Historic Liberty Hill AME Church

Meetings held in this church in the 1940s and 1950s led to local court cases that helped bring about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling desegregating public schools. Nineteen members of this congregation were plaintiffs in the case of Briggs v. Elliott, heard in U.S. District Court in Charleston in 1952. Although the three-judge panel refused to abolish racial segregation in South Carolina schools, a dissenting opinion influenced the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education(1954). Formerly all-white Summerton High School is the only school associated with the Briggs case that is still standing.