South Carolina may have 99 problems, but producing Black excellence is not one of them. For people who aren’t from South Carolina, the state may be more associated with racial trauma above all else. The state has suffered more than its share of racially-charged killings: 2015 alone included the anti-Black racist massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and unarmed Black man Walter Scott being killed by a white police officer who shot him in the back. Between that and dismal statistics around education and incarceration, the state often has the odds going against it.
But people who hail from the state see it as much more. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the United States in 1860, leading to the start of the Civil War. And even though Scott’s death was horrific, the officer who killed him was…