Editors note: A portion of this story was omitted from Sundays Daily News, Page 1C. This is the story in its entirety. CLARENDON COUNTY, S.C. In Clarendon County, the schoolchildren walked. Two miles or four miles or nine. Before dawn and on sweaty afternoons, always looking out for the buses, where the whites seemed to have an endless supply of bottle caps to throw. They walked because thats the way it was. They were black, and the county would pay nothing for their school transportation. And when their parents finally collected enough cash to buy a bus the whites had junked, it kept breaking down. So they asked the chairman of the school board for help. His response: We aint got no money to buy a bus for your n—— children. This time, for the first time, they fought back. Fifty years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools inherently unequal. That case was a consolidation of five school desegregation cases from across the country. The first of those was Briggs v. Elliott 20 South Carolinians backed by a hundred more, led by a minister who went searching for a school bus. It all began in Clarendon County, says Vernon Burton, professor of history at the University of Illinois. When people think of the civil rights movement, they think about the cities. But it really began in this rural area. We think of the marches, but it really began out there. It began with poor farmers in one of the poorest counties of a poor state. Most rented land from whites, while some worked the whites land for a dollar or two per week. Others were sharecroppers, providing labor on white land and getting a small share of the profits. None of those options offered a path out of poverty. Like any parents, Clarendon Countys blacks wanted better for their children, but black schools offered little promise of that. Books were held together by tape; tables were boards placed on chairs. In 1950, Clarendon had three times as many black students as white, but white students got 60 percent of educational funds. Running water was a faucet in the yard, said Joseph De Laine, a Clarendon County student now living in Charlotte, N.C. There were outhouses that were very unsanitary, and the rooms were heated by potbellied stoves. But in the 1940s, changing all of that seemed too much for blacks to imagine. Instead, they began with something smaller. A bus. The Rev. Joseph Armstrong J.A. De Laine was a slender and quiet man, with black glasses much more severe than he. A teacher and preacher at Clarendon schools and churches, De Laine was one of the countys few educated men, a window to the world for his congregation, many of whom couldnt read. Thus the reverend was a respected man, and he lived an exemplary life. He helped illiterate parents fill out forms for their children. He drove the sick to doctors in Columbia, S.C. and helped pay the bills. He always wore a suit, said youngest son B.B. De Laine, but when he talked in the field with folks, he always bent over and helped them pick cotton. One day in June 1947, De Laine attended a session at Columbias Allen University to hear Ed Hinton, the state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On that day, Hinton railed against the state of black education in South Carolina, and he suggested that whites surely wanted to keep it that way. Acquiring buses for blacks, he said, was a place for change to begin. He challenged anyone to find a man, a plaintiff, who would lend his name to a bus complaint. That week, J.A. DeLaine drove out to Davis Station, a small Clarendon community where farmers had purchased a broken-down bus and where school officials had refused to pay even for gas. De Laine spoke to Levi Pearson, a farmer whose children had walked eight miles to the Scotts Branch High School in Summerton. Pearson agreed to sue, but in June 1948, Pearson v. Clarendon County was dismissed on a technicality: Pearsons farm straddled the line between a school district where he paid his taxes, and another where his children attended school. He was declared to have no legal standing in the case. That fall, Pearsons line of credit was shut off by white fertilizer suppliers. Undeterred, DeLaine and Pearson led a group of eight Clarendon residents the next spring to Columbia, where they met with attorney Thurgood Marshall, a legend-in-making with the national NAACP. They told a reluctant Marshall they wanted to aim higher for equal school facilities. Marshall told them he expected to find a school equality case elsewhere. By November 1949, 107 Clarendon parents and children had signed a petition asking for educational advantages and facilities equal in all respects to that which is provided for whites. At the top of the list were Harry and Eliza Briggs, who had opened their home so people could quietly sign. I thought we were just really popular, says son, Nathaniel, then 7 years old and now a retiring Ford worker in New Jersey. The Briggs house was only 400 yards from Scotts Branch school, Nathaniel Briggs says, but his parents recognized the fight had become much larger than buses. The Briggses also were among the first to suffer. Harry Briggs was fired from his job as a gas station worker. Eliza Briggs lost her job as a hotel maid. Soon, Nathaniels father moved to Miami to work at a gas station and send money home. Two years later, his family followed, leaving behind all that wouldnt fit in a car. Whites called such retribution the squeeze. Others on the petition lost their jobs, including J.A. De Laine, who was fired from his teaching position. Mortgages and credit lines were called in without warning. Reverdy Wells, a plaintiff signer