This Is My Home

This chapter brings the story of Liberia into the present. Drawing on memories of current residents, the chapter describes efforts to preserve and present the community’s history to visitors. For example, the original community cemetery is re-discovered, cleared, protected, and interpreted. Newer homes provide refuge for returning relatives or aging kin. Some racist sentiments remain, but overwhelmingly Liberia’s remaining residents fit comfortably into a rural Upstate South Carolina landscape.

It Really Wasn’t a Bad Life

Still segregated under Jim Crow restrictions, the Liberia community continues in this chapter as a semi-protected enclave, anchored primarily by one extended family. The story of Liberia includes the community’s survival as a farming region as desegregation gradually percolated into Upstate South Carolina and as racialized assaults continued. Soapstone Baptist Church persists, but Soapstone School eventually closes under rural (but still segregated) consolidation. The story of Liberia is presented primarily through the memories of contemporary residents, especially the community’s surviving matriarch and her extended family.