Perspective Chapter: Alice Norwood Spearman Wright and White Women Civil Rights Activists in South Carolina

What sustained Alice Norwood Spearman as executive director of the South Carolina Council on Human Relations from 1954 to 1967 was her network of women friends. In 1958, four of Spearman’s close allies served on the Council’s fifty-member board of directors: Mary Frayser, Wil Lou Gray, Rebecca Reid, and Eunice Stackhouse. Two other women board members were also part of Spearman’s support network: volunteer Charlotte A. Hickman, and Elizabeth Ledeen, director of Presbyterian student work. Complimenting her style as executive director., Reid attributed the growth in the Council’s membership to Spearman’s “ability to avoid antagonizing people, even those with whom you most drastically disagree.” Spearman not only made friends, she kept them. At a dinner with Spearman, Stackhouse, Gray, and Frayser “agreed that [she was] holding down handsomely a most difficult job and growing in the process.” Moreover, she convinced the African American community that there were indeed white South Carolinians committed to racial justice.