In 1915, it was a farming community embedded in the economy of the post-Reconstruction South, which meant that its Black residents lived and worked within the specific constraints of the Jim Crow system that had been imposed across the South following the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s.

South Carolina in 1915 was one of the states with the highest Black population percentage in the country.

The majority of the state’s population was African American, the descendants of the enslaved people who had worked the rice and cotton plantations of the lowcountry and the piedmont.

The end of slavery in 1865 had not been followed by the economic and political equality that many had hoped for.

Instead, the decades after Reconstruction had produced a system of enforced segregation, political disenfranchisement, and economic subordination that structured virtually every aspect of Black life in the state.