It Started With a Bus: The Story of Harry Briggs and the Case That Started It All

Before there was Brown v. Board of Education there was a school bus. Or rather there wasn’t one, and that absence set in motion a chain of events that would change the course of American history.

In Clarendon County, South Carolina in the late 1940s the disparity between Black and white education was not subtle. It was written into the state constitution. Article 11 of South Carolina’s 1896 Constitution stated plainly that separate schools shall be provided for children of the white and colored races and that no child of either race shall ever be permitted to attend a school provided for the other. Segregation in South Carolina was not a custom. It was the law.

White children in Clarendon County were provided bus transportation to school. Black children were not. Some Black children had to walk nine miles one way to get to school every day. Others had to ford a stream, or row across it when it flooded, before the nine mile walk even began. In 1946, seventeen Clarendon County parents pooled their resources and purchased a used school bus for $700 to transport Black children to school. The buses were old and barely functional but they were what the community could afford because the county would provide nothing.

It was Reverend Joseph Armstrong DeLaine, a Methodist minister, principal, and teacher in the Summerton community, who helped organize the community’s response. Working with local families and NAACP attorneys, the community drafted a petition and eventually a lawsuit simply requesting that the county provide Black children the same bus transportation it provided white children. The request was rejected. The lawsuit that followed would grow into something far larger than a school bus.

Harry Briggs, a gas station attendant, and his wife Eliza, a maid, became the lead plaintiffs in what would be filed as Briggs v. Elliott, named for Harry Briggs and Roderick W. Elliott, chairman of the school board. They were ordinary working people in a small Southern town who understood exactly what they were risking by putting their names on that lawsuit. They signed it anyway.

The retaliation was immediate and severe. Harry Briggs lost his job. Eliza Briggs lost hers. Other families who signed the petition faced economic pressure designed to punish them into silence. The home of a reverend who was one of the driving forces behind the suit was burned to the ground and white firefighters refused to put out the flames. The message from the white power structure of Clarendon County was unambiguous, there would be a price for demanding equality and the community would pay it.

They pressed on anyway.

Briggs v. Elliott was the first case in the twentieth century to challenge the constitutionality of racially segregated schools. What began as a petition for a school bus had evolved, with the guidance of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, into a direct constitutional challenge to the doctrine of separate but equal itself. The federal district court ruled against the plaintiffs. The NAACP appealed. The case made its way to the United States Supreme Court where it was consolidated with four other cases from Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington D.C. into what history would record as Brown v. Board of Education.

On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The doctrine of separate but equal, enshrined in law since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, was unconstitutional.

Harry and Eliza Briggs had asked for a school bus. What they helped deliver was the legal foundation for the desegregation of American public education.

The documentary “Through His Lens” examines the cases and the people whose courage made Brown v. Board of Education possible, not just the attorneys who argued it, but the ordinary men and women who put their names on petitions and lawsuits knowing exactly what it would cost them. The Briggs family’s story is one that history has not always told loudly enough. It deserves to be heard.

Through His Lens is currently in production. For more information contact Dr. Scott Glenn