Jim Campbell, a highly regarded human rights activist and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, has been a gift to the SC Progressive Network since the group’s founding in 1996. The organization has benefited mightily from his years in the trenches – as a Marine and as a social justice warrior. (Campbell’s papers are housed at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston.)
Becci Robbins and Jim Campbell at the SC Progressive Network’s 2016 fall conference.
We sent him a copy of our new booklet, knowing how familiar he is with the people and history it covers. In return, he copied us on an email he sent to his comrades across the country. His endorsement is a true honor.
Campbell wrote, “I’ve just read a copy of the SC Progressive Network‘s recently published booklet, HISTORY DENIED: Recovering South Carolina’s Stolen Past by Becci Robbins. Its content is a substantive introduction to the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) and the vanguard radical labor organizing among interracial youth in the severely segregated South between 1937 and 1949. Specifically, this tells of a landmark Congress convened in Columbia, South Carolina in October of 1946. This event had in active participation such Freedom Movement notables as local South Carolina Youth Leaders in addition to Paul Robeson, Herbert Aptheker, Dorothy and Louis Burnham, Esther [Cooper] and Jim Jackson, Louise Patterson, Sallye Davis, Jack O’Dell, South Carolina’s Modjeska Simkins and the Congress’ keynote speaker, W.E.B. DuBois. His keynote speech, BEHOLD THE LAND, has been a ‘must read’ for all young activists ever since.
This landmark booklet is also a ‘must read’ for today’s activists as both struggle inspiration and primer on our long civil rights movement.”
The booklet was reviewed by Jeffrey Collins at the Associated Press.
Jim Campbell speaks at a Network retreat at Penn Center.
GET YOUR COPY OF HISTORY DENIED
Download the e-version of History Denied here. (You can also download three earlier booklets on three phenomenal SC women Modjeska Monteith Simkins, Harriet Hancock, and Sarah Leverette.)
Copies of History Denied are available at the Network’s office in the historic Modejska Simkins House, 2025 Marion St., downtown Columbia, SC. One copy is free; additional copies are $2.50 each. To order by mail, click here. To order bulk copies, call our office at 803-808-3384.