S.C. lawmakers Wednesday settled a closely watched judicial race with racial overtones, promoting a black Circuit Court judge to the state's second-highest court.

Lawmakers elected Donald Beatty of Spartanburg, 50, to fill the Court of Appeals seat of Jasper Cureton, 64, who is retiring June 30.

Cureton, of Richland County, is the state's highest-ranking black judge.

Beatty narrowly defeated Family Court Judge Bruce Williams, 47, of Columbia, who is white. The vote was 84-78.

During Wednesday's joint session, lawmakers also elected 15 unopposed judicial candidates. Two of them - Reginald Lloyd and Clifton Newman - are black.

Black legislators say blacks are underrepresented on the bench statewide. In Wednesday's elections, they focused their attention on the race for Cureton's seat.

Sen. Kay Patterson, D-Richland, said he's pleased with Beatty's election, but more work is needed.

"We need to move beyond tokenism and get our fair share of judges," he said. "We've got only a few black Circuit Court judges."

Lloyd, a Columbia lawyer who was the only candidate for an at-large Circuit Court seat, said he would like to see more minority and women judges.

But the Legislature "as a whole has been concerned about that, and they're setting standards high," said Lloyd, former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.

Beatty declined to discuss the issue, saying only, "It was a hard-fought race, and I'm appreciative of those folks who worked hard for me."

Williams, his challenger, was unavailable for comment.

Of 111 appellate, circuit and family court judges statewide, only eight (about 7 percent), are black, including those elected Wednesday, state Office of Court Administration records show. About 30 percent of the state's population is black.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal, who attended Wednesday's elections, said the state's courts need to be more diverse. She thinks Beatty is "going to be one of the great ones."

Citing a speech she made last year to lawmakers, Toal said more blacks won't be elected to the bench until there are more black graduates from the state's only law school, at USC.

In that speech, Toal pointed out that of the approximately 10,500 lawyers licensed in South Carolina, about 6 percent are black. At USC's law school at the time, about 9 percent of the student body was black, she said.

Besides electing Beatty and Lloyd, lawmakers on Wednesday also elected unopposed candidates to the following seats:

• Court of Appeals - Chief Judge Kaye Hearn

• Administrative Law Judge - Ray Stevens

• Circuit Court - James Barber, G. Thomas Cooper, R. Markley Dennis, Kenneth Goode, Jackson Gregory, J. Mark Hayes, James Lockemy, J. Cordell Maddox, John Milling, Clifton Newman, Larry Patterson, Paula Thomas.