Other families left Summerton for economic reasons. Faced with poverty even in better times, with their involvement in the Briggs case they incurred the wrath of powerful local white leaders who could cost them their livelihoods. White Citizens' Councils appeared; to this day, white residents of Summerton remember which businesses had the proper stickers on their windows or doors that signified supportive owners. Many of the families involved in Briggs moved north as a result of job losses directly linked to the case, along with losses of property, credit at cotton gins or other local businesses, and real threats of violence. Harry and Eliza Briggs lost their jobs and moved north. Others went to Philadelphia or Washington, DC, where jobs were more plentiful and oppression less severe.

Given this hostile atmosphere, Summerton might seem an unlikely birthplace of the legal movement toward equal educational rights for African-Americans. Cases were stirring in Kansas, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, DC--the other sites involved in Brown at the Supreme Court level--and any of those cases could have come first. Summerton was unique, however, in that the local people had a dynamic, educated and spiritually motivated leader in De Laine, and he was determined to force change in the county where he had been born and raised.

De Laine won access to Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers and was successful in pressing the Briggs case nationally through Brown. After losing the case in federal court, Marshall broadened the suit into a desegregation case that held more promise, and Briggs found its footing and a path to the Supreme Court. Locally, however, the case left a more complicated legacy. When De Laine was driven from thestate, and other families were forced to flee or decided to leave when violence and threats became too much, the town lost its key African-American leaders and many ambitious young people who might have carried on the minister's fight for equality. Instead, the departures and isolation that followed the backlash to Briggs and Brown did little to halt school segregation in Summerton.

When much of South Carolina finally bowed to court-ordered school integration in 1970, virtually all the white students in Summerton transferred into a private school opened just for them, sponsored by a local Southern Baptist church. That private school, called Clarendon Hall, almost exclusively enrolls white students to this day, while public schools in Summerton enroll African-Americans almost exclusively. Other rural, majority-black towns and counties in South Carolina and neighboring states have seen much the same white flight from public schools, although white flight was especially pronounced in Summerton from the beginning.

As a result, this town of only 1,000 residents now operates with essentially two separate school systems for white and black children. In the three public schools known collectively as Clarendon County School District One, about two dozen of the roughly 1,200 students are white. At the private school, Clarendon Hall, five of the school's 275 students are black, according to a recent count. Those five students are among the private school's first African-American students ever to enroll; the first black students didn't start there until the twenty-first century had begun.

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