the spring of 1960, as he was about to graduate from high school, Gantt began to focus intently on going to a college with an outstanding architecture program.

(Gantt) A guidance counselor said, "You should consider going to a predominantly white institution."

But she didn't mention Clemson.

She simply said, "Look at these schools," and gave me schools to look at.

I applied to some of those, and I was accepted at Iowa State University in Ames.

I had a National Achievement Merit Scholarship, and that was not enough money to help me go to school.

My parents needed help, so, um, I, um... applied for something called state aid.

(Rashad) Under South Carolina's separate-but-equal structure, if a black student wanted to study a field like architecture that was only offered at a white college, South Carolina would pay him to go to school out of state.

(Gantt) That's how I got to Iowa.

Nice people, cold weather; it lasted about a year.

Then I started to look to see whether I could go somewhere closer to home, perhaps even Clemson.

It didn't take long for me to imagine, Boy, they don't have 23-below-zero weather in Clemson, South Carolina.

I'd be closer to home, to my girlfriends, to my friends.

All I had to do was get in.

In the winter of 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were students that had won a federal suit and were being admitted to the University of Georgia amidst a lot of brouhaha and protest.

But I said, "You know what?

"No one has applied to Clemson "and just asked to get in.

"They might let us in without any issue.

"As long as nobody applies, there is no reason for them to change their pattern."

And I applied.

The first application was sent in January of 1961, I believe, and, thereafter, successively for every term, summer school and all.

And they kept turning me down.

(Rashad) Clemson rejected Gantt's application three times.

On July 7, 1962, Matthew Perry filed suit at the U.S. District Court in Greenville for the admission of Harvey Gantt to Clemson College.

Because Harvey was a minor, his father, Christopher Gantt, was the plaintiff.

Constance Baker Motley of the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense Fund joined Perry's team.

(Donaldson) She was a force to be reckoned with in the courtroom.

Harvey Gantt was well-advised in counsel: the best civil rights lawyer in South Carolina, Matthew Perry, with one of the most accomplished civil rights lawyers in the national office in Constance Baker Motley.

(Rashad) Less than 3 months later, riots erupted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford to protest the enrollment of James Meredith.

Governor Ross Barnett blocked Meredith's entrance at the university and declared his love for Mississippi's heritage.

Even with more than 120 federal marshals on hand, the crowd turned violent after nightfall, and by the following morning, two people were dead, and scores more were reported injured.

(male speaker) Ross Barnett saw himself as the Winston Churchill of the South.

"We will fight them in the ditches, on the farms," or whatever he said.

And that was distinctly different from the message that Hollings gave.

(Rashad) Ernest "Fritz" Hollings had been elected governor of South Carolina in 1958.

A political pragmatist, he declared in his inaugural address that he would not desegregate South Carolina schools.

But he had campaigned on an economic development platform, and he worried that unrest would discourage investors.

Robert C. Edwards was the president of Clemson.

Like Hollings, he wanted to avoid violence.

Even as he and other Clemson officials fought Gantt's admission in the courts, they began to develop ways to keep the peace in case they lost the lawsuit.

(Reel) Every agency-- Reuters, AP, UP-- could send a delegate to cover the story.

The delegate had to come back and report to all the other members of his association before he released the story to his own paper.

(Rashad) Edwards and his team also had a plan for the students.

Stay calm; don't cause trouble.

The honor of Clemson rests with you.

(Rashad) The college made it clear that any student who got out of line would be expelled.

On January 9, 1963, at the end of his term, departing governor Fritz Hollings called for the state legislature to comply with federal law.

Every other governor of most every Southern state was rallying to fight segregation all the way.

Governor Hollings said we've run out of courts.

We're gonna do this the right way, with dignity, and obey the law.

(Rashad) A week later, newly elected governor Donald Russell held an integrated inaugural party, the first in South Carolina history.

The next day, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit declared that Clemson College must admit Harvey Gantt.

After six months of legal wrangling, Matthew Perry, Constance Baker Motley, and the NAACP had won their case.

Harvey would enter Clemson, and the college could not discriminate against any other African-American student.

Clemson appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay.

It was denied.

Some in the state legislature called for closing the college.

Senator Marion Gressette surprised them by advocating for peaceful acceptance of Gantt's enrollment.

I finally yielded to the integration at Clemson because I felt it was in the public interest to do it.

(Rashad) Chief of state law enforcement Pete Strom had been at University of Mississippi when riots broke out, sent there by Hollings to observe.

He organized round-the-clock police protection of Clemson College.

