[News] In 1968, Three Students Were Killed by Police. Today, Few Remember the Orangeburg Massacre

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-three-students-were-killed-police-today-few-remember-orangeburg-massacre-180968092/#0UzrlGK0jv7wmsTu.01 



  In 1968, Three Students Were Killed by Police. Today, Few Remember the
  Orangeburg Massacre

Lorraine Boissoneault - February 7, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recalling the event decades later, Robert Lee Davis remembered the 
chaotic noise and fear that permeated the night of February 8, 1968. 
“Students were hollering, yelling and running,” Davis said 
<http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf>. 
“I went into a slope near the front end of the campus and I kneeled 
down. I got up to run, and I took one step; that’s all I can remember. I 
got hit in the back.” He was among the 28 students of South Carolina 
State College injured that day in the Orangeburg Massacre; his friend, 
freshman Samuel Hammond, who had also been shot in the back, died of his 
wounds. Later that night, Delano Middleton and Henry Smith would also 
die; all three killed by the police were only 18 years old.

Despite being the first deadly confrontation between university students 
and law enforcement in United States history, the Orangeburg Massacre is 
a rarely remembered tragedy. Occurring two years before the better-known 
Kent State University shootings, and two months before the assassination 
of Martin Luther King, Jr., the incident “barely penetrated the nation’s 
consciousness,” writes Jack Bass 
<http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf> 
in his 1970 book /The Orangeburg Massacre/ 
<https://www.amazon.com/Orangeburg-Massacre-Jack-Bass/dp/0865545529>. 
Fifty years later, the events of the evening remain contested, and no 
formal investigation into the incident has ever been undertaken.

Although some news organizations, including the /Associated Press/, 
characterized the shootings as a “riot” at the time, the Orangeburg 
massacre came after a long series of clashes with local law enforcement 
and politicians. The city, located between Columbia and Charleston, had 
about 14,000 residents at the time of the killing. Home to South 
Carolina State College (today South Carolina State University) and 
Claflin College, both HBCUs, Orangeburg “played a really important role 
in the activism happening throughout South Carolina,” says Jack Shuler, 
a professor of English at Denison University and the author of /Blood 
and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town/ 
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GR9FBTS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1>.

King himself came through the town on multiple occasions to deliver 
speeches, students protested for desegregation, and pastors worked to 
foster change throughout the community, Shuler says. “The massacre 
wasn’t just a random thing that happened. It was part of the longer 
story, which goes back to the founding of the community.”

By the winter of 1968, students at the two colleges set their sights on 
one particular target: All-Star Bowling Lanes, owned by white proprietor 
Harry Floyd. Despite the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which 
outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national 
origin, Floyd continued to refuse African-Americans service. On February 
5, a group of students went to the bowling alley and defiantly sat at 
the lunch counter until the police were called and the business closed 
early.

The next day, the students returned and again entered the bowling alley, 
whereupon 15 of them were arrested. Hearing word of the arrests, 
hundreds of students poured into a parking lot nearby. Orangeburg police 
officers and state troopers confronted the growing crowd. Tensions began 
to diffuse <http://www.jstor.org/stable/43525464> once the arrested 
students were told they’d be freed, but at just that moment a fire truck 
arrived, causing new pandemonium. As civil rights activist and 
university educator Cleveland Sellers wrote in his autobiography, the 
fire truck suggested to the crowd that the authorities were ramping up 
their efforts because the powerful hoses had been turned on them during 
a demonstration in 1963 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=t-Z8Xe5XMqsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orangeburg+massacre&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiohOeCrY_ZAhVs7oMKHX6CB_sQ6AEIQTAF#v=onepage&q=orangeburg%20massacre&f=false>, 
causing injuries and illness.

Pushed against the front doors of the bowling alley in their panic, the 
students knocked in a glass pane and were immediately set upon by the 
police officers, who brutally beat several young women. As the students 
fled for their respective campuses, several broke shop windows and 
defaced cars along the way.

By February 7, Orangeburg mayor E.O. Pendarvis agreed to address the 
students. Although the meeting was largely unproductive, the mayor did 
agree to share the students’ requests with the city council. Among their 
list of demands 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=t-Z8Xe5XMqsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=orangeburg+massacre&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiohOeCrY_ZAhVs7oMKHX6CB_sQ6AEIQTAF#v=onepage&q=orangeburg%20massacre&f=false> 
were a call to end police brutality, a commission on fair employment in 
Orangeburg, the elimination of discrimination in public services like 
doctors’ offices, and the creation of a biracial human relations 
committee. But South Carolina governor Robert McNair had already called 
in the National Guard, further escalating the sense of impending disaster.

