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.
As the tape wound that spring day, Palmer and McMahon discovered other shared memories: of civil rights leaders camping out in their Sumter home, of their late husband and father, Robert J. Palmer, collecting money to bail demonstrators out of jail.
It was all wonderful stuff to Marvin Lare, the man behind this particular tape recorder.
Lare, a retired United Methodist minister and public policy advocate, has made it his business to collect memories of a time of school desegregation battles, marches and sit-ins.
The urgency is palpable. As the civil rights era passes into history and those who battled for civil rights grow older, historians say it is time to record the witnesses to that history.
“It’s like the World War II generation,” Lare said. “They are passing from the scene.”
Lare, who is associated with the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Public Service and Policy Research, has spent the past two years collecting 90 oral histories, many from people in their 80s and 90s. He anticipates taping several dozen more.
