How many DUers remember the Orangeburg massacre at South Carolina State?

[Squinch]

I am grateful for MineralMan's thread inviting us to remember Kent State. It was an atrocity perpetrated at a dark time in our history, and it needs to be remembered.

But there was another school massacre two years before that. It took place at a historically black school and because of that it was not given the same importance as the massacre at the white school two years later.

It was not even fully reported by the press until weeks after it happened. It did not get much coverage at all, and today it is all but forgotten.

Like Kent State, it deserves to be remembered.

Shortly thereafter (around 10:30 p.m.) South Carolina Highway Patrol Officers began firing into the crowd of around 200 protesters. Eight Patrol Officers fired carbines, shotguns, and revolvers at the protesters, firing for around 10 to 15 seconds. Twenty-seven people were injured in the shooting; most of whom were shot in the back as they were running away, and three African American men were killed.[7] The three men killed were Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith (both SCSU students), and Delano Middleton, a student at the local Wilkinson High School. Middleton was shot while simply sitting on the steps of the freshman dormitory awaiting the end of his mother's work shift.

The police later said that they believed they were under attack by small arms fire. A newspaper reported, "About 200 Negros [sic] gathered and began sniping with what sounded like 'at least one automatic, a shotgun and other small caliber weapons' and throwing bricks and bottles at the patrolmen."[8] Similarly, a North Carolina newspaper reported that week that students threw firebombs at buildings and that the sound of apparent sniper fire was heard.[9]

Protesters insisted that they did not fire at police officers, but threw objects and insulted the men. Evidence that police were being fired upon at the time of the incident was inconclusive, and no evidence was presented in court, as a result of investigations, that protesters were armed or had fired on officers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeburg_massacre

The cops were not convicted. One of the protesters was.

[FailureToCommunicate]

1. Remember it well. Though unlike Kent State it was centered around local civil rights protest and

the local law enforcement redneck cops and not Federal(ized) troops. So, the fact that it didn't garner the same level of national attention was not simply due to it being black victims vs white victims.

But, yes, it was another in a string of terrible incidents and deserves to be remembered.

Do you happen to know if anything is being planned around it's anniversary?

[Squinch]

5. I suspect that if it had been white students, it would have received much

more coverage regardless of the law enforcement arm doing the shooting.

The NYT ran a paragraph on a back page on the day after the event. It took weeks for the whole story to come out nationally, and then it was quickly dropped.

[SCantiGOP]

2. I was a teenager and lived about 30 miles away

Because it was at a black school it never got the attention that Kent State did, the same as Jackson State.

On edit: there has been a lot of coverage of the anniversary including several specials on ETV and interviews with those who were there.

[raccoon]

16. Same here. I remember my family driving thru on the way to my grandparents', and seeing the

National Guard there.

[marble falls]

3. Or the Jackson State killings that happened about a week after Kent....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings

A group of around one hundred black students had gathered on Lynch Street (named after black Reconstruction Era congressman John R. Lynch), which bisected the campus, on the evening of Thursday, May 14. The group "were reportedly pelting rocks at white motorists driving down the main road through campus — frequently the site of confrontations between white and black Jackson residents."[2] By around 9:30 p.m. the students had started fires, thrown rocks at motorists and overturned vehicles, including a large truck after a false rumor spread of the death of Charles Evers. Firefighters dispatched to the scene quickly requested police support.

The police responded in force. At least 75 Jackson police units from the city of Jackson and the Mississippi Highway Patrol[3] attempted to control the crowd while the firemen extinguished the fires. After the firefighters had left the scene, shortly before midnight, the police moved to disperse the crowd that had gathered in front of Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory.

Advancing to within 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 m) of the crowd, at roughly 12:05 a.m., officers opened fire on the dormitory.[4] The exact cause of the shooting and the moments leading up to it are unclear. Authorities say they saw a sniper on one of the building's upper floors and were being sniped in all directions. Later two city policemen and one state patrolman reported minor injuries from flying glass,[4] and an FBI search for evidence of sniper fire was negative.[5] The students say they did not provoke the officers. The gunfire lasted for 30 seconds, and more than 150 shots[2] were fired by a reported 40 state highway patrolmen using shotguns from 30 to 50 feet. Every window on the narrow side of the building facing Lynch Street was shattered.[4]

The crowd scattered and a number of people were trampled or cut by falling glass. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior, and James Earl Green, 17, a senior and miler[4] at nearby Jim Hill High School, were killed; twelve others were wounded. Gibbs was killed near Alexander Hall by buckshot, while Green was killed behind the police line in front of B. F. Roberts Hall, also with a shotgun.

[Squinch]

4. .

[Tipperary]

6. Yes indeed.

Good reminder.

[heaven05]

7. Did not

Last edited Sat May 5, 2018, 11:54 AM - Edit history (1)

remember. I was traveling around Vietnam at the Army's expense. Coverage. Nil in my neck of the woods. Heard about Orangeburg after Army service and 'back to the world'. Jackson State, I do remember, as I was then a civilian then getting my head busted protesting that 'southern strategy' asshole and Agnew's 10,000 a plate dinner.

[Squinch]

8. I was in grade school at the time but, still, I only learned about this a few years ago.

[Hortensis]

9. I was 15 at the time in California and really doubt

it was discussed in school. The first I might have heard about it was when the L.A. Times did a look-back in 1993 because we started each morning with the paper. But in any case I don't remember it. Kent State was, of course, in the news, print and TV, for weeks.

[Squinch]

11. I only learned about it a few years ago. Went so far as to go to the library

to look up the NYT from the days around it. I was stunned by how little coverage it got.

[Hortensis]

13. On googling I found no earlier LA Times coverage of it.

Though a quick search 50 years later in a different world doesn't rule it out, of course, the general media burial of this atrocity against students really is shocking.

It is also reassuring that that could and would not happen today. The massive media failure I mean, unfortunately not the murders by police, especially in these crazed days.

[dalton99a]

10. Kick

[Lint Head]

12. I am from South Carolina. I remember it well. I was born and raised in a town just north of

Orangeburg.

[malthaussen]

14. Jackson State, yes, Orangeburg, no.

As you say, coverage must have been about non-existent.

-- Mal

[Lonestarblue]

15. Republican political attitudes contributed to Kent State.

The day before the Kent State shooting, Ohio Governor James Rhodes, who was running for the U.S. Senate said that antiwar student protesters were “worse than the Brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” Rhodes was running against Robert Taft, Jr., to secure the Republican nomination. Although Rhodes had been moderate as governor, he moved to a tougher stance on antiwar protesters in his campaign.

There had already been a protest by Kent State students on May 1, with clashes between the students and local police. Rhodes sent the National Guard into a tense situation on May 4, thus escalating a protest into a standoff. Did Rhides do that, thinking it would help his Senate ambitions? He did not win the nomination. But Rhodes’ rhetoric may have helped set the stage for the antagonism of the National Guard, just as Trump has set the stage for antagonism toward the FBI and the rule of law with his rhetoric. Words matter, especially when the words are hateful rhetoric toward people who have every right to protest under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, such as those who protested at Trump’s inauguration. Calling for people to be locked up for exercising their Constitutional rights seriously undermines the rule of law, but Trump and Republicans do that regularly. We average citizens have very little power today because most of the power has been usurped by the super wealthy. Voting and peaceful protest are what we have left, and no president or political party should be allowed to take those rights away—or to lock up or kill innocent people who are exerting their right to protest.