“Had this been a protest at Clemson or University of South Carolina [two 
mostly white schools that had only integrated five years prior], I have 
no doubt that the governor wouldn’t order in the National Guard,” says 
Reid Toth, associate professor of criminal justice at University of 
South Carolina Upstate. “If you had a group of white students marching 
the streets in protest of integrating, you wouldn’t have seen the 
governor sending in the National Guard. It comes down to a terrible part 
of the history of my home state, which I love, but is still to this day 
battling the same sense of fear—that black people are dangerous.”

On the night of February 8, more than 100 students gathered on the South 
Carolina State campus College and began shouting at the armed officers 
stationed around them. While some students chanted “black power,” others 
began singing “We Shall Overcome.” When the students lit a bonfire to 
keep warm, patrolmen again called in a fire truck, exacerbating 
tensions. Then, at 10:30 p.m., patrolman David Shealy was injured when 
someone tossed a foreign object (what it was, whether a banister or 
something smaller, is contested) that hit him in the face. Minutes 
later, nine State Highway patrolmen opened fire 
<http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro> 
on the unarmed students.

In the aftermath, many—including Governor McNair 
<http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro>—argued 
the students had began shooting first, despite there being no evidence 
that any students had firearms. Not only were the patrolmen using much 
higher caliber ammunition than called for (the standard practice for 
dispersing riots was to use birdshot, while the officers here used the 
much larger double-ought buckshot), but the vast majority of students 
were injured in a way that indicated they were attempting to flee. All 
but two “had been shot in the back, side, or through the soles of their 
feet,” writes Reid Toth <http://www.jstor.org/stable/43525464>.

Although the massacre earned some national media attention, the stories 
disappeared quickly and many contained significant errors. (The 
/Associated Press/ reported 
<http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf> 
the incident included “a heavy exchange of gunfire” and never issued a 
correction.) “This was 1968, not 1964, and in the intervening years 
civil rights demonstrations had come to be seen as ‘riots’—and most 
whites seemed to feel that it was justified to put them down as brutally 
as possible,” wrote historian Dave Nolan 
<http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf>.

That’s not to say the massacre was forgotten by African-American 
communities; it received widespread coverage in the /Chicago Defender/ 
and other newspapers, prompted marches and vigils 
<http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro> 
at the University of Chicago and other South Carolina HBCUs, and led 
white students at a meeting of the National Student Association to 
organize “white alert teams” to act as buffers between black students 
and law officers.

As for the nine patrolmen who opened fire, they were exonerated of all 
charges in a 1969 trial. The only person convicted of any charges in 
association with the massacre was Sellers, the activist who had been 
shot while on campus. He spent seven months in state penitentiary for 
inciting the protests and wasn’t pardoned until 25 years later.

“I was targeted because of my work with the Student Nonviolent 
Coordinating Committee,” Sellers said 
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3133772>. “I was on the FBI’s militant 
radical list. The jury at my trial had two African-Americans but their 
only possible verdict (in order to remain in South Carolina) was 
‘guilty.’ South Carolina was known for forcing uppity blacks to flee.”

In 2001, South Carolina governor Jim Hodges apologized on behalf of the 
state, and Orangeburg mayor Paul Miller issued another apology from the 
city in 2009. But calls for a formal state investigation of the incident 
by state legislators like Bakari Sellers 
<https://www.postandcourier.com/news/orangeburg-massacre-survivors-fight-for-remembrance-of-bloodiest-civil-rights/article_66cd9b1e-0604-11e8-a307-036240bdda75.html> 
(the son of Cleveland Sellers) have gone unanswered.

For Toth, the repercussions of forgetting such important aspects of the 
state’s history are larger than the neglect felt by the victims and 
their families; they become systemic issues. She points to a lack of 
funding 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/how-will-historically-black-colleges-fare-under-trump/520785/> 
for historically black colleges and universities as an indication that 
historical amnesia has modern consequences.

“That is part of the overall benign neglect of failing to address 
events, whether they’re positive or negative, that impact the black 
community,” Toth says. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do as a 
scholar is write research on this topic as a non-emotional objective 
academic, because we should know the names of the three gentlemen who 
were shot just as we know those in Mississippi Burning and Kent State.”

-- 
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