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href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-three-students-were-killed-police-today-few-remember-orangeburg-massacre-180968092/#0UzrlGK0jv7wmsTu.01">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-three-students-were-killed-police-today-few-remember-orangeburg-massacre-180968092/#0UzrlGK0jv7wmsTu.01</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">In 1968, Three Students Were Killed by
Police. Today, Few Remember the Orangeburg Massacre<br>
</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Lorraine Boissoneault -
February 7, 2018<br>
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<p>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,” <a
href="http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf"
target="_blank">Davis said</a>. “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.</p>
<p>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,”
<a
href="http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf"
target="_blank">writes Jack Bass</a> in his 1970 book
<a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Orangeburg-Massacre-Jack-Bass/dp/0865545529"
target="_blank"><em>The Orangeburg Massacre</em></a>.
Fifty years later, the events of the evening remain
contested, and no formal investigation into the incident
has ever been undertaken.</p>
<p>Although some news organizations, including the <em>Associated
Press</em>, 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 <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GR9FBTS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1"
target="_blank"><em>Blood and Bone: Truth and
Reconciliation in a Southern Town</em></a>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/43525464"
target="_blank">Tensions began to diffuse</a> 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 <a
href="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"
target="_blank">during a demonstration in 1963</a>,
causing injuries and illness. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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"
target="_blank">list of demands</a> 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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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, <a
href="http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro"
target="_blank">nine State Highway patrolmen opened
fire</a> on the unarmed students.</p>
<p>In the aftermath, many—including <a
href="http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro"
target="_blank">Governor McNair</a>—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,” <a
href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/43525464"
target="_blank">writes Reid Toth</a>.</p>
<p>Although the massacre earned some national media
attention, the stories disappeared quickly and many
contained significant errors. (The <a
href="http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf"
target="_blank"><em>Associated Press</em> reported</a>
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,” <a
href="http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/wp-content/uploads/Documenting_the_Orangeburg_Massacre.pdf"
target="_blank">wrote historian Dave Nolan</a>.</p>
<p>That’s not to say the massacre was forgotten by
African-American communities; it received widespread
coverage in the <em>Chicago Defender</em> and other
newspapers, <a
href="http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/orangeburg-massacre/oburg-intro"
target="_blank">prompted marches and vigils</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“I was targeted because of my work with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” <a
href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3133772"
target="_blank">Sellers said</a>. “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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.postandcourier.com/news/orangeburg-massacre-survivors-fight-for-remembrance-of-bloodiest-civil-rights/article_66cd9b1e-0604-11e8-a307-036240bdda75.html"
target="_blank">Bakari Sellers</a> (the son of
Cleveland Sellers) have gone unanswered.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/how-will-historically-black-colleges-fare-under-trump/520785/"
target="_blank">lack of funding</a> for historically
black colleges and universities as an indication that
historical amnesia has modern consequences.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
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