THREE DEAD IN SOUTH CAROLINA: STUDENT RADICALIZATION AND THE

FORGOTTEN ORANGEBURG MASSACRE

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

by

Kimberly Dawn Stahler

May, 2018

Thesis written by

Kimberly Stahler

B.S., Frostburg State University, 2012

M.A., Kent State University, 2018

Approved by

Kenneth Bindas______, Advisor

Brian Hayashi ______, Chair, Department of History

James Blank ______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER Page

I RAISING RADICAL YOUTHS ...... 16

II DIVERGING FROM REALITY ...... 55

III CONTINUED RACIAL TENSIONS ...... 89

CONCLUSION ...... 117

NOTES ...... 123

SOURCES CONSULTED ...... 140

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Everyone who knows me is aware that I am driven, focused, and determined. These personality traits have helped me achieve my goals, but the help I have received from others along the way proved to be more valuable to me than those traits. I could not have completed this project without the assistance and support I received from others. I am forever indebted to too many people to lay them all out here. However, I would like to thank all of those who read through drafts and talked through ideas throughout my time working on this thesis in addition to those mentioned below.

All of the professors that I worked with during my time at Kent State University have helped me achieve my academic goals, but I would like to extend a special thanks to those who worked with me on my thesis. I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Kenneth Bindas. Thank you for the direction, advice, and support that you provided me along the way. I appreciate that you always made time for me whenever I needed to work through my own thoughts. I am also grateful for all the work that the members of my thesis committee put into overseeing this project: Dr. Leslie Heaphy, Dr. Zachary Williams, and Dr. Patrick Coy. Dr. Leslie Heaphy read drafts of my work throughout my writing process, and her feedback proved to greatly benefit my thesis. Dr. Zachary Williams helped me engage with the current scholarship on gender and the civil rights movement and broadened my understanding of identity. Dr. Patrick Coy helped me approach my research from an interdisciplinary lens, which rounded out the perspective that my thesis takes.

iv I also am indebted to others academics and library professionals who helped me accomplish this project. Dr. Leonne Hudson introduced me to my case study and helped me work through my research throughout my time at Kent State University. Archivist Avery Daniels from the Miller F. Whittaker Library provided me with invaluable help with my primary source research which made this project possible. I appreciate every email that Daniels responded to and every source that he brought to my attention that I did not know existed. Further, a special thanks goes to Dr. William C. Hine for agreeing to an interview with me and for answering numerous emails to clarify some of the discrepancies that I found during my research. His insight and attention helped make this project into what it is. I am forever indebted to those who put tireless effort into saving and preserving the documents surrounding the Orangeburg Massacre: those who conducted and participated in the Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Project, those who wrote the grant proposal that funded the project and the process of cataloguing the documents in the Orangeburg Massacre Collection at the Miller F. Whitaker Library, and those who continue to participate in the annual commemorations and who keep the memory of the massacre alive.

It would be impossible to list all of the friends and family members who helped me complete this thesis. However, special thanks are due to my sister Bethany Stahler and my brother-in-law Larry Nehring for helping me mentally and physically survive this project. To everyone who read drafts, who talked through ideas, and who provided ample amounts of encouragement, thank you, I could not have done this without you.

When I started working on this project, gun violence in schools and police brutality targeting African Americans were major problems in America. The work of Alicia Garza,

Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and so many others is truly inspirational and impactful.

Additionally, in the last few months there has been a student movement growing that is

v demanding change from American politicians and the American public who have accepted the constant presence of school shootings in the news. I dedicate this thesis to all the young students who are standing up to ensure that their classrooms are a safe place for learning and to the often overlooked radical women who have built the foundation of grassroots organizing networks that are fighting for social justice in America.

vi

INTRODUCTION

On February 8, 1968, hundreds of African American students from South Carolina State

College (SCSC) and Claflin College gathered around a bonfire on Watson Street in Orangeburg,

South Carolina, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Across the street, a group of almost exclusively white law enforcement officers from the South Carolina National Guard, the South Carolina

