South Carolina State University
South Carolina State University is the only public, historically Black, land-grant research university in South Carolina. Established by the General Assembly in 1896 after the legislature severed its land-grant designation from Claflin University, SC State carries the dual legacy of agricultural and mechanical education in the Morrill Act tradition and the civil rights struggle of the twentieth century — including, most consequentially, the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, in which state troopers killed three SC State students protesting a segregated bowling alley.
- Founded
- 1896 (General Assembly act of separation)
- Type
- Public land-grant research university (1890)
- Location
- Orangeburg, South Carolina
- Accreditation
- SACSCOC (continuously accredited since 1941; reaffirmed 2021)
- Colors
- Garnet and blue
- Mascot
- The Bulldogs
- Enrollment
- Approx. 2,500 (recent)
- Status
- Active
- Website
- scsu.edu
History
The institution that became South Carolina State University began in 1872 as the agricultural and mechanical department of Claflin College, established under the federal Morrill Act of 1862. In 1896, the South Carolina General Assembly passed an act of separation that detached the land-grant program from Claflin and created the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina — a separate, state-controlled institution for the agricultural and mechanical education of Black South Carolinians. The school operated under that name until 1954, when it was renamed South Carolina State College, and acquired its current name in 1992.
SC State sits in the middle of the South Carolina civil rights record, and the events of February 8, 1968 mark the most consequential moment in the university's history. On that night, after several days of student demonstrations against the city's segregated All Star Bowling Lane, South Carolina Highway Patrol officers opened fire on a crowd of students gathered on the SC State campus. Three young men — Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith — were killed, and at least twenty-eight others were wounded. The event, now known as the Orangeburg Massacre, occurred more than two years before the National Guard killings at Kent State, but received a fraction of the national press attention. None of the officers who fired were convicted of any crime.
As a land-grant institution under the second Morrill Act of 1890, SC State has historically been entitled to a state match against federal land-grant appropriations. A 2023 federal review found that South Carolina, like most states with 1890 institutions, had chronically underfunded SC State relative to its predominantly white land-grant counterpart, Clemson University — an underfunding gap that has been formally documented by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Education.
Notable Alumni
A representative selection. SC State has produced fifteen college presidents, three NFL Hall of Famers, and a long line of judges, military officers, and elected officials.
U.S. Representative from South Carolina (1993–present); former House Majority Whip; the most senior Black member of the U.S. House.
First Black Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court since Reconstruction (1994–2000).
Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker; nine-time Pro Bowl selection; Super Bowl XXI champion with the New York Giants.
Pro Football Hall of Fame safety; four-time Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Retired Major General, U.S. Marine Corps; served as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (2010–2011).
Significance
SC State is the principal site of South Carolina's 1890 land-grant mission, and it is the only public institution in the state that bears that designation. The chronic state-match shortfall against the 1890 program has become, over the last decade, a defining policy question for the federal land-grant system; SC State is one of the institutions for which that gap has been most precisely quantified.
The university also remains the institutional memory of the Orangeburg Massacre. The dead are commemorated on the SC State campus, and the events of February 8, 1968 are taught not as an aside to the civil rights story but as one of its earliest and most state-sanctioned acts of violence against student protestors in the period.
In February 2025, SC State was designated a Research 2 (“high research activity”) institution under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education — the only R2 university in South Carolina and one of roughly a dozen HBCUs to hold the classification. President Alexander Conyers presented the designation, which requires sustained research expenditures and annual doctoral production, as recognition of the enrollment and fiscal recovery that reversed a decade of decline once severe enough to threaten the university’s existence.