Early Struggles
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This chapter introduces John Henry McCray, the young African-American editor whose newspaper would play a key role in reviving civil rights activism in the South Carolina. Raised in Lincolnville, an all-black village near Charleston, South Carolina, McCray gave up a relatively comfortable insurance-industry job to launch a newspaper in 1935. He teamed up with NAACP activists and used his newspaper to battle conservative forces in the black community who wanted to “accommodate” white supremacist rule. The chapter details the history of “accommodationism,” which re-gained strength in South Carolina after white supremacists crushed a nascent civil rights movement in the early 1920s.