Highway Patrol, and the local Orangeburg Police stood armed. After the bonfire grew, an officer called the fire department to prevent the flames from endangering the power lines. When the fire truck arrived, the National Guardsmen advanced into the street to protect the fire truck. The students began to retreat to their dormitories as the Highway Patrolmen crossed the street and stopped in an embankment at the edge of the SCSC campus. Suddenly, nine Highway Patrol officers fired their pump-action shot guns loaded with buckshot into the retreating crowd.1

The shooting lasted less than ten seconds, and in that time at least thirty-one students sustained injuries. Later, Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton died from their wounds. After the firing stopped, chaos continued on campus as those who were able helped the most severely injured to reach the infirmary. Most of the wounded students were hit in their backs or the bottoms of their feet. Field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC), Cleveland Sellers later told reporters that because the patrolmen “shot as low as they could and a number of students fell to the ground…they could have killed 75 percent of them right then if they wanted to.”2 Rosemary Brooks, a senior at SCSC, was one of the many black community members who helped the injured students find safety in the aftermath. Later she remembered, “that night was the worst night of my life. Never have I seen so much

1 bloodshed. Never have I seen so much heartbreak and terror… one student was shot in the mouth and part of his tongue was ripped out.”3 National movement leaders expressed their outrage at the use of deadly force from South Carolina’s law enforcement agencies during this peaceful protest. After a federal judge ordered the bowling alley to integrate in the weeks following the massacre, SNCC leader, H. Rap Brown stated, “as usual the Justice Department is acting in a faint-hearted manner after the blood of black youth has flowed in the streets. Three dead and 50 injured is too high a price to pay for a goddamn bowling alley.”4

After the shooting ended, the law enforcement officers continued to block Watson street, which intersected with the sole entrance to the SCSC campus. No ambulances were called to help the injured and dying students. Officers dragged Henry Smith and Delano Middleton, who would die soon after, towards their police cars. Four students later testified that they witnessed a patrolman use the butt of his gun to strike Smith. The sole nurse on duty that evening in the infirmary was quickly overwhelmed with the number of students who needed medical attention.

Most of the students needed more care than she could provide. Arleathia Jones, and other SCSC students who had cars, drove the severely injured students to the local segregated hospital.

Frankie Thomas, Jordan Simmons, and Charles Hildebrand were a few of the students who remembered that once they were admitted to the hospital they did not receive any care and needed to seek medical attention in other nearby hospitals the following day. Even today, some of the surviving students, including Ernest Shuler, continue to carry buckshot pellets in their bodies.5

After the massacre ended, tensions between the law enforcement officers and the students seemed to dissipate. The National Guardsmen, the Highway Patrolmen, and the local police officers did not advance further on campus after the shooting ended. No more confrontations

2 occurred near the campus between students and the law enforcement officers. Harold Riley, a student at SCSC in 1968, witnessed the shooting and the aftermath and later remembered, “it seemed they did what they came to do, and they knew they killed a few of us. They knew that.

And their job was done.”6 However, across the railroad tracks on the white side of town, some students continued to experience altercations with police officers. Arleathia Jones was pulled over on a return trip from the hospital with her pregnant SCSC classmate, Louise Cawley. They were both asked to exit the vehicle during the traffic stop, and an Orangeburg City Police officer physically assaulted Cawley who was later admitted to the hospital overnight due to the injuries she sustained. Months later, she miscarried.7

The Orangeburg Massacre was a culmination of a week-long protest aimed at desegregating the local All Star Bowling Lanes. After months of negotiations with the owner,

Henry Floyd, failed to produce results, SCSC senior John Stroman decided to stage a sit-in protest at the bowling alley with forty of his classmates. On the second night of the sit-in, police officers arrested fifteen protesters and physically assaulted students gathered in a large crowd outside of the bowling alley. By Wednesday, the college administration had instructed the students not to leave the campus due to the heightened racial tensions and the police brutality.

