Beginning during the Reconstruction Era, African Americans were elected to political offices in large numbers, leading to South Carolina's first majority-black government.

Toward the end of the 1870s however, the Democratic Party regained power and passed laws aimed at disenfranchising African Americans, including the denial of the right to vote.

In 1670 when the British Empire colonized the region, the Lords Proprietor established the Province of Carolina and created a plantation-style economy that increasingly relied on enslaved labor.

[4] Unlike her more northern colonies, South Carolina's introduction to slavery was based largely on a preexisting enslavement system from the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century.

[11] In response to the Stono Rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed more laws limiting the rights of African Americans and more-strictly regulating the institution of slavery.

Two delegates to the Continental Congress, Edward Rutledge and Thomas Lynch, sought to bar free African Americans from enlisting in the militia, while other statesmen, such as Henry Laurens, favored exchanging military service for freedom.

One band of three hundred Georgia and South Carolina slaves, who called themselves King of England's Soldiers, fled to the Savannah River swamps and survived until May 1786 when they were burned out by militia.

Vesey held numerous secret meetings and eventually gained the support of both slaves and free blacks throughout the city and countryside who were willing to fight for their freedom.

The developing economies of Northern and upper-South states facilitated abolition while the heavy investment in King Cotton in South Carolina only strengthened the institution of slavery.

The U.S. Congress passed a bill awarding Smalls and his crewmen the prize money for the Planter (valuable not only for its guns but low draft in Charleston bay); Southern newspapers demanded harsh discipline for the Confederate officers whose joint shore leave had allowed the slaves to steal the boat.

Laws passed during the Reconstruction era, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution greatly expanded the rights of African Americans in South Carolina.

The enforcement of black codes was an effort by the Democrats and white supremacists to maintain a system of racial inequality and hierarchy that existed before the Civil War.

Black codes, in addition to poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation meant that the Democratic party in South Carolina was virtually unopposed until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

Though the Fifteenth amendment protected black men's right to vote, poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation from groups like the Ku Klux Klan meant that African American turnouts for elections were extremely low.

One of the stipulations of the application was that voters must be able to "(a) both read and write a section of the Constitution of South Carolina; or (b)...have paid all taxes due last year on property in this State assessed at $300.00 or more.

For example, if a man read the entire South Carolina constitution, but mispronounced one word, the examiner could still refuse the voter access to the polling facility.

[48] The state of South Carolina asserted that poll taxes were not voting qualifications but instead a method of funding public schools,[49] though historians and scholars today dispute this claim.

[52] Later that year, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal crime to prevent any American citizens from exercising their rights.

Temporarily, the number of incidents of lynching and terrorism significantly reduced but increased again after the Compromise of 1877 in which President Hayes removed federal troops from the South.

[56] After the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, race-based segregation was legal across the United States, though such separation had already rooted itself in South Carolina's culture and custom.

"[57] Beginning in the late 1870s, Democrats repealed most of the laws passed by Republicans during the Reconstruction era, thus revoking civil liberties and rights from South Carolina African Americans.

State and municipal codes prohibited whites and blacks from eating in the same portion of a restaurant, using the same public facilities (such as drinking fountains or bathrooms), and required segregated seating.

[61][62] The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970.

The military remained segregated until President Harry Truman signed an executive order after World War II to integrate the armed forces.

Another Charleston resident remembers seeing two African Americans attempt to sit at the front of a city bus, something strictly prohibited by the Jim Crow laws of the time.

Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina authored the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the 1954 Brown v. Board decision as "unwarranted" and referred to anti-segregationists as "agitators and troublemakers invading our States.

[73] Many blacks leaving South Carolina are now recently moving to other Southern cities with more job opportunities including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Raleigh and San Antonio.

After the shooting, calls to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds intensified, including from influential figures such as President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush.

In 1996, Republican Governor David Beasley advocated to remove the flag, a stance that contributed to his failure to win reelection against Democrat Jim Hodges.

Other national figures endorsed Haley's decision, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Texas Governor Rick Perry.