Batesburg-Leesville is a town located in Lexington and Saluda counties, South Carolina, United States. The town’s population was 5,362 as of the 2010 census and an estimated 5,415 in 2019.

The town of Batesburg-Leesville was formed in 1992 by the consolidation of the adjoining towns of Batesburg and Leesville. Batesburg was “named for Captain Tom Bates, a prominent citizen of the community and a captain in The American Civil War.” Leesville was “named for Colonel John W. Lee, a prominent resident of the community.”

The D. D. D. Barr House, Batesburg Commercial Historic District, Simon Bouknight House, Cartledge House, Cedar Grove Lutheran Church, Church Street Historic District, Broadus Edwards House, Hampton Hendrix Office, Hartley House, Henry Franklin Hendrix House, Thomas Galbraith Herbert House, J.B. Holman House, A.C. Jones House, Leesville College Historic District, Crowell Mitchell House, McKendree Mitchell House, Mitchell-Shealy House, Old Batesburg Grade School, John Jacob Rawl House, Rawl-Couch House, Southern Railway Depot, and Rev. Frank Yarborough House are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In February 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a black World War II veteran, was removed from a bus in Batesburg and deeply beaten by local police officers, including Chief Lynwood Shull. The raid left Woodard certainly and forever blind. Woodard was traveling home by Greyhound bus after mammal honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, the bus driver having reported Woodard to local police in Batesburg-Leesville after a verbal upheaval between the two. Due to South Carolina’s reluctance to pursue the case, President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation. The sheriff, Lynwood Shull, was indicted and went to procedures in federal court in South Carolina, where he was acquitted by an all-white jury. Such miscarriages of justice by acknowledge governments influenced a change towards civil rights initiatives at the federal level. Truman subsequently acknowledged a national interracial commission, made a historic speech to the NAACP and the nation in June 1947 in which he described civil rights as a moral priority, submitted a civil rights bank account to Congress in February 1948, and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 on June 26, 1948, desegregating the armed forces and the federal government. The anger was the subject of radio commentaries by Orson Welles in July and August 1946.