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<font face="Verdana" size=2>May 24 / 25, 2008<br>
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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner05242008.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner05242008.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b><i>Student
Masscare in South Carolina, 40 Years Later <br><br>
</i></font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
<b>Orangeburg, 1968
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By FRED
GARDNER <br><br>
</font><font size=6 color="#990000">F</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>
orty years ago on the campus of South Carolina State College, which is in
the city of Orangeburg, three students were killed and 27 wounded when
police fired into a group expressing outrage over the exclusion of Black
people from the only bowling alley in town. It was night, the assignment
editors hadn't anticipated such violence, there was no TV coverage. The
Associated Press falsely reported in a story carried by papers around the
country that there had been "an exchange of gunfire," as if the
students had fired at the police. The AP never ran a correction.
<br><br>
Two documentaries about the Orangeburg massacre are due out soon.
According to a New York Times story April 18, filmmaker Dan Klores has
been "thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the historical
memory for decades." Me, too. <br><br>
In February '68 I was running a coffeehouse called The UFO on Main St. in
Columbia, South Carolina, that was patronized by GIs from Fort Jackson
(black and white) and some students from the university. One day
Cleveland Sellers, an organizer from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, came to see our place and to discuss the possibility of doing
something in concert -an action that would link domestic injustice and
overseas intervention. <br><br>
While he was at the UFO, Sellers got word to hurry back to Orangeburg
because things were getting heavy. I drove him the 40 miles and hung out
at a soul food café as evening fell and the sounds of confrontation
escalated -breaking glass, screeching tires, people running down the
street full tilt, shouts of "Honky" and
"Motherfucker." The shooting hadn't started when I decided to
head back to the UFO. Cleveland Sellers would catch a bullet in the
arm, get arrested, and be castigated as the "outside agitator"
who had caused all the trouble. (Sellers grew up and went to high school
in Denmark, SC, which is 20 miles from Orangeburg.) The cops who
fired on unarmed students would be charged with civil rights violations
and acquitted. Only Cleve did time (for inciting to riot and riot).
<br><br>
Although the media coverage was generally scant and misleading, two
reporters -Jack Bass of the Charlotte Observer and Jack Nelson of the Los
Angeles Times- filed thorough, accurate stories, and then wrote a book,
"The Orangeburg Massacre" (World Publishing, 1970). The
introduction by Thomas Pettigrew discusses why what happened in
Orangeburg got downplayed in America. It wasn't the number of
casualties, Pettigrew observed: "Recall the intense interest in the
triple civil rights murders near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few years
before..." Nor was it Governor Robert McNair's defense of the
cops: "Was Governor George Wallace's explanation for the Selma
bridge brutality in 1965 taken seriously?" <br><br>
The key factor, according to Pettigrew: "Orangeburg followed a
succession of race riots in major northern cities... White America was
frightened and its mood shifted. The Bull Connors and Sheriff Clarks who
had served as the racial villains in the early 1960s were being replaced
by the Rap Browns and the Panthers." This is undoubtedly true. But
'White America' isn't monolithic, and the decision-making elites felt
threatened not so much by Black Power rhetoric and inner-city looting as
by the movement's internationalist tendencies and growing opposition to
the war in Viet Nam. This was certainly true of the ruling elite in South
Carolina, which included the head of the House Armed Services Committee,
L. Mendel Rivers, and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Strom Thurmond. <br><br>
Martin Luther King was killed in April '68 after he had begun calling for
an end to U.S. intervention in Viet Nam. I think something analogous was
a factor in the Orangeburg massacre. There was something in the air in
early '68 -the vague prospect of the civil rights movement and the peace
movement merging. Cleveland Sellers personified this possibility.
He had been drafted in retaliation for his civil rights work and had
refused induction. He was under surveillance from both the FBI and
the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED). He asked black GIs what they
thought they were fighting for in Viet Nam. He certainly was not
directing the protests in Orangeburg. The outraged students had their own
leaders, including several ROTC cadets. Their confrontation with the
police escalated while Sellers was out of town.<br><br>
It was SLED Chief J.P. Strom, with the unwavering backing of Gov. Robert
McNair (considered a "moderate" on racial matters among
southern governors), who led the small army that moved in on the South
Carolina State campus. "There were 66 patrolmen backed up by 45
National Guardsmen armed with M-1 rifles and fixed bayonets,"
according to Bass and Nelson. "In addition, some of the 25 SLED
agents in the area, several members of Orangeburg's 28-man police force,
and several sheriff's deputies were nearby. At the moment of ultimate
confrontation there were about as many lawmen and Guardsmen as there were
students. In addition, 61 other state patrolmen and 395 other National
Guardsmen were on duty in Orangeburg that night." <br><br>
The state patrolmen had .38 caliber pistols. Many had been issued
shotguns loaded with deadly double-ought buckshot. Some had carbines.
Strom's whole tactical approach -the number of troopers massed, the level
of firepower, the decision to confront and push back the students (whose
ultimate acting-out was to light a bonfire on campus)- virtually
guaranteed that deadly mayhem would ensue. <br><br>
Bass and Nelson provide a small piece of indirect, circumstantial
evidence suggesting that the men responsible for the Orangeburg massacre
were influenced by their obeisance to the military: "Strom had been
a central figure in South Carolina's record of racial peace... In 1964 he
coolly handled an explosive situation that occurred when an integrated
group of college students showed up to picket George Wallace at Columbia
Municipal Airport." On that occasion Strom ordered the
pro-Wallace crowd to back off when they threatened to attack the
protestors. <br><br>
But in May ‘67 later Strom showed "less tolerance when antiwar
demonstrators protested at the University of South Carolina over the
granting of an honorary degree to General William Westmoreland, a South
Carolina native then in command of United States troops in Vietnam. Strom
ordered pickets hustled away from the campus chapel, where the ceremony
was being held... Asked later why police moved against the pickets, who
had been peaceful, Strom indicated that the governor wanted no antiwar
demonstrations to mar the ceremony." <br><br>
The Orangeburg Massacre took place February 8, 1968. The students who
lost their whole, promising lives were Samuel Hammond (shot in the back),
Henry Smith (shot five times), and Delano Middleton (a high school
student whose mother worked as a maid at the college, shot seven
times). <br><br>
<br><br>
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