A Rocky Beginning

The first chapter of Roy Talbert’s Coastal Carolina University: The First Fifty Years, available this spring, creates a sense of suspense not unlike a good mystery story. But the question that keeps you turning pages is not “Who done it?” but, rather, “Is it gonna happen?”

Even though we know the answer—perhaps because we know the answer—it is fascinating to discover that Coastal, which is now celebrating 50 years of remarkable growth and achievement, had a very difficult birth.

“We’ve forgotten how hard the fight was to get this school started,” said Talbert, a distinguished Coastal history professor and author.

It's official: Headlines in 1954.

In the early 1950s, the average Horry County citizen had not gone beyond the seventh-grade, and perhaps one-third of the teachers in the largely rural county did not have a college degree. But Thurman Anderson, the county’s superintendent of education, could foresee the area’s potential and its need for access to higher education. The junior college movement was flourishing all across America at the time, but in South Carolina it was a relatively new idea, and in most academic circles an extremely unpopular one.

Also, at the same moment when Anderson and his associates were seeking support for the idea of a two-year college here, the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. In South Carolina, political leaders were so offended by the ruling that they seriously discussed killing the entire public school system.

“It was an odd time to advance such an ambitious idea as the establishment of a junior college in South Carolina,” says Talbert.“ The political climate could not have been worse.”

It is evident that Talbert feels a heroic element at work in the story: a struggle against formidable odds by men and women of vision, courage, and, it seems in retrospect, an entirely impractical determination.

“The idea for Coastal originated in the public school system of Horry County,” Talbert says. “Thurman Anderson had the idea and Kenyon East, county director of instruction, made it happen. They had to go to the business community for support and it responded superbly. A group of remarkable, dedicated, hard-working people, whom we now refer to as our founders, signed on to become the first board of directors.”

The problem was that no support could be found where it was indispensably needed—from an established state institution of higher learning willing to extend college credit for the new enterprise. In the summer of 1954, East and Parks M. Coble, superintendent of Conway area schools, were assigned the difficult job of visiting colleges and begging for sponsorship. In the meantime, supporters of the new college, certain of success, began registering students for fall classes. Full-time tuition was set at $100 per semester, and part-time students could enroll for $21 per course. Area residents began signing up for courses even as East and Coble were turned down by college after college, including the University of South Carolina, Clemson, Winthrop and Coker.

Then, as summer was drawing to a close and the organizers of the new college were facing postponement, College of Charleston President George D. Grice rescued the plan. His initial response was famously negative—“What in the hell do you want a college in Horry County for?”—but, impressed by the quixotic enthusiasm of the school men, he took a leap of faith and agreed to sponsor the school for four years. Coastal Carolina Junior College’s first classes met after hours at Conway High School on September 20 with 53 students enrolled.

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