George Elmore
Entrepreneur and political activist
George Elmore (1905-1959) helped break the all-White voting system in South Carolina with his lawsuit in 1946. The businessman worked with the Negro Citizens Council to register to vote and sued when the Democratic Party refused to let him cast a ballot. The NAACP’s lawyer Thurgood Marshall and Columbia attorney Harold Boulware argued and won his case, Elmore v. Rice, in June 1947. Mr. Elmore and his family suffered severe backlash from White government officials and business owners for challenging segregation. It took a second lawsuit, Brown v. Baskin, in 1948 to outlaw South Carolina’s all-White Democratic primary.
Courtesy of the Elmore family.