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“Recovering Untold Stories”: Civil Rights Veteran Revisits School Victory

NNPA NEWSWIRE — Bennie and Plummie Richburg Parson, along with Harry and Eliza Briggs, parents of five schoolchildren, were the first signers of the 1949 petition for “equal educational opportunities and facilities.” Although “Briggs v. Elliott” was the first of the school desegregation cases to reach the court, it was placed behind the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, possibly because of the maneuvering of South Carolina Gov. James Byrnes. On May 17, 1954, the Parsons family, the Briggs family, and dozens of other unflinching South Carolinians were vindicated with the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision ruling segregation unconstitutional.

Published

6 years ago

February 11, 2020

Oakland Post

Student plaintiffs of Brown v. Board cases shared memories of the historic struggle in Kansas and South Carolina at the University of South Carolina in January. From left, Cheryl Brown Henderson, Celestine Parson Lloyd, Nathaniel Briggs, Deborah Dandridge, and Dr. Bobby Donaldson, director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research.

By Christopher Frear, Center for Civil Rights History and Research

COLUMBIA, S.C. — As a child in South Carolina after World War Two, Celestine Parson Lloyd took part in a groundbreaking study to fight school segregation, a fight her parents and NAACP lawyers carried to victory in the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Jan. 15, Ms. Parson Lloyd, now of Mount Vernon, New York, relived a moment of that fight—and the victory—as part of the public panel “Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision” organized by the University of South Carolina Center for Civil Rights History and Research and the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission.

“I heard Harold Boulware, Thurgood Marshall, all the NAACP lawyers,” at the strategy meetings, she said.

Ms. Parson Lloyd described vivid memories of seeing Ku Klux Klan fliers posted on their front door and of visiting the burned-out home of Clarendon County movement leader, the Rev. J. A. De Laine.

Celestine Parson Lloyd

In building the legal case, pioneering psychologists Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a now-famous doll test with Summerton school children, including Ms. Parson Lloyd. They asked children which doll they liked better between a white doll and black doll and which one was the “good” one and the “bad” one to test the effects of segregation on children. Ms. Parson Lloyd recalled clearly that she had selected the African American doll.

“I knew it had something to do with the case,” she recalled. “As long as I knew it was something pertaining to the case, I would participate.”

After the panel discussion, researchers with the Center for Civil Rights presented Ms. Parson Lloyd with a copy of her test results from February 24, 1951, that they had uncovered during a visit to the Library of Congress.

“It brought back memories,” she said later. “I was elated. My parents, along with me, contributed to something so meaningful. It was important stuff for our society.”

At the panel, Ms. Parson Lloyd shared her detailed and sometimes harrowing memories of the desegregation struggle in Summerton.

In defiance of known threats, her parents, Bennie and Plummie Richburg Parson, agreed that her father should sign a petition championing the end of racial segregation in schools.

“Don’t take your name off the petition, even if you have to eat dirt,” her grandfather told her father as young Celestine listened. And her great-grandmother Angeline Brunson Parson, who lived to the age of 117, told stories of her life in enslavement and of emancipation.

“One night, my father wasn’t home,” Mrs. Parson Lloyd recalled, “and they came and they knocked on the door, and they said, ‘We were looking for this little lost boy,’ but that’s what they called men in the South, a boy. What they were doing was taking people out and they beat you and they mugged you and leave you somewhere, and if my father was home, he would have been taken out and probably beaten and left some place.

“And I was petrified. We were all afraid, because we didn’t know what was going to be the next day,” she told the panel audience.

The legal effort started with NAACP support in 1948, when Levi Pearson initiated a lawsuit against the Summerton School District to provide a school bus for his children. On a property line technicality, Pearson had to withdraw as the plaintiff and a new lawsuit had to be built with parents of Scott’s Branch School students.

At meetings in St. Mark and Liberty Hill AME churches in Summerton, Ms. Parson Lloyd listened intently as NAACP officers and lawyers explained the lawsuit and counseled parents about the violent response ahead. She is featured in several photographs taken of plaintiffs at local churches and now archived in University of South Carolina collections.

Along with the Parsons, Harry and Eliza Briggs, parents of five schoolchildren, were the first signers of the 1949 petition for “equal educational opportunities and facilities.” The signers refused to yield to violence, even when Harry Briggs was fired from his job and the De Laine family home was burned to the ground. Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter and South Carolina’s Harold Boulware filed Briggs v. Elliott in federal court, directly challenging segregation.

“Each business place had a list of these petitioners, and, if your name was on there, you were fired, and you weren’t allowed to buy food in the grocery stores in that town. You couldn’t buy gas for your car,” she said.

Celestine Parson Lloyd, left, and sister-in-law Annie Camacho look at her nearly 70-year-old test from Dr. Kenneth Clark’s famous doll experiment. Researchers at the University of South Carolina Center for Civil Rights History discovered the test at the Library of Congress and presented it to her on Jan. 15.

