Qualla: University of South Carolina

University of South Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HaloMasterMind, CC BY-SA 4.0. On October 7, 1873, Henry E. Hayne walked into the medical college and signed the register. He was the Secretary of State of South Carolina, and he was the first Black student to enroll at the university since the school's founding seventy-two years earlier. White students walked out. White faculty resigned in protest. The story made national news. Within two years, the majority of students at South Carolina College were Black. It was, briefly and improbably, the most progressive university in the American South. The window stayed open for four years. Then Reconstruction ended, the legislature became all-white again, and the door closed for nearly nine decades.

Image: HaloMasterMind | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of South Carolina: Founded 1801, Built by Enslaved Hands

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dfscgt21, CC BY-SA 3.0. South Carolina College was chartered on December 19, 1801, by an act of the General Assembly that Governor John Drayton pushed through as a way to bind the Lowcountry to the Backcountry through a shared elite education. Reverend Jonathan Maxcy, a Baptist minister who had served a...

Image: Dfscgt21 | CC BY-SA 3.0

University of South Carolina: The College of Secession

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit University of South Carolina, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1840s and 1850s, South Carolina College was the leading institution of the South - a symbol, by design. Its faculty included Francis Lieber, who would later draft the laws of war for the Union army; Thomas Cooper, a chemist and political theorist; and the geologist Joseph ...

Image: University of South Carolina | CC BY-SA 4.0

University of South Carolina: The Radical University

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:user:Gamecock uploader to en-wp, Public domain. In 1869, the Reconstruction-era legislature passed the University Act. A Black representative from Beaufort, W. J. Whipper, added an amendment forbidding racial discrimination in admissions. Two Black trustees - Benjamin A. Boseman and Francis Lewis Cardozo - were elected to the ...

Image: en:user:Gamecock uploader to en-wp | Public domain

University of South Carolina: September 1963: Three Students

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abductive, CC0. In September 1963, three Black students enrolled at the University of South Carolina: Henrie Monteith, Robert Anderson, and James Solomon. USC was one of the last large public universities in the South to desegregate. The three feared violence. They were excluded from most aspect...

Image: Abductive | CC0

University of South Carolina: The Horseshoe Now

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abductive, CC0. The Horseshoe is on the National Register of Historic Places. The eleven original buildings survived a fire, an earthquake, and the Civil War; the South Caroliniana Library, designed by Robert Mills in 1840, was the first freestanding academic library building in the United State...

Image: Abductive | CC0