ties in health care, education, and economic opportunity, and later helped raise funds for Good Samaritan-Waverly Hospital, a first-rate facility for Black patients in Columbia. At the same time, she worked with the NAACP on landmark school desegregation cases and voterrights campaigns, turning her Columbia home into a strategy hub for lawyers, organizers, and everyday citizens.
Today, the Modjeska Monteith Simkins House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and preserved as a site of memory and education, a reminder that some of the state’s
biggest legal and political shifts were planned at a kitchen table in Columbia.
Opening doors to books and ideas
While Evans and Simkins transformed health and civil rights, librarian Ethel Martin Bolden quietly revolutionized access to information for Black children in Columbia. In the 1940s, during the Jim Crow era, Bolden helped establish the first library in a Black elementary school in the city, a crucial step at a time when Black students had little access to public library
services.
Over nearly four decades as a librarian and educator, Bolden expanded collections, created reading programs, and insisted that Black children deserved the same intellectual resources as their white peers. Her work helped seed a reading culture that nurtured generations of students in Columbia’s segregated and then newly integrated schools.
A quiet first at the ballot box
Donella Brown Wilson never held elected office, but her commitment at the ballot box made history. In 1948, she was among the first African Americans allowed to vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, after decades in which party primaries effectively excluded Black citizens.
Wilson went on to vote in every election for roughly 70 years, embodying a quiet but powerful form of resistance in the Jim Crow and post–civil rights eras. In Columbia and across the state, her story has become a symbol of the persistence needed to turn legal victories into lived democratic participation.
From local activism to national policy
South Carolina–born activist and lawyer Marian Wright Edelman, whose early organizing work in the South helped shape the broader civil rights movement, also influenced conversations that reached into Columbia’s halls of power. She became the first Black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, represented civil rights activists, helped establish the federal Head Start program, and later founded the Children’s Defense Fund, a national advocacy organization for children.
Edelman’s policy work on poverty, education, and child welfare has informed debates in state legislatures around the country, including South Carolina’s, anchoring child-focused
reforms in a moral language that resonated with many Black families in and around Columbia. A new generation under the State House dome
If earlier generations fought for access to the ballot, a newer generation of Black women has claimed seats in the legislature that meets in downtown Columbia. Among them is Gilda Cobb-Hunter, who became the longest-serving member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and the longest-serving African American lawmaker in the chamber’s history.
Cobb-Hunter and her colleagues have pressed for criminal justice reform, educational equity, and the recognition of Black history, including efforts to establish an African American monument on the State House grounds and to remove the Confederate flag from the Capitol area. In 2019, she was part of a record group of African American women serving together in the South Carolina House, a milestone in representation centered in Columbia’s legislative corridors.
Joining Cobb-Hunter are women such as Wendy Brawley, Chandra Dillard, Rosalyn D. Henderson-Myers, Patricia Henegan, Annie McDaniel, J. Anne Parks, Leola Robinson-Simpson, and Krystle Simmons— lawmakers whose presence has permanently altered the visual and political landscape of the
General Assembly. Their work on education, health care, and economic opportunity continues the struggles begun by women like Evans and Simkins, but from inside the policymaking arena.
These women are following in the footsteps of Juanita Goggins, the first African American woman elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1974.
A city learning to tell the whole story
In recent years, Columbia institutions have begun making these women more visible. The “Columbia City of Women” project, led by Historic Columbia and community partners, maps sites around the city connected to women who changed Columbia, including Black women leaders in health, civil rights, and education.
Historic homes, hospital sites, and school buildings now carry markers that invite residents and visitors to see familiar streets differently— with Dr. Matilda Evans’s clinics, Modjeska Simkins’s home, and Ethel Bolden’s libraries reframed as landmarks, not footnotes. For a city still wrestling with the legacy of slavery and segregation, the growing recognition of its Black women pioneers represents not just a correction to the historical record, but a new starting point for imagining Columbia’s future.