In 1951, the parents appealed to the Supreme Court. Although it was the first of the school desegregation cases to reach the court, it was placed behind the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, possibly because of the maneuvering of South Carolina Gov. James Byrnes. On May 17, 1954, the Parsons family, the Briggs family, and dozens of other unflinching South Carolinians were vindicated with the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision ruling segregation unconstitutional.

“When I got home from school, word was around,” she recalled. “My parents were elated, ‘We won! We won!’ The battle is almost over.”

Ms. Parson Lloyd graduated from Scott’s Branch High School in 1956 and departed for New York City, where she and her mother joined her father who fled Summerton amid repeated threats after the 1954 ruling. In New York, she worked on behalf of the poor and marginalized, retiring as an assistant superintendent of a women’s homeless shelter.

“By showing Civil Rights veterans the documents already preserved, we can help them recover memories. In turn, by recording their memories, we expand the history available to scholars and students,” Civil Rights Center Director Dr. Bobby Donaldson said. “We seek to document our state’s deep Civil Rights history, like the Briggs case—with donations of letters, photographs, newspapers—and to assist those who participated in historic events in chronicling their own histories.”

The Center for Civil Rights History and Research chronicles, preserves, and shares South Carolina’s vital history through community programs such as the “Recovering Untold Stories” panel, the “Justice for All” exhibit, and educational support that informs K-12 and higher education curriculum in the state. The Center was founded in November 2015 with the receipt of the congressional papers of Representative James E. Clyburn, the state’s first African-American member of Congress since the late nineteenth century and a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement. The Center’s website is located at www.civilrights.sc.edu.

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

3 days ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

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PRESS ROOM: NBA Hall of Fame Nominee Terry Cummings Joins 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to Launch Victory & Values Initiative

NNPA NEWSWIRE — NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

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Cummings becomes an honorary member, joining other role model sports stars

NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings has officially become an honorary member of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County, marking a powerful new chapter for the 100 Black Men and youth development across the region.

Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th. The moment signified more than membership — it marked the launch of the organization’s transformative new platform, the Victory & Values Initiative.

The Victory & Values Initiative is a groundbreaking youth development program designed to empower elementary and middle school students through a dynamic blend of sports, mentorship, and STEM exposure. The initiative focuses on building health, discipline, character, leadership, and access to opportunity — creating pathways for long-term academic and personal success.

“This is about more than sports,” said Cummings during the ceremony. “It’s about using the platform of athletics to teach life lessons, create access, and build the next generation of leaders.”

The induction ceremony also featured notable guests including NASCAR’s newest Star Driver, Lavar Scott and NASCAR Director of Athletic Performance, Phil Horton, who joined Cummings for a powerful Victory & Values Town Hall discussion. The Town Hall was moderated by renowned Sports Emcee John Hollins and focused on leadership, resilience, discipline, and the importance of mentorship in shaping young lives.

A “Day at NASCAR” for 75+ Youth

Cummings wasted no time getting to work. On his first full day as an honorary member, he joined his new brothers of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to host a “Day at NASCAR,” escorting more than 75 youth to a once-in-a-lifetime experience at EchoPark Motor Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway).

The youth participants received behind-the-scenes access including: an exclusive tour of Pit Row, access to the Garage Area and exploration of the interactive Fan Zone.

The experience culminated with a surprise meet-and-greet and Q&A session with NASCAR Superstar Bubba Wallace, who shared insights on perseverance, preparation, and breaking barriers in professional sports.

The day served as a living example of the ‘Victory & Values’ Initiative in action — exposing youth to new industries, expanding their vision for the future, and connecting them directly with high- level mentors and role models.

Building Leaders Through Access and Mentorship

The 100 Black Men of DeKalb County – a chapter of the largest, national mentoring organization in the county – continues to expand its footprint with programs focused on academic excellence, economic empowerment, leadership development, and health & wellness.

The launch of ‘Victory & Values’ represents a strategic expansion of the organization’s impact

intentionally integrating athletics and STEM to engage youth at an early age while reinforcing core principles such as integrity, accountability, teamwork, and perseverance.

“Our mission has always been to mentor the next generation,” said Vaughn Irons, President-Elect of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County. “With Terry Cummings joining the brotherhood, along with partners in NASCAR and professional sports, we are creating unprecedented access and exposure for our youth. Victory & Values is about turning inspiration into structured opportunity.”

By connecting elementary and middle school students to professional athletes, executives, STEM professionals, and community leaders, the initiative aims to:

Increase youth exposure to careers in sports business, engineering, and performance science
Strengthen mentorship pipelines
Promote physical wellness and mental resilience
Build character-driven leadership at an early age

Open Invitation to Youth and Families

All youth are invited to participate in the Victory & Values Initiative, along with the other countless, impactful programs offered by the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County.

Parents and guardians seeking mentorship, leadership development, academic enrichment, and transformative exposure opportunities for their children are encouraged to connect with the organization.

As NBA Legend Terry Cummings’ induction demonstrates, Victory & Values is more than a program — it is a movement designed to build champions in life, not just in sports.

For more information about the Victory & Values Initiative or to enroll a student, contact: 100 Black Men of DeKalb County at Phone at 404.241.1338, info@100bmod.org or Tee Foxx at 404.791.6525,