Local History Makers
For more than two centuries, Black women in Columbia have been building institutions, challenging injustice, and reshaping public life. Today, their legacies are finally moving closer to the center of the city’s story, from hospital corridors and classrooms to the floor of the South Carolina State House.
A doctor for a segregated city
At the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Matilda Arabella Evans returned to Columbia with a medical degree and a determination to serve a community that white hospitals largely ignored. As the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina, she opened Taylor Lane Hospital, the first Black-owned hospital in Columbia, and later helped create several other medical institutions in the city.
Her work went beyond treating patients. Dr. Evans launched the Columbia Clinic Association to provide free health services and education to families and conducted health surveys of Black schoolchildren in Columbia that led to permanent health examinations in public schools. She founded the Negro Health Association of South Carolina and The Negro Health Journal of South Carolina, using data and advocacy to push for better health outcomes in Black communities. In an era of segregation, she built spaces where Black Columbians could receive dignified, professional care—and insisted that public systems recognize their needs. The matriarch of civil rights
Decades later, a modest house on Marion Street would become the nerve center of South Carolina’s civil rights struggle. Inside lived Modjeska Monteith Simkins, often called the “matriarch” of the state’s civil rights movement. Born in Columbia in 1899, the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, Simkins spent her life challenging the intertwined forces of racism, poverty, and political exclusion.
Simkins first made her mark in public health, serving as director of Negro Work for the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association and becoming the state’s only full-time Black public health worker. She used that position to expose dispari-
