Join us at our next Speaker at the Center series on Tuesday, February 25, at 3 p.m. for an author talk with Carolyn Click. Click's recent release, "The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot." 

One man's fight for the ballot reveals the sacrifices of those who shaped the civil rights movement in the American South
On August 13, 1946, George Elmore arrived at his regular polling place in Columbia, South Carolina. He requested a ballot to vote in the Democratic Party primary but was turned away. While the general election would not occur until November, everyone in South Carolina understood that the results of the election would really be decided on that late summer afternoon. South Carolina was a one-party state, and the segregationist Democratic Party had endured as the uncontested rulers of state politics since the end of political Reconstruction in the late 1870s. No Black man or woman had cast a meaningful ballot in South Carolina in nearly as long. For Elmore and others in the state, the day had come to reclaim this most precious American right.

Carolyn Click's The Cost of the Vote centers on Elmore and the activists and lawyers who successfully challenged the all-white primary in South Carolina. Although Elmore's court challenge would prove successful, he paid a steep personal price. He died a decade after the case, ruined financially. His family was scattered because of the hostility provoked by his activism. The political rewards for Black voters also remained long in coming, and Elmore would not survive to see the full flowering of the 1960s voting rights movement.

The Cost of the Vote is the story of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote.

For more information, please get in touch with McCabe Rentz, SC Center for the Book Coordinator, at 803-734-4816 or mrentz@statelibrary.sc.gov 

Location & Parking: The event is held at the South Carolina State Library Learning Lab, 1500 Senate Street, Columbia, SC 29201. On-street metered parking is available.

Enter between the two lions.

About the author: Carolyn Click is a journalist and teacher. She was Virginia editor for United Press International and a reporter at the Roanoke (Va.) Times before coming to The State in Columbia, South Carolina. After a newspaper career, Click taught in the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications and in USC's Honors College. She divides her time between South Carolina and her native Virginia.

Accessibility: FM Auditory Assistance, large print materials, and other accessibility accommodations are available upon request. If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate, please contact the program organizer at least two weeks in advance.