[News] Orangeburg Massacre stirs debate 44 years later

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Orangeburg Massacre stirs debate 44 years later


      by Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY


http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012/09/21/orangeburg-massacre-stirs-debate-44-years-later/57817944/1

Cleveland Sellers saw plenty of civil rights protests throughout the 
South as program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating 
Committee in the 1960s. When he arrived at South Carolina State College 
in Orangeburg in 1968, he thought it was time to quietly work for his 
degree.

On Feb. 8, the quiet ended.

Sellers joined a demonstration against a segregated bowling alley that 
ended with 30 unarmed black students shot by white police, three of them 
fatally. Sellers was wounded in the armpit.

It was the most brutal response yet to student protests that would 
change the nation, yet for decades it got little attention. Now, 
scholars and people like Sellers with first-hand accounts are changing that.

Today, academics, students and others meet in South Carolina for a 
three-day conference at the College of Charleston. They'll discuss the 
black power movement and the legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers 
is one of the speakers.

The conference comes after a 2002 book, /The Orangeburg Massacre/, by 
journalists Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, and a 2010 documentary,/Scarred 
Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968/.

"South Carolina State was the first time ever in the history of America 
that a college student had been killed on their campus for doing 
absolutely nothing," says Sellers, now president of Voorhees College in 
Denmark, S.C.

What bothers Sellers and other scholars is that the Orangeburg Massacre, 
as it is now known, happened two years before the May 4, 1970, Kent 
State shootings, when National Guardsmen shot into an anti-war protest 
on the Ohio campus, killing four. Yet Orangeburg never received anywhere 
near the attention.

"It's still a sore spot for people here, when you talk about a massacre 
of students, how it never reached the level of a Kent State," says 
Patricia Lessane, executive director of the Avery Research Center, which 
is hosting the conference.

"This was an example of people who were saying, 'Enough is enough,' " 
she says. "We hear about Selma and other places," referring to the March 
7, 1965, attack on voting rights protesters in the Alabama city, "but 
you don't hear about Orangeburg."

Sellers, who went to prison on a rioting conviction, says, "I think the 
Orangeburg Massacre goes down besides the martyrs of the 16th Street 
Baptist Church, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner and many others," 
referring to the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964.

"The legacy is that there were other martyrs just like the ones we know 
about that got slid off to the side of history and weren't well 
recognized because South Carolina refused for a long time to address 
those kinds of issues."

Orangeburg is a city of 14,000 about 40 miles southeast of Columbia, the 
state capital. Its website boasts it is where 600 Confederate soldiers 
temporarily blocked the advance of the Union army. It also has two 
historically black schools across the street from one another: South 
Carolina State and Claflin University.

Over the years, most places in town had been integrated, but the All 
Star Bowling Lanes still wouldn't serve African Americans, says John 
Stroman, then a student organizer and a junior at South Carolina State. 
Today, the retired teacher is 69 and still lives in Orangeburg.

On Feb. 6, 1968, Stroman and other students went to the bowling alley 
and sat down at the counter but were ignored. One touched a salt shaker 
and the wife of owner Harry Floyd, now dead,threw it away, Stroman says. 
Everything they touched got tossed, he says.

"I hugged the jukebox and I said, 'Now throw this in the trash can,' " 
Stroman recalls. "Harry got peeved and said, 'I'm going to call the 
police.' "

On the second night, state and local police met the students. More than 
a dozen were arrested, bloodied students went to the infirmary, and 
other students threw bricks and rocks at stores.

On the third night, the weather had cooled to freezing and the students 
lit a bonfire just off campus, When a firetruck was called in and state 
police followed, about 100 students retreated to campus, according to 
Bass. Accounts vary, but many say a banister thrown from a building hit 
a state trooper in the head. A few minutes later, about 70 law 
enforcement officers opened fire with carbines, pistols and riot guns 
loaded with buckshot. The shooting lasted about 10 seconds.

"When I heard the first shot go off, I looked to see if they were really 
shooting," Sellers said. "The area in front of the police was all lit 
up. There was smoke still billowing out from the bonfire."

He hit the ground.

"I could feel when I got hit," Sellers said. "It was a burning sensation."

Many people were shot in the back or the bottom of the feet as they 
scrambled away from the police gunfire.

This was the segregation era. No ambulances came. With a gunshot wound 
under his left arm , Sellers dragged injured students to the infirmary. 
"They were hurt real bad and that's the only way they could have gotten 
back over there," he says.

ROTC student Henry Smith had five gunshots. He died at the hospital. 
Freshman football player Sam Hammond died on the floor of the college 
infirmary.

High school student Delano Middleton, shot in the chest, was a regular 
on the campus because his mother was a cleaner there and because he 
liked the grilled cheese sandwiches at the cafeteria, says Scarred 
Justice filmmaker Judy Richardson.

Middleton's mother appeared at his side at the hospital and he took her 
hand, Richardson recounts from interviews she did for the documentary.

He told his mother, " 'You've been a good mama but I'm going to leave 
you now.' She starts saying, 'The Lord is my shepherd... ' He repeats it 
and says, 'Thank you mama, I feel so much better now.' "

Then he died.

Despite news accounts of heavy gunfire, investigations later revealed 
that the students were not armed.

At first, Sellers was charged with five felonies, but they were whittled 
down to one: rioting.

"They convicted me of riot, one-man riot," he says bitterly.

He served seven months at hard labor of a one-year sentence.

In 1993, the state pardons board pardoned him, clearing his felony record.

"I have moved on and I have forgiven those folks who perpetuated this, 
but I can't forget it," he says. "You don't necessarily have to get 
consumed by your bitterness and the attitudes that you might have 
developed in being treated in this manner. I was obviously targeted and 
I survived it, but I wanted to leave a legacy for other youngsters."

*Campus shootings involving law enforcement*

The 1970 shootings at Kent State University in Ohio have been heavily 
discussed through history. But the Orangeburg Massacre and other 
incidents are not as well known:

-- Riots, Texas Southern University, Houston, May 17, 1967, one police 
officer died in clashes sparked by a false rumor that a black boy had 
been shot by white police.

-- The Orangeburg Massacre, South Carolina State College, Orangeburg, 
S.C., Feb. 8, 1968, two college students and a high school student died 
in clashes that erupted after students tried to integrate a local 
bowling alley.

-- The Greensboro Uprising, Greensboro, N.C., May 21-24, 1969, a North 
Carolina A&T State University sophomore died in clashes between 
university and high school students and authorities after the high 
school blocked a black student from running for student body president.

-- Kent State shootings, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970, 
four students died after the National Guard opened fire on an anti-war 
protest.

-- Jackson State shootings, Jackson State College, Jackson, Miss., May 
14, 1970, two students died after police opened fire on a group of 
students gathered on a street that cut through campus, after students 
protested white motorists taunting black students.

/Sources: Civil Rights Greensboro project; Kent State University, 
published reports/

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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