Henrie Monteith Treadwell, one of the three students who desegregated the University of South Carolina in 1963, has died at 80. Her walk onto campus that September opened a door the state had kept shut since Reconstruction, and she spent the rest of her life holding doors open for others.
A family of fighters
Treadwell grew up in Columbia inside one of South Carolina's great civil rights families. Her aunt was Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the public health reformer and NAACP leader whose home served as a strategy room for the state's freedom movement. When the university refused to admit her, Treadwell went to court. The refusal, she later said, sparked "a new fervor in me."
Two weeks before classes began, a bomb exploded near her family's home. She enrolled anyway. On Sept. 11, 1963, she, Robert Anderson and James Solomon became the first Black students at the university since 1877. They endured threats, slurs and isolation. In 1965 she became the university's first Black graduate since Reconstruction.
A life in public health
The fight did not end at graduation. Treadwell earned a doctorate in biochemistry and built a career in health equity, studying care in poor communities, the health of young Black men, and prison health and health policy. The struggle to enroll, she said, "made me a stronger person than I might have been had I not had to walk some of those paths by myself."
The university has since honored the three pioneers with statues on campus. Her real monument is the generations of Black South Carolinians who walked the paths she cleared.
For the full story of the 1963 desegregation, read our archive piece, Desegregating the University of South Carolina. For the longer history of Black life at the university, see the work of historians Tyler D. Parry and Robert Greene II.
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