The red-brick Georgian-style home on a tree-lined street at the heart of the University of South Carolina campus has no sign posted yet. For the moment, it is as anonymous as the red-brick Dutch townhouse
where Anne Frank hid with her family from German soldiers. 

Opened on the eve of Yom Kippur this year, the new Anne Frank Center is dedicated to studying the legacy of the German-Dutch writer whose famous diary chronicled the two years she spent hiding in a secret annex in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Frank is being memorialized in the heart of the South as part of an educational effort to stem not only hatred of Jews, but bigotry, discrimination and racism more broadly.

The center is the brainchild of Doyle Stevick, associate professor of educational leadership at the university and an expert on Holocaust education. The center’s 1,060 square feet of exhibition space is interspersed with photos, timelines and references to the segregated South. 

With the opening of the center, funded by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the university and private donations, Stevick hopes it cements the university’s commitment to inclusion and civil society.