South Carolina is about to trade its all-male state Supreme court for an all-white one.

The General Assembly, which picks almost all state judges, is expected Wednesday to elevate Court of Appeals Judge Letitia Verdin to the high court. The white woman will take the seat of Chief Justice Don Beatty, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 72. Beatty is Black.

Verdin is the only candidate left after two others dropped out when they realized they couldn’t get enough votes in the 170-seat Legislature. One candidate was a Black woman and the other was a white man.

“She will be an excellent Supreme Court justice. I’m glad we now have that diversity present,” said Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine, an African American Democrat who was a law school classmate of Verdin. “But we shouldn’t trade diversity. We need to take a look across the court system.”

Over the past 17 years — and all but seven years since 1984 — South Carolina has had a Black judge on its highest court. Either a woman or a Black man has been chief justice for all but one of the past 30 years.

Ernest Finney became the state’s first African American circuit judge since Reconstruction in 1976. Eight years later, civil rights leaders hailed his ascension to the state Supreme Court.

It showed Black people have a presence at every level of the state court system, even if sometimes Finney was invited to speak in his role as a justice at private clubs that refused to admit African Americans.

“Not only did he do the job excellently, he elevated the reputation of the court system,” said attorney I.S. Leevy Johnson, who became the first Black House member since Reconstruction in 1971 and went on to become the first Black leader of the South Carolina Bar the same year Finney joined the Supreme Court.

“He gave confidence in the system to people of color who historically — since well before Dred Scott — have had no need to feel any confidence,” Johnson added, referencing the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared African Americans could not be citizens.

A number of Black lawyers followed Finney’s path. They, too, have been reaching retirement age. Just 13% of the judges in the trial and appellate courts are Black in a state where 27% of the population is Black. Just one judge of color, a Black man, is on the nine-judge state Court of Appeals, which is often the training ground for the Supreme Court.