The city administration did not feel that they could adequately handle the civil rights dispute that was escalating in the town. They requested that the governor send the National Guard. However, the city administration and the state officials made no attempt to resolve the segregation issue at the bowling alley. Federal courts later used the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Civil Rights

Act of 1964 to force Henry Floyd to integrate his establishment. Student leader of the sit-in protest, John Stroman bowled without incident after the courts’ decision. As the first African

Americans bowled in his alley, Floyd stated, “I can’t fight the Federal Government. I can’t fight

3 any government. There’s nothing I can do about it.”8 In response, The Bronze Raven, an African

American newspaper based in Toledo, Ohio, posed the question, “if all it took was a demand that the bowling alley owners obey the law, then, it may be asked why the City of Orangeburg and the State of South Carolina did not themselves know that equally as well as the Federal

Government.”9

Students continued to protest after the massacre calling for Governor Robert McNair to initiate a civil rights investigation and fire the Highway Patrolmen who murdered their classmates. When it became clear that McNair would not take action, they began writing letters to Lieutenant Governor John C. West and asked him to do so. One student, Delores Irene Shaw expressed her disgruntlement with the state’s response to the massacre by kindly reminding

West, “Sir, this is a college not a slaughter house.”10 Reading these letters, it is clear that the students were aware that race played a major role in the state’s mishandling of the massacre and the black community’s relegation to second-class citizenship. Albert Dawson, wrote in a letter to

West, “now that we’ve been shot down by lawless gun wielding officers I wonder about the first stanza of the Constitution. I wonder if secretly in the minds of the white it reads, We the white people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…do ordain and establish this

Constitution for the American whites.”11

Two trials took place in connection to the massacre, but only one person was convicted of any crime. Cleveland Sellers was found guilty of “riot” in 1970 and sentenced to one year of hard labor. Most of the charges that the state originally brought against him were dropped and the charge of “riot” was changed from Thursday night to Tuesday night during the trial after the prosecution failed to build a case against Sellers. He was released from prison after nine months on good behavior. Prior to the shooting, he was living in Orangeburg and working with student

4 groups to raise black consciousness on the college campuses.12 His goal was to elevate the local activism to the national stage. He chose Orangeburg because of the history of grassroots organizing in the town and the presence of South Carolina State College where he intended to enroll in classes. He hoped to use the existing networks of civil rights activists in South Carolina to alleviate black poverty in the state. Sellers was arrested in the hospital as he was waiting for medical treatment for the wound he sustained in his shoulder. He feared that the officers would kill him if he was alone with them.13 Some of the black community members believed that the massacre occurred partly because the officers were targeting Sellers due to his status as an outside agitator and his connection to Black Power.14 In 1969, the nine Highway Patrol officers who fired their weapons stood trial after being charged with violating the students’ civil rights.

However, they all were acquitted of civil rights violations. Soon after the massacre, some of the responsible officers received promotions. One of the officers that was acquitted was Henry

Morrell Addy. He was promoted from Sergeant to Lieutenant in 1968.15

Black newspapers and Black Power advocates quickly named this shooting the

Orangeburg Massacre. The Afro American, published in numerous cities in the South and on the

East Coast, ran an editorial that stated, “a small-sized massacre took place in Orangeburg, S.C. recently – a program of unarmed students by trigger-happy officers bent on the letting of colored students’ blood.”16 The black community knew that race was an underlying motivator in the shooting and Sellers’ conviction which National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP) lawyer Mathew Perry recalled was “a miscarriage of justice.” Perry explained that, “South Carolina was rigidly segregated by reason of race. The laws that spelled out that practice are legend. They proscribed activities running across the entire spectrum of human behavior…the climate of that period which undoubtedly permeated the trial process, undoubtedly

5 led to his [Sellers’] conviction.”17 Newspapers, civil rights leaders, and Black Power advocates rejected the white media’s reports that the student protest constituted a riot. NAACP Executive

Director Roy Wilkins wrote to Governor Robert McNair, “we are shocked and outraged at the news” of the massacre. “There is no report that the students were leaving the campus or that their conduct was disorderly or threatening the public peace.”18

Here, it may be helpful to lay out the terms used in this thesis to differentiate the various law enforcement officers as there were numerous different agencies involved in the response to the student protest and massacre. The South Carolina Highway Patrol quickly came to offer support to the Orangeburg Police Department after the student sit-in began. I use the term police officers to refer exclusively to those individuals employed by the local police department, while the term patrolmen refers only to those individuals employed by the Highway Patrol. When these agencies seemed insufficient, Governor McNair called in the South Carolina National Guard to help quell the protest activity. I also refer to these individuals as soldiers and guardsmen. When I use the term law enforcement officers, I am referring to a mixed group of individuals from more than one of these law enforcement agencies. Other definitions of terms are provided within the chapters as needed.