and one of Scotts Branchs brightest, learned that his transcript had been altered to include Fs before it was sent to Temple University. He was not admitted. In late 1949, Briggs v. Elliott was filed in U.S. District Court in Charleston, S.C. Plaintiffs asked for equal educational opportunities for black children. But in the pre-trial hearing, District Judge J. Waties Waring posed a question to Marshall: Why were the plaintiffs suing for equality when that, in theory, was what they had under the separate but equal standard. Was enforcement all they wanted? No, said Marshall, he also was raising indirectly the idea of desegregation. The judge told him to refile his case asking specifically for that. It was a remarkable request, especially from a white judge. Briggs v. Elliott became the first case to address the concept of school desegregation. On May 28, 1951, arguments for Briggs began in Charleston. Right away, the state stunned the plaintiffs by conceding that Clarendons school facilities were substandard. But, said attorney Robert Figg, the state legislature had passed a sales tax to finance new buildings and equipment at the underserved schools. On June 21, 1951, Judges John Parker and George Bell Timmerman handed the plaintiffs a defeat, ordering the state only to make black facilities equal. Waring dissented, saying that segregation in education can never produce equality. For that, Waring became an outcast in Charlestons white social circles and eventually moved to New York. In Clarendon, the Briggs defeat was expected, but it was not without benefit. It resulted in better facilities, remembers B.B. DeLaine. From one year to the next we went from no school buses to 32 school buses. But most people were smart enough to know there were still inequities. Briggs was appealed immediately to the Supreme Court, which sent it back to District Court in 1952 for a report on the progress made toward equalizing school facilities. By the time the case came back to the Supreme Court later that year, four other desegregation cases were waiting. The five cases were to be argued together, the justices decided, and the consolidation would be named Brown v. Board of Education, after one of the five, a Kansas case. The real reason they went with Brown v. Board instead of Clarendon is that they wanted to get a case that wasnt from the South, says Burton, the Illinois professor. Otherwise, Brown v. Board of Education would be known as Briggs v. Elliott. On May 17, 1954, from the Supreme Court: In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. My father was in orbit, says B.B. De Laine. Im not sure he had come to the conclusion the Supreme Court was ready to overturn. I dont know whether he had faith in the nine people who sat on the court then. In Clarendon, blacks were hopeful but quiet. Blacks wouldnt dare go out and have a public celebration over that, B.B. De Laine says. Indeed, after the Supreme Court added teeth to the ruling with its deliberate speed plan the next year, retribution began in earnest. By then, J.A. De Laine had been transferred to an AME church in Lake City, S.C.; his home in Summerton burned soon after as firefighters watched, claiming the home was 20 feet outside town limits. In Lake City, rocks were thrown through the De Laine home, and threats came in the mail. The family was unaware that black men had taken to secretly guarding the house at night. Inside, the De Laines hung a gun over every door not unusual for blacks waiting for the Ku Klux Klan to ride through at night. On Oct. 1, a group of about 25 men gathered across the street from De Laines house, dug a hole for a cross and burned it that night. Three days later, De Laines church burned. Finally, late in the night on Oct. 10, De Laine heard gunshots outside his home. Ten minutes later, a car pulled to the front of his driveway, and two more shots came from it. De Laine fired back, marking the car as he said the county sheriff had instructed him to. News reports later said that two in the car suffered minor wounds. De Laine fled first to Florence, then to Charlotte, where his sister, Ophelia, was attending Johnson C. Smith University. Eventually, he landed in New York City. Authorities in South Carolina issued a warrant for his arrest, but the U.S. Department of Justice refused to enforce the fugitive act because De Laine had immediately informed the FBI of his whereabouts. Eventually, South Carolina Gov. George Bell Timmerman declined to extradite him. South Carolina, he said, is well rid of this professional agitator. J.A. De Laine took a teaching position in Buffalo, N.Y., and chartered the De Laine-Waring AME Church there in 1956. He kept in touch with South Carolina friends and former parishioners, and he spoke and raised money for their continuing efforts toward desegregation, which came slowly in Clarendon and throughout the South. It was traumatic for him, oldest son Joseph De Laine says. It was traumatic because his entire persona was South Carolina. The people there, he was just rooted in them. To leave and to have to go somewhere else; it was hard to adapt. DeLaine frequently commented on two things to his family: First, he didnt want to die in New York. Also, he hoped that Clarendons desegregation efforts wouldnt be forgotten. He retired to Charlotte in 1971 and asked to return to South Carolina, but one of the Lake City men involved in the 1955 shooting refused to drop charges. De Laine did, however, sit in the back of a college class his son B.B. taught at North Carolina A&T, and he proudly and quietly counted the whites sitting among the blacks. De Laine died in 1974.