Robert Smalls is not a random, atomized individual. He has an important context that should not be glossed over.
I say this knowing how desperate conservatives are to gloss it over. It's why you guys are implementing anti-CRT laws in state after state.
The context is Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans you guys wish to sweep under the rug in favor of touting predators of children like Strom Thurmond, and the viciousness of anti-Reconstructionism in South Carolina.
From your link:
Smalls was a delegate at the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention where he was a part of the effort to make free, compulsory schooling available to all South Carolina children.[20] He also served as a delegate at several Republican National Conventions; he also participated in the South Carolina Republican State conventions.
In 1868, Smalls was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. He was very effective, and introduced the Homestead Act and introduced and worked to pass the Civil Rights bill. In 1870, Jonathan Jasper Wright was elected judge of the South Carolina Supreme Court and Smalls was elected to fill his unexpired time in the Senate. He continued in the Senate, winning the 1872 election against W. J. Whipper. In the senate he was considered a very good speaker and debater. He was on the Finance Committee and chairman of the Public Printing Committee.[32][20]
Conservative whites in your state formed the KKK the same year DIRECTLY because of the successes of guys like Smalls.
"The K. K. Alphabet": Secret Communication and Coordination of the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas - Civil War Era Journal/JSTOR
Abstract
This article explores the story behind a ciphered letter sent from two brothers, Johnston Jones in North Carolina to Iredell Jones in South Carolina, both members of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. The letter and a few accompanying documents generated by fellow members of the Klan suggest that the Klan was not exclusively an organic and isolated movement. Rather, conservative white southern elites, connected by ties of Confederate service and family, engaged in a clandestine campaign of organizing against the interracial politics of Reconstruction. Recalibrating our conception of the extent to which the Ku Klux Klan was coordinated provides a more accurate understanding of the ways white supremacist vigilante violence was used to shut down interracial political opportunities after emancipation.
No Black person, including Rep. Smalls, would have suffered or endured so much if not for the vicious political behavior of conservative whites, who worked to keep Black people either nominally enslaved, legally subservient, or preferably both.