The county and city take their name from Thomas Sumter, a Virginia-born planter who became a guerrilla commander during the American Revolution. The British called him the Carolina Gamecock for his persistent, harassing tactics in the South Carolina backcountry. After the war he served South Carolina in both the U.S. House and the Senate. The town that grew up around the courthouse became one of the inland trade and rail centers of the South Carolina Midlands. Today U.S. 76 and 378 run east-west through it, with Columbia 32 miles west and the High Hills of Santee just to the west of town. Sumter's first female mayor was Martha Priscilla Shaw, who served from 1952 to 1956 - the first woman to serve as a mayor anywhere in South Carolina.

Sumter is also home to Shaw Air Force Base, named for First Lieutenant Ervin David Shaw, a Sumter County native and one of the first Americans to fly combat missions in the First World War. Shaw flies F-16 Fighting Falcons today and houses the headquarters of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, U.S. Army Central, the 15th Air Force, the 20th Fighter Wing, and many tenant units. F-16s from Shaw were among the primary American fighters of the Gulf War. Since the Second World War, Shaw has been a major source of federal and civilian employment in the Sumter area. Every president from Eisenhower to Obama has visited the city or base.

Sumter punches well above its weight for famous sons and daughters. Jasper Johns - painter of flags and targets, one of the giants of postwar American art - is a Sumter man. So is wood sculptor Grainger McKoy. In basketball: Ray Allen, ten-time NBA All-Star, and Ja Morant, the second pick in the 2019 NBA draft. In baseball: Bobby Richardson, three-time World Series champion with the Yankees; Jordan Montgomery, MLB pitcher; JP Sears, another big-leaguer. In music: Lee Brice, country singer-songwriter; Ray 'Stingray' Davis, a founding member of Parliament and Funkadelic, born in Sumter. Nancy O'Dell anchored Entertainment Tonight from here. Jay Ellis came home from Sumter to act in Top Gun: Maverick. Shawn Weatherly was Miss Universe 1980. Samuel R. Allen ran John Deere. From Stateburg in the High Hills came Angelica Singleton Van Buren, acting First Lady to the widower President Martin Van Buren. The list runs long.

There is one Sumter story that must be told plainly. In 1944, fourteen-year-old George Stinney - an African American boy from the nearby town of Alcolu - was convicted of murdering two white girls and put to death in the electric chair. He was the youngest person executed in twentieth-century America. His trial lasted less than three hours. The all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes. His court-appointed lawyer called no witnesses and filed no appeal. In 2014, seventy years after his death, a South Carolina judge vacated the conviction, ruling that Stinney had been denied a fair trial. Stinney was a child. He weighed about ninety pounds. The state strapped him into a chair built for adults and killed him in 1944. He grew up in a country, and a court system, that did not see him as fully human. Sumter is where his name and his memory now belong. A few miles from Swan Lake, the city of swans and iris is also a place where this happened, and remembering it is part of telling the truth about the South.