This thesis builds on the work of numerous historians, and uses Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s long periodization of the civil rights movement.19 Although most of my investigation focuses on the latter part of the 1960s, the student activists in Orangeburg were part of a long tradition of organizing in South Carolina, which draws on Peter Lau’s Democracy Rising.20 Further, this thesis places students at the center of the movement and views college campuses as hot-beds of movement activity, which relies on Joy Ann Williamson’s Radicalizing the Ebony Tower.21 In

1960, student activism changed the nature of the movement as the Woolworth’s lunch counter

6 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, encouraged other students across the South to use direct nonviolent action to integrate the local lunch counters surrounding their college campuses.

Although most of the students were too young to participate in the 1961 Freedom Rides, the

1963 March on Washington, or the 1964 Freedom Summer, the students were aware of the violent response that activists faced during the decade. Cleveland Sellers offered advice and insight to the students when he thought necessary. He did not think protesting at night was wise, and he was afraid to be alone with the police officers because of “what had transpired with

[Andrew] Goodman, Turner, and [James] Cheney [sic.] down in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”22

Recent scholarship has brought to light the small local movements that enabled national leaders to come into a community and elevate their activities to the national stage. The essays in

Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America demonstrates that southern towns that experienced a high level of activism developed extensive networks of African Americans and caught the attention of national civil rights leaders who moved to their town to help advance the local movement to the national stage.23 The local organizing efforts in Orangeburg had an impact on the movement in South Carolina and the national movement. After generations of grassroots organizing, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, and other leaders helped elevate the small local movements to the national stage. Cleveland Sellers moved to Orangeburg with the intention of doing the same thing. These leaders became “outside agitators” who disrupted the local African Americans in towns throughout the South where the white community was convinced the local black community was happy and content with the way things were.

The civil rights movement was a struggle for black freedom and equality. Even after

President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of

7 1965, the second half of the 1960s proved to be even more turbulent than the first half. Stokely

Carmichael, addressing a group of activists in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1966 shouted the phrase “Black Power” electrifying the crowd. However, based on the essays in The Black Power

Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights- Black Power Era since the militant tactics and ideas that

Black Power utilized existed prior to Carmichael’s impassioned speech, the two movements coexisted simultaneously.24 Even after liberal legislation was enacted, riots broke out in Los

Angeles, Detroit, and many other cities, and liberal whites could not understand why racial relations were not improving. The Commission on Civil Disorders, which became known as the

Kerner Commission, reported that poverty was a major contributor to these riots. Black communities occupied subpar housing, had unequal access to jobs that provided economic advancement, and attended underfunded schools which afforded a poorer quality of education than the white neighborhood schools did.25 The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act did not address these problems which caused most of the unrest in northern black communities.

It is an understatement to write that 1968 was a turbulent year. The civil rights movement and the antiwar movement clashed with the existing power structure in cities across the country as well as continued divisions between dominant and counter-cultures. After the Orangeburg

Massacre, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke out against the war, sent a telegram to the US

Attorney General Ramsey Clark to demand that he “act now to bring to justice the perpetrators of the largest armed assault undertaken under color of law in recent Southern history.”26 Dr. King sent this telegram from Memphis, Tennessee, where he was actively involved with the sanitation worker strike and preparing for a march on March 28. A small group of protesters at this march turned violent and sixty people were injured, and one person died during the demonstration. One week later, on April 4, Dr. King was assassinated. His murder set off protests and urban

8 uprisings across the country as many of the activists in the civil rights movement became even more radical and the national black community mourned his death.

