Shootings on Black College Campuses
April 17, 2008
Rhonda M. Cartwright, BA, M.L.S
While visiting one of my links, I stumbled upon a very interesting piece of history that I knew nothing about, school shootings at HBCU’s during the late 60’s/early 70’s. We hear a great deal about the shootings that took place at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio as a result on ongoing Vietnam War protests. Well, the same things were happening on Black campuses but in protest of Jim Crow and other segregationists activities. I’ve copied the entire article in hopes that more awareness and appreciation for African-Americans and their struggles for civil rights are acknowledged and given credit.
FILMS REVISIT OVERLOOKED SHOOTINGS ON A BLACK CAMPUS by Tim Arango published April 16, 2008.
Two years before the deadly Kent State shootings, state troopers opened fire on a student protest on the campus of South Carolina State College. Three people died, and 28 were wounded.Related
The incident, which became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” never pierced the nation’s collective memory of the 1960s, and academics and survivors say that one reason was shoddy, racially biased press coverage: those killed were black.
But new media coverage may give the shootings their historical due, and some scholars and survivors hope it might also nudge South Carolina legislators to open a state investigation of the 40-year-old tragedy, which never received such scrutiny.
Dan Klores, a New York filmmaker and former public relations executive, has been thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the historical memory for decades, since he was a student at the time at the nearby University of South Carolinain Columbia. He said he hoped his latest film, “Black Magic,” about basketball players at historically black colleges, will open people’s eyes to Orangeburg. (The film made its debut on ESPN on March 16.)
Mr. Klores said that Orangeburg was only obliquely related to the topic of “Black Magic,” but that he was looking for any reason to delve into the incident. During his research for the film he discovered that one of the Orangeburg fatalities was a star high school basketball player who was on campus because his mother worked at the college as a maid.
“That gave me the excuse,” Mr. Klores said. “That’s all it was. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I said, ‘That’s fine, it’s my film.’ ”
Another film, a documentary produced by two Boston movie-makers, Bestor Cram and Judy Richardson, was in the research phase for nearly 10 years before the pair finally received financing last year. Titled “Orangeburg,” it is scheduled for broadcast this fall on PBS.
“We were up against two problems,” said Mr. Cram, a principal at Northern Light Productions in Boston, explaining why it took so long to finance the film. “People actually wondered why they hadn’t heard of it. Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told.”
Mr. Cram and his co-producer, Ms. Richardson, were activists in the 1960s and had long wanted to tell this story.
“We’re combining our activist sensibilities with our longstanding filmmaking sensibilities,” Mr. Cram said. “I promise you this is not a polemic. It’s about people’s lives that were profoundly changed by a tragedy.”
Ms. Richardson said that beyond the conventional interpretation of the role race played in Orangeburg’s not being as well known as Kent State, other circumstances also contributed to the event’s obscurity. For one, the shootings were at night, and there was no television coverage because, according to Ms. Richardson, “no one anticipated the event turning out the way it did.”
Second, many of the still photographs taken by a photographer for the local paper, The Times and Democrat, were later destroyed in a fire. “There are only a few images, like a half-dozen,” Ms. Richardson said.
The killings occurred on Feb. 8, 1968, when white state troopers fired on a group of more than 100 students. The shootings came after three days of rising tension following what began as a protest calling for the integration of an all-white bowling alley in Orangeburg, home to the predominantly black South Carolina State College. (It is now a university.)
The state’s governor at the time, Robert E. McNair, blamed the clash on “black power advocates.” He also incorrectly stated that the shooting happened off campus. In 2006 Mr. McNair, who died last year, acknowledged that as governor he bore responsibility for the shootings, but did not say much more.
News coverage of the Orangeburg shootings was misleading. The first dispatch from The Associated Press, which set the tone for much of the initial coverage in the nation’s papers, described the incident as “a heavy exchange of gunfire,” although it was later determined that those killed were unarmed.
“Here is my assessment of why there was not better coverage,” said Jack Bass, who covered the shootings for The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and is now a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Because the shootings occurred at night, there were no compelling television images, as there were of the Kent State events, he said.
“It was too close to deadline on the East Coast, so papers relied on the initial misleading story by The Associated Press,” he added. “And the students were black.” (The New York Times, which had been following the tensions, ran the article written by The Associated Press and later ran other articles by wire services and staff reporters.)
Dan Klores, above, directed “Black Magic,” a television film touching on a 1968 shooting at South Carolina State College in which three blacks were killed by state troopers.
In 1970 Mr. Bass wrote a book on the tragedy with Jack Nelson, who covered Orangeburg for The Los Angeles Times. And, coincidentally, in 1968 Mr. Bass was Mr. Klores’s journalism professor at the University of South Carolina.
“When I see it on ESPN, suddenly I see it brought in to popular culture,” Mr. Bass said.
A federal Justice Department investigation resulted in a trial in which nine patrolmen were acquitted of charges stemming from the shootings. The only person convicted in connection with the event was Cleveland L. Sellers, who was the national program director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Mr. Sellers, who was shot in the shoulder, was convicted on a charge of “riot” and served seven months of a one-year prison term.
Mr. Sellers, who was later pardoned, now directs the African-American Studies program at the University of South Carolina, and has been active in trying to ensure that Orangeburg will not be forgotten.
“We’ve fought the long fight,” Mr. Sellers said in a telephone interview. “First we had to bring it in to the civil rights literature. We’ve kept the flame lit.”
“Now Dan’s film, really for the first time ever on a national scale, actually addresses the Orangeburg Massacre and shines some light on what happened,” he added. “There was a veil of secrecy and silence on it.”
The media is belatedly acknowledging the incident in other ways. In February Tom Brokawvisited Orangeburg to participate in a 40th-anniversary memorial service. Mr. Brokaw’s latest book, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties,” addresses Orangeburg.
After screening “Black Magic” in Washington for the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Klores met with Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to discuss reopening the federal investigation of the Orangeburg shootings. Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Representative Conyers, said he was looking into the Orangeburg incident and was considering holding a hearing on it.
Mr. Klores and Mr. Sellers said that a push to reopen the federal investigation was meant partly to pressure action by the South Carolina Legislature, where a bill was introduced last year to create a panel to investigate Orangeburg. The former United States Attorney in South Carolina, Reginald I. Lloyd, and former Gov. Jim Hodgessupport a state investigation. But no hearing has been scheduled on the bill, and State Representative James H. Harrison, a Republican who is chairman of the state’s Judiciary Committee, recently told The Greenville News in South Carolina, “My personal feeling is we don’t need to create something that is going to create more division.”
For Mr. Klores and Mr. Sellers, a full state investigation is needed to bring about a resolution.
“So here I am in a position where maybe I can do something,” Mr. Klores said. “That’s all it is.”
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