BLYTHEWOOD – The annual Black History Month Celebration organized each year by the Blythewood Historical Society, lived up to its theme last Saturday – ‘Looking Back – Reaching Forward’ – with two locally and nationally recognized speakers who did just that.
Jim Felder, a political and civil rights activist from Sumter, S.C. served as pallbearer and head of casket at the funeral of President John F. Kennedy, and served in the S.C. House of Representatives. Felder, an attorney, took the audience through several firsts for African-Americans in South Carolina, which came about as the result of the organization of the S.C. chapter of the NAACP in the basement of Benedict College in 1939, and with the assistance of famed black attorney Thurgood Marshall.
Some of those firsts, he said, included: a lawsuit in South Carolina in 1941 for equal pay for lack teachers; a 1947 lawsuit that led to black students being admitted to law schools in South Carolina; a 1947 South Carolina lawsuit that was a precursor to another lawsuit that led to the integration of public schools; an unsuccessful attempt by a black man to run for office in South Carolina in 1948 that led to the doors of the S.C. legislature opening up to blacks, and a voter registration push in 1967, that Felder headed up.
“In 1967, there were 50,000 black registered voters,” Felder told the audience. “Today there are 1.1 million. In 1967, we only had eight black legislatures. Today we have 928 elected officials in every office in South Carolina from school board to the legislature.
A second speaker on the program was Blythewood’s own NBA legend Alex English.
A native of Columbia, English and his wife Vanessa and their five children settled in Blythewood more than 30 years ago after his retirement from professional basketball.
English, who grew up in poverty, living with his grandmother and 12 other kids in a three-room house and sometimes subsisting on one meal a day, went on to be a star basketball player for Dreher High School and the University of South Carolina where he was the first African-American sports star at the school.
Drafted into the NBA, he was the star player throughout the 1980’s for the Denver Nuggets. When he retired, he held nearly every Nuggets team record – including most career points, assists, and games.
English has been praised not only for his pioneering sports prowess as a young black athlete in the wide world of sports, but as one of the most respected, well-rounded and dominant players in the game. It has been written that, “he was a coach’s dream – confident and quiet, coachable and prepared, and always ready to play.”
Outside of sports, English, who holds a bachelor’s degree in English, is a published author, poet and has acted in several movies, two of them produced by his oldest son, Alex, Jr.
See English’s Black History program presentation.