Yet, the Orangeburg Massacre contributed to the local transformation and the national radicalization of the civil rights movement. In response to the deaths, H. Rap Brown believed,

“we must move from resistance to aggression from revolt to revolution.” 27 The massacre sparked protests on college campuses throughout the South, foreshadowing the uproar on college campuses later that year. As was evident throughout the 1960s, students in 1968 felt that they could not remain isolated on their campuses, they occupied the front lines of the movement. At a march on the South Carolina state house, one student carried a sign that read, “how can we study after three black brothers are dead and their killers are free.”28 By 1968, black nationalism was on the rise as the national civil rights movement fractured, and some organizations had rejected white sympathizers. Previously, SNCC had expelled all the white members of the organization in

1965. Black Power had transformed SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael after he used the phrase in 1966, and tensions between Black Power advocates and white sympathizers became even worse during the trial of thirteen Black Panther Party members in 1970. A black woman shouted at sympathetic white students who filled the court room, “what are you whiteys doing here- this is a trial for black people…you radicals will be the Establishment in 20 years.”29

Even after 1968, civil unrest and civil rights activities continued to be met with violent suppression at the local level and the federal level from the Federal Bureau of Investigation

(FBI).

Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton were not the first black men to be murdered during the civil rights movement, nor the last. They were not the first black men to die asserting their constitutional rights as Americans or the first men to die as bystanders.

9 However, their deaths marked the first time that law enforcement officers invaded a historically black college campus and shot at the backs of dispersing students. Two years before the Kent

State Shooting on May 4, 1970, and the Jackson State Shooting on May 15, 1970, in

Orangeburg, South Carolina, white police officers gunned down black students and blocked the only road that emergency vehicles could have used to transport the dying students.

The local white community in Orangeburg, historians of the civil rights movement, and the media have largely ignored the massacre. An annual commemoration was held to commemorate the shooting on the SCSC campus, which received sparse news coverage and was primarily attended by African Americans. In 1998, NAACP lawyer Mathew Perry, alumnus of

South Carolina State College, remembered that February 8, 1968, “was the most regrettable day in the life of South Carolina. All South Carolinians, certainly those of us interested in justice, certainly those of us interested in removing the barriers of segregation, certainly those of us interested in decency were appalled by what happened on that occasion.”30 More than thirty years after the massacre, a play depicting the history of the massacre opened on the SCSC campus and in Columbia. Viewers remarked that “even though the Civil Rights Act had been passed, 1968 Orangeburg was 1955 America.”31 A citizen of South Carolina expressed that they welcomed the history lesson the play provided for an event they believed “our state swept it under the rug.”32

In 1968, conflicting news reports and first-hand accounts made determining the facts about what happened before, during, and after the Orangeburg Massacre a difficult task.

Newspaper reports, from white and black newspapers, cited varying numbers of injured students ranging from thirty to fifty. Some of the FBI agents who conducted an investigation cooperated with some of the members of the State Law Enforcement Division, which led some individuals

10 to point to these relationships across bureaucratic lines to as a lack of impartiality in the investigation. Members from both agencies searched for evidence the day after the massacre, including shotgun shells. FBI agents testified during the nine Highway Patrolmen’s trial that they discovered evidence that guns were fired from the direction of campus. However, another FBI employee testified to the contrary.33

Primary sources always present the issue of inherent biases, but in this historical investigation some sources include the problem of ulterior motives and government secrecy. I draw on a wide variety of sources of varying origins to combat these problems. Oral history interviews with surviving students provide insight into the students’ understanding of what happened. Whenever possible multiple sources can verify concrete facts, for example the whereabouts of particular people at certain times, the conversations that took place between individuals, and the actions of the students and the white politicians. Internal government memos reference informants who presumably were students or employees at the colleges. As was common of all civil rights activity during J. Edgar Hoover’s time as FBI director, the activity at

SCSC was closely monitored and presumably some black community members provided information to the FBI. These documents did not expose the identities of these individuals, and since they did not disclose themselves, it is hard to determine who they were. To combat the various motives that might drive individuals who authored the sources that I draw on, I present the beliefs of the white and black community as a spectrum. Individuals had their own personal beliefs and life experiences that shaped their world view, no two being alike. Although, the same southern culture influenced all of those involved in this study, these individuals had different experiences and perceptions. Primary sources from the SCSC and Claflin College students provide deep insight into the role that race, gender, and class played in the massacre and the

11 ensuing denial of justice to the victims and their surviving families. Letters that the students wrote to Lieutenant Governor West provide insight into the minds of the students and how they constructed their rhetoric they in their attempt to convince the state to take action. Black newspaper reports demonstrate the varying responses that the black community had to these deaths.

