South Carolina State University marks anniversary of Orangeburg Massacre
- Sacramento Living - Sacramento Food and Wine, Home, Health
COLUMBIA, S.C -- COLUMBIA, S.C. - As South Carolina State University
marks the 43rd anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre on Tuesday, new
book and movie projects suggest the passage of four decades has
heightened, rather than diminished, the intrigue surrounding the state's
deadliest civil rights incident.
Three students were killed and 28 wounded during the Feb. 8, 1968,
standoff between students, angry over the segregation of Orangeburg's
only bowling alley, and South Carolina highway patrolmen massed near the
campus.
"It's about accounting for history," said Jack Shuler, a Denison
University professor and Orangeburg native whose new book, "Blood and
Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town," will be published by
the University of South Carolina Press in 2012. "After interviewing
people whose lives have been transformed by what happened on that one
night, that one night, in 1968, and learning how that changed them so
much, I know you cannot bury things."
Frank Beacham, an independent writer in New York, also is pitching his
idea for a feature film about Orangeburg that deals less with the
conflicting accounts of what happened and who is to blame than why the
incident still looms large in the minds of so many.
"As time goes on, you have to ask, why does this story continue?" he
said Monday. "There is something to it that is greater than the shooting
in 1968."
That "something," he believes, is rooted in the mind set of some white
Southerners who are still enamored with the Confederate flag and
nostalgia for the Old South, although many believe the state has made
great progress in analyzing the incident.
"I've sort of left the details of the story behind, and now I'm more
interested in the South's seeming inability to deal with it," said
Beacham, who has written accounts of the burning of a Myrtle Beach,
S.C., nightclub by the Ku Klux Klan and the 1934 labor violence in his
native Honea Path, S.C. Shuler, 34, said he only began paying serious
attention to the Orangeburg shootings, which happened six years before
his birth, when he moved away from South Carolina to attend graduate
school in New York.
Shortly after 9/11, he picked up the "The Orangeburg Massacre," the
definitive account written by reporters Jack Bass and Jack Nelson.
"After the violence I witnessed on 9/11, it was kind of intense to
witness violence in your own hometown," Shuler said Monday. Shuler, who
is white, calls his book part memoir and part history. "I wrote it
honestly, and I wanted to be honest with myself and with my readers. I
am very much a part of the narrative because I am very much wrapped up
in what happened," he said. "Part of the story for me is my great-uncle
was a highway patrolman."
Shuler's relative was positioned on U.S. 301, away from the escalating
action that took place the night of Feb. 8. That's when students, who
had been protesting for several days, massed at the campus entrance,
started a bonfire, and began taunting patrolmen and National Guard
officers barricaded across the street.
One officer was struck by a flying banister, torn from a nearby house,
prompting officers to fire into the air and into the crowd of students,
who turned and fled into the dark.
Two South Carolina.State students, Samuel Hammond and Henry Smith, and a
high school student, Delano Middleton, lay dead, and 28 others were
wounded.
Most sustained shots to the back and in the soles of their feet.
Then-Gov. Robert McNair, a progressive New South governor who had
ordered the Highway Patrol and National Guard to Orangeburg in the days
leading up to the violence, lamented the shootings and called Feb. 8
"one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina."
But he also blamed the shootings on "outside agitators" who he believed
had incited the students.
Cleveland Sellers, field coordinator for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and a South Carolina native, was arrested for
allegedly inciting the riot. He denied the accusations but served seven
months in prison on a misdemeanor conviction of rioting. Sellers, now
president of Voorhees College, was issued a pardon in 1993.
Nine highway patrolmen who admitted firing into the crowd of students
were tried on federal charges of imposing summary punishment without due
process of law and acquitted.
Shuler said Monday he had no intention of trying "to crack the case,"
but he hopes his interviews with about 37 people will shed light on the
perception of the incident since then.
"I think I went into the project with a lot of assumptions and was
surprised by the care and commitment of the Orangeburg community," he
said.
Bill Hine, a South Carolina State history professor, said the Shuler
book has the potential to promote the kind of healing that has been
evident in the last decade as more people have spoken about their
perspectives on the shootings.
"It's not so much (his) historical research that has unearthed any new
evidence and information, but in the sense of the community coming
together," Hine said.
A turning point in the public discussion came when former Gov. Jim
Hodges, addressing the 1991 commemoration, expressed "deep regret."
Both Shuler and Beacham have added new voices to the conversation,
including that of George Dean, then the only black member of the South
Carolina National Guard. In interviews, Dean spoke of the heightened,
overblown tensions among his white superiors and of his decision to meet
with South Carolina State President Maceo Nance, when he urged the
president to keep the students off the streets that night.
Beacham said he is working with producer Nick Grillo on a proposal to
produce a feature film that would examine the 1968 clash and the racial
climate of the era. He is a tough critic of his home state and believes
the time will come when the full story will be told.
"It will be resolved," Beacham said, "perhaps not in my lifetime or
yours, but I suspect at some point, when all of the people have died, it
will come to some kind of resolution. But it hasn't yet."
--
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/02/07/3384716/south-carolina-state-university.html
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