Holly Scott, the oldest of 15 children, was born and raised in the rural town of Eastover, South Carolina. After graduating as valedictorian of Webber High School in the early 1950s, she enrolled in the Columbia Hospital School of Nursing, which was first established in September of 1935 at the corner of Laurens and Washington Streets as the School of Nursing for Black Students. When it eventually closed in 1965, the school had graduated a total of 401 nurses in its history, including Holly Scott.
In 1960, Scott became the second African American to work at Columbia’s VA Hospital, where she faithfully served until 1992. In 2024, she was joined by her daughter, Bernardine Cobb, and her granddaughter, Christina Freeman, at StoryCorps to talk about her experiences in nursing school and the era of racial integration within South Carolina’s healthcare industry.
TRANSCRIPT:…