60 years after graduating from SC State, Clyburn gets diploma at commencement ceremony
Sixty years ago, Jim Clyburn finished his studies at the state’s only publicly funded Black college.
He had taken all of the history courses at South Carolina State and had earned a bachelor of arts degree from the school. But the college at the time didn’t have graduation ceremonies in December, instead only offering the ceremony in the spring.
So Clyburn had his diploma mailed to him, and he didn’t get the experience of marching with classmates to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance,” having his named called and having an undergraduate degree presented to him on stage.
On Friday, that changed.
In an event where President Joe Biden was the keynote speaker, Clyburn participated in S.C. State’s commencement ceremony, along with 128 graduating students, and received a diploma on stage after the school invited him to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his graduation.
His three daughters and all of his grandchildren attended the ceremony as well.
“Sixty years, I guess it’s about time, huh,” Clyburn said with a laugh during an interview earlier this week.
Clyburn and his wife, also a Bulldog alum, continued to help the university well after their days as students. They donated money to the school, where a transportation training center is named for the House majority whip and the honors college is named for his late wife, Emily.
“Congressman Clyburn has been very good to this university. He and his wife both were major contributors, and they established scholarships here. They’ve been loyal alumni, and he’s kind of a favorite son of ours,” said Sam Watson, spokesman for the school. “He’s been good to S.C. State, S.C. State has been good to him, and we wanted to show our appreciation.”
Clyburn graduated from the school when it didn’t have fall commencement ceremonies, while other public colleges and universities in the state did. He opted not come back for the spring ceremony because he was married and was teaching at the time.
It was a rite of passage he missed.
“I always felt that,” Clyburn said in an interview. “And I’ve talked to people about their graduations or that often felt that that was kind of the indignity that was visited upon not just me, I wasn’t the only one that finished in December that year, but those are the kinds of indignities that you visited upon you when you have the kind of system that we had in place here in South Carolina. A system that has been dismantled, and now they’re separate but equal, which was never equal.”
Fighting against indignities is something he did while he was a student at S.C. State.
It was at S.C. State where Clyburn met his eventual wife while they protested for civil rights both on campus and in the city of Orangeburg.
Clyburn enrolled at S.C. State in September 1957, during a time he said students didn’t have a say who would be their elected leadership.
“It was run basically like a plantation,” Clyburn said. “We weren’t allowed to select our own student body president.”
But those concerns didn’t become clear to him until a civil rights march in 1960, which eventually ended with him going to jail.
“We had problems downtown,” Clyburn said. “You can go into five-and-dime store… we would go in there, buy school supplies and not be trespassing. When you would go in and purchase and hamburger, you would be trespassing. These were the things we were fighting against.”
As he was leaving the jail in Orangeburg, a group of students came to bring Clyburn and others some food. One of the students who brought food was Emily England, who Clyburn would marry 18 months later. England brought a hamburger over to Clyburn and split in half so they could share the food.
They eventually walked back to campus that night, when he realized that the civil rights problems weren’t just in downtown Orangeburg.
“It was on that walk back to the campus, we were talking, it became clear that much of our problem had to do with what was going on on the campus,” Clyburn said.
“We decided that night, not only were we going to challenge what was going on downtown Orangeburg, we were going to challenge what was going on on the campus,” Clyburn said. “We were not going to allow the administration to tell us who we could vote for and who we couldn’t vote for.”
The students sought changes and did something that had never been done at a coed Black colleges: They elected a woman as a president of the student body.
Clyburn, who also spoke at Friday’s commencement ceremony, had his own message for the students.
“I want you all to stick with it,” Clyburn told reporters this week. “Don’t get discouraged by these, these little insults that’s handed to you. Some of them by official state action. Don’t let that discourage you.”
This story was originally published December 17, 2021 at 11:23 AM with the headline "60 years after graduating from SC State, Clyburn gets diploma at commencement ceremony."
