The Orangeburg Massacre Occurred 53 Years Ago Today

By Frank Beacham

Racism is a very ugly thing. It escalated in the era of Trump, usually disguised as a public safety issue against immigrants or open prejudice against countries that the president deemed inferior. It will take a long time to undo the damage.

In the 1950s and 60s, racism took another form. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.

Today, the only difference is that police and racial beatings are often caught on video made by bystanders with iPhones. Law enforcement can’t deny the video, and more and more policemen are brought to justice.

The federal government — though on-board to stop racism in the late 1960s — still played catch-up in going to court to address the many civil rights violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.

One of those glitches — this time over a segregated bowling alley — happened in 1968 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a town founded on slavery 400 years ago. The Ku Klux Klan and lynchings prevailed there during the Jim Crow years. But in 1968, before Kent State, there was the Orangeburg Massacre, the first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus.

On February 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today — white highway patrolmen killed three black college students and wounded 27 others at South Carolina State College. It was state-sanctioned murder and the cover-up still continues.

In 1968, a loophole in the Civil Rights Act passed four years earlier led to some delay in forcing All Star Bowling Lanes to admit blacks. With two black colleges in Orangeburg and nowhere else to bowl, the bowling alley became a target for civil rights advocates. The black students at the colleges wanted to bowl there and staged a demonstration.

A conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto the campus of South Carolina State College.

All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.

Until the shooting, South Carolina was a southern state that had proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. It was all really a charade. Nonviolence in South Carolina was equated with racial harmony in a white community with a paternalistic attitude toward its poorer black citizens. Equal rights were another thing.

To help protect its “progressive” self-image on racial issues, a web of official deceptions was created by South Carolina’s young governor — Robert McNair — and his administration to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg.

The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the college. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense in order to protect themselves from a attacking mob of students.

To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.

Time would prove none of it was true. At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, upon outside scrutiny, it began to unravel. Then, with his legacy threatened, McNair broke nearly forty years of silence in 2006 in an attempt to put the pieces back together.

Ignoring facts proven over the years in court cases and through the first person accounts of eyewitnesses, McNair used local media and friendly “historians” as a tool to help members of his community lie to themselves about their own history.

In the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.

Ramsey Clark, who was U.S. Attorney General in 1968, knows the truth and minced no words in an interview with me about what happened there.

“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Clark. “The police lost their self control. They just started shooting. It was a slaughter. Double ought buckshot is what you use for deer. It’s meant to kill. One guy emptied his service revolver. That takes a lot of shooting. The (students) are running away. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow! My God, there’s a murderous intent there. We are lucky more weren’t killed.”

Clark told me the student deaths were caused by police criminal acts. “The provocation for the incident was an absurd, provocative display of force,” he said.

Gov. McNair responded to Orangeburg with excessive police power because that was the politically expedient thing to do in 1968, the former attorney general said.

“Fear, anger, a sense of self-righteousness to justify hating began to be seen as successful politics.” When the tactic backfired, Clark added, state officials fabricated stories that many South Carolinians believe to this day.

So, after 53 years, the story of the Orangeburg Massacre still simmers, unresolved. It is the chilling saga of the horrors of law enforcement motivated by racism and hatred — and the inability of a Southern state to admit the truth.

The central theme is “mendacity,” the web of lies a community spins in a desperate attempt to maintain it’s self-image and dignity when confronted by its own prejudice. It’s a culture where words are constantly being rede?ned in order that a people can more comfortably deceive themselves.

Today, racism has been dressed up and made more sophisticated by the policies of a Republican-controlled legislature that still refuses to even investigate the massacre. The sad story is after a half a century, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.

The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting is in my book, “Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem and Murder.”