Williesha Lakin

Among the artifacts and photos in the S.C. State Museum's civil rights exhibit is a photograph of activist Leonard Glover holding up a picket sign outside a segregated Columbia diner.

"Thank God for Mississippi," the sign reads. "It keeps S.C. from being at the bottom of the list."

The photograph is one of more than 60 by Cecil Williams of Orangeburg highlighted in "A More Convenient Season: The Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina 1948-1968," which will run through next May.

The exhibit commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that said "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional.

The exhibit may have a lasting effect on Selma Erdogdu, a 27-year-old USC graduate student, and her mother, Lisa Mattenklotz-Erdogdu, 64, who visited the State Museum last week.

The pair originally are from Germany, near Cologne, so the exhibit is much like an interactive American history lesson.

"I was impressed," Erdogdu said. "I was surprised (the exhibit) was given so much room."

Mattenklotz-Erdogdu, who was visiting the United States for the first time and whose comments were translated by her daughter, was born in 1939, so she was privy to many of the events as they happened. She said the civil rights struggle in the United States made news in her home country. Erdogdu's father is Turkish, and she said she felt sensitive to tensions between blacks and whites in America because they seemed much like those between Turks and Germans.

"If you ever feel discriminated against and you see this (exhibit), you perceive it differently," she said.

The exhibit begins with two water fountains. One is similar to those found today, with a sign above it that reads, "Whites Only." The other looks more like a dilapidated, dirty bird bath. Above it, a sign reads, "Colored Only."

A maze of photographs and artifacts is in the room, which is dimly lit and has grayish walls, capturing the somberness of the exhibit.

Much of the exhibit highlights activists and events in eight S.C. counties.

It includes a small Ku Klux Klan uniform made for a child, and three crosses that were burned in front of the home of a York County school board member who was working on integrating public schools.

A portion of the lunch counter at Kress, which was at Main and Hampton streets, is included in the exhibit. Sit-ins and demonstrations were held there in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Inside a replica of a small church, complete with wooden pews and an altar, lie several bound copies of important South Carolina lawsuits of the time, including the Briggs v. Elliot case out of Clarendon County, which was later combined with other cases as part of Brown v. the Board of Education.

The fact the exhibit even exists was a surprise to Erdogdu. "I'm always surprised that the issue is sort of avoided in public," she said. "It's very rare that you see blacks and whites in mixed groups. That's my impression. People don't talk about it."

Her mother said she was "positively surprised the way (civil rights) is dealt with" in the exhibit.

The photographs seemed to have an impact, even though Erdogdu was translating only some of the captions to her mother. What stood out most, her mother said, was the "sadness you can see in people's faces."