A protestor carries a sign during a boycott of Woolworth’s in Columbia, South Carolina.

Nestled in a residential section of Orangeburg, South Carolina, there’s a 3,500-square-foot structure that’s so minimalist, it looks at first glance like an elegant series of conjoined blocks.

Civil Rights Trail, this place is the only one commemorating the entirety of the civil rights movement in the state.

A child looks up at his mother during an anti-segregation protest in 1963 at the South Carolina State House.

The shell casings were left behind when highway patrolmen fired their guns into a crowd of student demonstrators at South Carolina State University in 1968, killing three and wounding 28 in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.

Now he has placed more than 300 of his artifacts in the Cecil Williams Civil Rights Museum, which he plans to open to the public when the coronavirus pandemic recedes.

Cecil Williams photographed shell casings he found at the scene of the February 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, in which highway patrolmen killed three demonstrators and wounded dozens more at South Carolina State University.

Williams photographed many of the participants.

At 13 years old, Williams captured Attorney Thurgood Marshall arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, to prepare for arguments in the Briggs v.

When Thurgood Marshall visited Charleston, Williams got off one shot of the great attorney stepping off the train and captured a famous image of Marshall as a traveler, with hat, coat, and Samsonite luggage.

By the time he arrived, only two attendees were left: the grand dragon of the Klan and a state highway patrolman, who looked at each other as Williams approached, camera in hand.

“So I took a picture of the two of them standing by that,” Williams says.

A desire to highlight the struggle for civil rights in South Carolina inspired Williams to build his museum.

Claflin University students speak out against segregation in downtown Orangeburg, South Carolina, March 1960.

In 1968, Williams was working as the official photographer for South Carolina State University—like Claflin, a historically Black school in Orangeburg—when he covered student protests to integrate the local All-Star bowling alley.

United Auto Workers join civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy and fellow activists at a march during the 1969 hospital workers’ strike in Charleston, South Carolina.

Few Americans ever heard about the Briggs case or understood that sit-ins were taking place in Orangeburg and Rock Hill, South Carolina, at the same time protesters were famously using the same tactic in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“South Carolina has a buried history,” says preservationist Catherine Fleming Bruce, author of The Sustainers: Being, Building and Doing Good through Activism in the Sacred Spaces of Civil Rights, Human Rights and Social Movements.

So Williams started seeking support for a museum dedicated to, as he puts it, “the South Carolina events that changed America.” And after a decade of polite interest but no commitments from state and local public officials, he decided to create it himself

He and his wife, Barbara, a longtime educator, lived in one of them, and this became the Cecil Williams Civil Rights Museum

Williams designed the building that houses his civil rights museum in Orangeburg, South Carolina

And he’s built exhibits to house its keynote items, from Marshall’s Samsonite suitcase to bowling pins from the All-Star lanes to a Confederate flag that once flew over the South Carolina state capitol

But he says this with pride about the first and only institution of its kind in South Carolina: “It’s a symbol of what could be achieved.”