In fall of 1963, Lucinda Brawley enrolled as the second African American student ever to attend Clemson University in South Carolina. A native of Hopkins, South Carolina, Ms. Brawley began dating civil rights leader Harvey Gantt when they were both undergraduate students. In an interview with Lynn Haessly in 1986, Harvey Gantt recalled meeting Lucinda; “I met her prior to her coming to Clemson. I became a very famous person all of a sudden in the period leading up to that and so I went to speak to a lot of high schools and got to meet her and heard that she was interested in being a student at Clemson and she was a very smart girl. So I finished talking to her class and then we talked. She was pretty and I thought it was nice. She matriculated at Clemson the very next semester. She got in.”
Harvey and Lucinda Grantt were married in the fall of 1964. Upon Harvey’s graduation in 1965, he and Lucinda moved to Charlotte, N.C., where Lucinda completed her course work in applied mathematics and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from UNC-Charlotte. She later continued her education, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from the same school. Lucinda was business manager of East Towne Manor, an assisted-living facility in Charlotte, until her retirement.
Clemson University now includes the Harvey and Lucinda Gantt Multicultural Center, committed to creating diverse learning environments that enhance the intercultural competence of students. The center “supports and advocates for the needs of all students, challenges students to think critically about themselves and their communities, provides engaging experiential learning opportunities and empowers students to be positive change agents.”
Lucinda and Harvey Gantt currently reside in Charlotte, North Carolina and are the proud parents of four children;Sonja, Erika, Angela, and Adam.
