Simkins, Modjeska Monteith

SIMKINS, MODJESKA MONTEITH (1899–1992). In the same year Walter Hines Page wrote a friend that he would rather be “an imp in Hades than a Negro in South Carolina,” Modjeska Monteith was born in South Carolina. Part of the brown bourgeoisie (father a businessman and mother a teacher) of the state capital, Columbia. Modjeska’s mother, Rachel, was a founding member of W.E.B. Dubois’s Niagara Movement in 1905 and a founder of the Columbia Branch of the NAACP in 1917. Modjeska’s earliest memories are being at NAACP meetings and being involved in civil rights activities.

Simkins received her A.B. degree at Benedict College. Benedict was founded in 1870 by the Baptist Church, and at the time, most of the faculty were white, northern missionaries. She taught school until 1930, when she married Andrew Whitfield Simkins, grandson of a Reconstruction Black leader. Since state law prohibited married women from teaching, Modjeska Simkins found employment as the “Director or Negro work” for the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association. She became involved with New Deal agencies, and during the 1930s began focusing on civil rights for Black people. In 1936, Simkins began working with the National Negro Congress, and became a Senior Advisor to the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). Simkins organized the 1946 SNYC conference in Columbia SC that had more than 3,000 participants with delegations from Africa and South America, as well as CIO labor unions. The multiracial event violated local segregation ordinances with 170 white delegates. Paul Robeson spoke and sang, and W.E.B. DuBois gave the keynote address, “Behold the Land.”
In 1941 Simkins was elected secretary of the newly founded South Carolina Conference for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She served as the executive secretary of the conference and had an unusually prominent roll in the organization’s affairs until 1957. Of her many causes, Simkins worked for the equalization of salaries between white and Black teachers, for the abolition of the white primary system, and for the desegregation of South Carolina public schools (including the Clarendon County case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s declaring segregated schools unconstitutional).
As a spokesperson for African Americans in South Carolina, Simkins became involved in a number of national organizations. In 1946 she became the South Carolina liaison to the Civil Rights Congress (formed when the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties merged) and served on the Resolutions and the Continuations committees. She was the South Carolina liaison to and on the national advisory board of the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America. In 1947 she joined the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and served on its board of representatives and helped produce several reports for the group. That same year she became active in supporting the Southern Negro Youth Congress. In the 1949 “Freedom Caravan from the Fighting South,” she campaigned in Harlem for reelection of councilman Benjamin Davis on the Communist Party ticket. In 1951 she became active in the American Peace Crusade. She was an initial sponsor of the group and held several offices and participated as a delegate at different meetings. She also worked in the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Her name regularly appeared on petitions and letters in the Daily Worker, the Daily People’s World, and the Worker.

Always outspoken, Simkins had a deep involvement in civil rights, which increasingly led her to Left movements. She would correct people who called her a “civil rights” activist, stating that civil rights were laws that granted you limited rights that can be taken away. She worked for “human rights” that we are all born with. She was dismissed as state secretary of the NAACP in 1957 because a number of organizations that Simkins worked with were accused of being Communist fronts. She remained in the NAACP but accepted a public relations position at the Victory Savings Bank. The bank was founded in 1921 by her family and remained in family hands until 1980s. During her unsuccessful runs for the Columbia City Council (1966 and 1984) and the State House of Representatives (1968), she was smeared with red paint for associations with groups the House Un-American Activities Committee (the committee had a two-page list on Simkins’s affiliations) had declared “Communist fronts” and subversive organizations. For the next two decades, Simkins’s civic and reform activities centered around local projects. Most notably, she served as the public relations director of the Richland County Citizens Committee, an organization that encouraged direct political action on the part of the African American population and sponsored programs to desegregate the city’s public schools, to integrate and improve the state mental hospital, and to desegregate the city’s recreational facilities. In 1988 she helped bring a victorious voting rights suit against Richland County.

In 1990, Simkins was awarded the Order of the Palmetto, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her devotion to social justice and racial equality. The same devotion she was vilified for decades. After her death, in 1994, Simkins’ portrait was hung in the South Carolina State House recognizing her as “a fearless outspoken champion of the oppressed”. That year, the house that Simkins live in for sixty years in downtown Columbia was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Her home continued to serve her community into the twenty-first century. From 1976 through her death in 1992, Simkins served as an advisor and mentor to the Grass Roots Organizing Committee (GROW), a Columbia based social justice nonprofit formed by civil rights and anti-war veterans. GROW staff served as Simkins’ lieutenants and she participated in protests ranging from anti-apartheid to anti-nuclear. In 1996, GROW founded the South Carolina Progressive Network (SCPN), as a statewide nonpartisan social justice coalition. In 2008, the SCPN moved offices and meeting space into the Simkins home. In 2015, the SCPN launched the Modjeska Simkins School of Human Rights from her home at 2025 Marion Street. In 2016, documents were found in the Howard University library that Simkins wrote in 1946 from 2025 Marion Street, announcing that the Leadership Training School, under the auspices of the SNYC would begin holding classes: “It must be conceded that at this very hour more so than at any time in the history of this nation, there is urgent need for the development of progressive thinkers to become the leaders of TOMORROW.”

Without foreknowledge the curriculum for the Modjeska School mirrored the one Modjeska Simkins organized seventy years earlier. The school places emphasis on how the long history of peoples’ resistance continues to be erased and lessons relearned. The SCPN purchased the commercial building adjacent to the Simkins house for the Modjeska School’s permanent home. The school retained the clarity and principles necessary to advance the cause of human rights.

The Simkins home became the property of the city of Columbia and the Historic Columbia Foundation. In 2020, with a major grant from the National Park Service, the home was upgraded to museum standards to serve as an educational forum for the decades of work that Simkins and many others did for civil and human rights in South Carolina. The Modjeska School next door provided classes on putting those teachings to work.

Aba-Mecha, Barbara Woods. “Black Woman Activist in Twentieth Century South Carolina: Modjeska Monteith Simkins.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1978.

Brett Bursey, Executive Director, SC Progressive Network (https://www.scpronet.com/). Input from Bursey, 2-9-2021. Booklets available at ModjeskaSchool.com for free download or hardcopy purchase: “Modjeska Monteith Simkins, A South Carolina Revolutionary” “History Denied: Recovering South Carolina’s Stolen Past.

Gelman, Eric S. Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Simkins, Modjeska Monteith. Papers. University of South Carolina Library.