On the morning of January 28th, a crowd of journalists from around the country began to gather on the Clemson campus, anticipating the violent reaction that had marked the desegregation of other Southern schools.

I was there the day he made his entrance.

I was one of probably 240 journalists.

I was there with my still camera representing "Jet" magazine.

We had come from the James Meredith situation, where there was violence.

But I believe the governor had insisted that we show the nation that South Carolina is doing this with dignity.

If it was uneventful to journalists because it had no violence, so be it.

He was achieving what he had come there for, to gain an education.

(Gantt) I recalled, somewhere around 10 or 12 miles out, that all the papers they had sent me to sign in, I needed to get out of the car and find them because they were in my luggage.

I said, "Mr. Perry, I've got to stop "because I don't want to go fumbling for that when I get to Clemson."

So we stopped on what appeared to be a rather isolated highway... you know, no one, not a lot of traffic.

And then I said, "Wow," because I looked around and I saw helicopters above, a whole train of people behind us, and I realized that this was a big deal.

My goodness!

I got the papers, got back in the car, and then drove up to the Clemson campus.

(Rashad) As planned, Perry arrived at Clemson at 1:30 in the afternoon.

He was instructed to let Harvey out while he and the others stayed in the car.

(Gantt) And there-- I'll never forget this as long as I live-- Matthew Perry said, "Harvey, "I along with your parents and others "have supported you all the way along, "but the rest you've got to do by yourself.

"Brought you 90 yards; you've got to run "the last 10 for the touchdown, and we can't go with you."

I should have been a little nervous.

I did worry about my hands shaking when I signed in.

I had to cut through all these news people, and they parted ways like the Red Sea parted.

Got inside, got to the counter, and all the papers were laid out for me to sign, and cameras were there to record that moment.

When it was done, I guess it must have been the registrar that said, "You're signed in; you're a student at Clemson."

Harvey, when did you first decide you wanted to go to Clemson College?

I was thinking about it for quite some time.

I believe I made a concrete decision during my first quarter at Iowa State back in 1960.

But such an attempt, of course, would probably take some support within the family.

How did your father feel about it?

He was always for me, 100%.

He was always for me, definitely.

(Rashad) Harvey Gantt encountered few problems at Clemson... and few friends.

It might have been a lonely experience except for the support of a community he had not anticipated.

(Gantt) When I finished my interview with the dean on the first day, I came back, and-- a young kid, 20 years old-- I was hungry.

When I got to the door of the dining room, I was greeted by an African American, and he was just very gracious, and you could see this look on his face.

I said, Wow, that's nice to have them around.

And I got to the line, and everybody along the line was black.

And I said, Wow, that's even better!

And then it got even better than that 'cause they started giving me the best piece of meat and the biggest dessert.

And you could see in their faces, you know, this was a new thing.

I mean, they'd been on the other side of that line, and here somebody that looked like them was a student, and their own children would one day walk through that line as a student.

And that was huge.

That was big.

And I guess the way they celebrated it was saying, "Harvey, we're gonna take care of you," and they did.

I never wanted for anything.

(Donaldson) Gantt goes to Clemson probably fully aware that he's just one of many.

He is quoted as saying, "I just hope perhaps I'm just the first step in the ladder."

He's going, certainly, to advance his education.

He's going to become the successful architect he becomes.

But he's also going to pave the way for others who want the same opportunities that he has.

(Rashad) The following semester, the fall of 1963, Clemson admitted its first African-American woman, Lucinda Brawley.

(Lucinda Brawley Gantt) That January, when I was in the process of looking at schools, here comes this guy who integrated Clemson.

I was like, "Oh, there's an option here on the table."

So I applied to Clemson, was accepted, and entered in September.

I said I was gonna be her big brother if she came 'cause I had learned how to get around Clemson.

The conversation was pretty general, and he was gonna be a big brother.

And my first impression, he was very warm, and I felt comfortable.

And, you know, we'd get together for dinner.

And I was her big brother for a while.

Then we started dating and ended up getting married.

(Rashad) Harvey Gantt graduated from Clemson with honors in 1965, and he and Lucinda moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she finished her course work and they raised four children.

Gantt cofounded Gantt Huberman Architects in 1971.

In 1983, he was elected the first African-American mayor of Charlotte, and he was nominated twice for the U.S. Senate.

Fifty-something years ago, you know, I was a student in high school, and I had those dreams.

I wanted to be an architect and worked hard at it.

A lot of people were there to help.

You have to persevere.

That story hasn't changed, even in the 21st century.

(The Hallelujah Singers) This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

Oh, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

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