9:30 Registration Opens
10:00 – 10:45 AM South Carolina’s Matilda Evans: A Medical Pioneer, Dr. Walter Curry,
A prolific and award-winning author, Dr. Curry’s work brings overlooked narratives to life. He will focus on Matilda Evans’ groundbreaking work as the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina and her establishment of the Taylor Lane Hospital. He will highlight her tireless advocacy for public health and health equity for African Americans during the Jim Crow era.
10:45- 11:30 AM “Payne-ful” Business: Charleston’s Journey to Truth, Margaret Seidler, In her acclaimed book, “Payne-ful” Business: Charleston’s Journey to Truth, author Margaret Seidler traces her journey after a late-in-life DNA test reveals distant cousins of African descent. Motivated by their ancestral search, she uncovers three generations of slave traders in her family, including William Payne, a giant in the domestic slave trade. The journey continues this year as Margaret unearths the story of a young runaway, Molly, sold by Payne.
11:30 – 11:45 break
11:45 – 12:30 The Cost of the Vote, Carolyn Click, centers on George Elmore and the activists and lawyers who successfully challenged the all-white primary in South Carolina. Although Elmore's court challenge would prove successful, he paid a steep personal price. He died a decade after the case, ruined financially. His family was scattered because of the hostility provoked by his activism. The political rewards for Black voters also remained long in coming, and Elmore would not survive to see the full flowering of the 1960s voting rights movement. The Cost of the Vote is the story of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote.
