It’s been nearly 50 years since Brett Bursey met Modjeska Monteith Simkins at the Harden St. branch of Victory Savings Bank and opened an account for the Grass Roots Organizing Workshop (GROW). They struck up a friendship and close working relations that endured for the next 18 years of Modjeska’s long life which began in 1899.
Modjeska was 20 years old in 1921 when the Monteith family helped start the bank with $2600 in deposits.
Victory Savings, now Optus Bank, was the state’s first Black bank and one of the nation’s few Black banks that made it through the Depression. Victory Savings helped many families, farms, and businesses keep going during the darkest days of Jim Crow.
Modjeska was engaged in the founding of the NAACP State Conference in 1935, which was one of the most active and aggressive in the South. Her outspoken manner, progressive politics, and leadership saw her pushed out of the State Conference in 1957 when her name was intentionally left off the ballot. It was the height of the Red Scare and social justice organizations and activists were deemed communists by politicians who whipped up hysteria to suppress activism.
Modjeska, known for “making a way out of no way,” started the Richland County Citizens Committee and remained active in local, and legislative matters. She participated and spoke at GROW events ranging from anti-apartheid pickets at banks selling South African gold Krugerrands, to anti-nuclear protests at the Bomb Plant in Aiken County.
In 1996, GROW organized the SC Progressive Network to foster a statewide movement of shared values that is gaining momentum in these days of uncompromising nationalism and white supremacy.
In 2014, when our office was in the historic Modjeska house, plans were made to start a school to teach effective citizenship and the Modjeska Monteith Simkins School for Human Rights started classes in 2015. The next year, in the archives at Howard University, we discovered that Modjeska had started a Leadership School in 1946, from the same house, with the same curriculum on good jobs, education, healthcare and racial justice we were teaching 70 years later. South Carolina’s history of resistance has been continually erased, preventing new generations fighting the same problems from gaining ground. The Modjeska School
has started taking applications for the 2024 session (ModjeskaSchool.com), teaching the inspiring history of resistance to the same problems we face today.
Optus, the latest iteration of Victory Savings Bank, manifests the long and closely held tradition of social justice as “mission-centric,” to com-
