COLUMBIA, S.C.
One day last spring, Lorin Peri Palmer trolled back 40 years in her memory and explained what it was like to be 9 and the human face of a social experiment called integration.
With a tape recorder running, Palmer recounted the silent looks and solitary lunches she endured as the first Black girl at Sumter’s Millwood Elementary School.
“We would go out on the playground and get on the monkey bars, and everyone would flee,” she said, recounting the events of 1966.
Each night, her mother, Theodis “Theo” Palmer McMahon, would coach her on her small part in upending segregation, recounting sacrifices of other Black women, from Harriet Tubman to Mary McLeod Bethune.
“It was like a mission,” McMahon said. “It may have damaged her a little, but it had to be done.”
Now, historians at University of South Carolina and South Carolina State University are on a different kind of mission: to chronicle the civil rights era by collecting the oral histories of ordinary people like Palmer. It is time, they say, for people to step forward and tell their stories.
