Photographer Cecil Williams expands South Carolina’s civil rights museum

ORANGEBURG, S.C. (APTN) — Much of how South Carolina has seen its civil rights history has been through the lens of photographer Cecil Williams. From sit-ins to prayer protests to portraits of African Americans integrating universities and rising to federal judges, Williams has snapped it.

After years of work, his chief dream of a civil rights museum marking how Black Americans fought segregation and discrimination in the state is about to move out of his old house and into a much bigger, and more prominent, building in Orangeburg.

“Photography is so important to telling stories about history. And we in South Carolina formally have not been known for involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement and the progress that took place bringing down the barriers to segregation,” said Williams, who turned 85 last month.

“But in South Carolina, we have so many untold stories that are yet to be known. And one of the ways to save these stories, these stories of sacrifice, these stories of overcoming, is to have a museum like we are developing here in Orangeburg.”

Williams got his first camera when he was 9. A few years later he took one picture of civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall getting off a train to work on a segregation case — just one frame because it was dark and flashbulbs were $1 each.

The photo got a lot of attention. Soon, Jet magazine had Williams taking pictures. He kept going for decades, capturing images of the Charleston hospital workers strike, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond’s last campaign and the Confederate flag being removed from atop the Statehouse dome.

He recalled how South Carolina newspapers would not hire a Black photographer, so he took his work to The Associated Press instead.

“And I was not welcomed as an African-American youth and as a photographer in the state newspaper,” said Williams. “But I could go upstairs where the Associated Press used many of my photographs during the 1960s.”

In 2019, Williams converted his old house and darkroom in a residential neighborhood in Orangeburg into the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. It’s the only civil rights museum in the state.

In the next year or so, Williams hopes to move his museum into a building three times larger in downtown Orangeburg with full-time staff.

It’s part of a $23 million federal grant to revitalize Railroad Corner in Orangeburg as a gateway to the city that is nearly three-quarters African American with two neighboring historically Black universities. And it’s the culmination of years of trying to get support from anyone who will listen.