Randolph Cemetery

Randolph Cemetery, founded in 1871, was one of the first black cemeteries in Columbia. It was named for Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a black state senator assassinated in 1868 near Hodges in Abbeville County. A native of Kentucky and a free black before the Civil War, Randolph had been a chaplain in the Union Army, an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a newspaper publisher before he was elected to represent Orangeburg County in the S.C. Senate in 1868. Eight other black lawmakers from the Reconstruction era are buried there: Henry Cardozo, William Fabriel Myers, William Beverly Nash, Robert John Palmer, William M. Simons, Samuel Benjamin Thompson, Charles McDuffie Wilder, and Lucius W. Wimbush. Randolph Cemetery was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.

Columbia, South Carolina · United States