Clarendon County, a rural community in South Carolina, was the battleground of Black sharecroppers, domestic workers, laborers and clergymen who joined with the NAACP to fight for better schools for Black children. This small but mighty group of brave visionaries filed their lawsuit, Briggs v. Elliott, in 1951. This was the first of five cases that led to the breakthrough 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.
In 2004, the research of Alice Bernstein, a respected journalist, led to her discovery of the play The People of Clarendon County, a seminal work by Ossie Davis. It had been performed only once in 1955 by the young actors Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Bernstein, moved by the tenacity and wisdom of the people of Clarendon County in their fight for equality, and with Davis's encouragement, has published this important work...adding essays based on Aesthetic Realism which explain the cause of and answer to racism.