USC’s proposed civil rights center has a powerful location — here’s why it matters
Some 50 years after the University of South Carolina bought and razed Booker T. Washington High School’s main classroom building amid a campus expansion, a civil rights center will spring from the soil where the historic Black high school once stood.
The USC Board of Trustees on June 19 gave their approval to begin planning the building, which will house the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, currently located in the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library.
The significance of the center’s proposed location at the intersection of Blossom and Bull streets, just east of the only structure that remains from the original four-acre Booker T. Washington High School campus, is not lost on the university.
“The site is not random,” USC architect Derek Gruner said in an interview with The State Media Co. “The site has symbolic importance.”
When it opens, the new civil rights center will serve as a hub for scholarship and instruction and a repository for historical materials that spotlight South Carolina’s civil rights history.
The building’s larger exhibition space will allow USC’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research to consolidate and display its ever-growing collection, which is currently spread across multiple locations throughout Columbia.
The center, launched in 2015 to chronicle, preserve and share South Carolina’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, possesses audio recordings, photographs, newspaper clippings, manuscripts and various primary source documents from notable South Carolina civil rights leaders, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia.
Its current exhibition, “Health, Rights and Resistance: Civil Rights and African American Health in South Carolina,” explores how the fight for access to health care was intertwined with the struggle for civil rights, and continues to this day.
Beyond serving as a permanent home for archival materials and a destination for K-12 school field trips, Gruner said he also wants the civil rights center to be a space that’s attractive to USC students.
“I don’t want it to have the sterility that a museum can sometimes have,” he said. “I want to make sure that our students are drawn to that building and populate it, and that it’s active when you walk in there.”
To encourage student use, the university anticipates incorporating classrooms, meeting space and study space into the design.
Because the project is still in the predesign phase, a timeline for its completion is still quite fluid.
Given its cultural and historical significance, however, Gruner said he thinks it will be at least three to four years before the civil rights center opens its doors.
“This is going to be a project we’re going to devote a lot of attention to,” he said. “To make sure that it’s designed to be an iconic building. This is a special building.”
The project, which is estimated to cost $24.4 million, will be funded through a combination of federal grants, private donations and state and institutional funds.
This story was originally published June 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "USC’s proposed civil rights center has a powerful location — here’s why it matters."