Chapter 1, “Raising Radical Youths,” draws on the work of numerous historians to demonstrate how radical black women educators taught their students how to be activists and created space for the students to become even more radical. The essays in Southern Black women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement assert that radical black women were at the center of local movements as leaders, organizers, and foot soldiers. The essays in Sisters in the Struggle explores the radicalism of some black women in the movement and the work they accomplished.

This chapter also draws on Belinda Robnett’s How Long? How Long?: African American

Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights and Lynne Olson’s Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung

Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement to demonstrate how vital women were to the movement and to bring to light how unique their struggles were.34 In this chapter, the focus on the activism of the women in Orangeburg demonstrates how their efforts were central to the student and local movement. Orangeburg’s radical black women were leaders, organizers, and foot soldiers who drove the local movement, which caught the attention of SNCC and Cleveland Sellers.

Chapter 2, “Diverging From Reality,” explores the different perceptions of reality that existed in Orangeburg. These conflicting perceptions hindered the ability of the groups involved to peacefully resolve civil rights disputes and contributed to the escalation of a peaceful sit-in to desegregate a bowling alley to a massacre in four short days. This assertion is based on the works of numerous historians. This exploration begins with an understanding of race as a cultural

12 construct with passive and active enforcement. David Goldfield’s Black, White, and Southern:

Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940s to the Present and Benjamin Houston’s The

Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City demonstrate how the white community enforced acceptable behaviors from the black community, which altered their understanding of the African American identity. Gary Gerstle’s

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race demonstrate how white nationalism united the white community and Eastern European immigrants in order to reconcile the former-Confederacy and the Union while maintaining white supremacy after the

Civil War. Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and

Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black

Power has proven to be very influential in shifting the understanding of race and the civil rights movement to demonstrate that the sexual terrorism directed at black women drove the movement and the perceptions that whites had of black men’s and women’s identity. Nancy Isenburg’s

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America explores the centrality of class divisions in American consciousness and the perceptions of the class hierarchy. Her work helps to demonstrate the way that the black middle class in Orangeburg challenged the white community’s understanding of class as it intersects with race and gender.35 The black community in Orangeburg violated racial, gendered, and class norms. Their education and income levels were potentially higher than some of the white community members’ which did not fit the white community’s perception of reality. As the students demanded the right to bowl, the white community’s understanding of a content black community broke down and some whites held onto their southern culture and traditions in an attempt to maintain the status quo.

13 Chapter 3, “Continued Racial Tensions,” examines the collective memory of the massacre and the annual commemorations that took place on the SCSC campus. The black community constructed their own collective memory at these commemorations to combat the distorted memory and silence of the white community. Most of the white community refused to discuss the massacre. They forgot about white resistance to civil rights advancements, Jim Crow, and their own racism. This chapter builds on the work of the historians who contributed to

History and Memory in African-American Culture, The Civil Rights Movement in American

Memory, and Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory.36 This chapter examines the massacre as a cultural trauma that altered the collective identity of the black community. Here, identity formation is a process that is intertwined with reconciliation. The black community has used the commemorations and their collective memory to call for political action in South

Carolina aimed at truth and reconciliation. In 2003, Governor Mark Sanford apologized for the massacre on behalf of the state. Some of the black community members were appreciative for his apology, while others thought his sentiment was meaningless.

This thesis broadens the historians’ understanding of how identity formation and performance interacted with social activism. This discussion helps to understand how some law enforcement officers in South Carolina responded with deadly force when a group of protesters’ identity performance interrupted the officers’ understanding of the definition of the protesters’ identity. Civil rights activists constructed their own definitions to their racial identity and used their identity performance during the struggle for black freedom. Further, this thesis broadens our understanding of how the past and collective memory continue to exacerbate racial relations.

Although it has been largely forgotten, the Orangeburg Massacre remains relevant because of how much it can teach us about how the perceptions of identity performance have not always

14 matched the definition those individuals who hold an identity have constructed themselves. As white southerners resisted the cultural change of desegregation, they also resisted the redefinition of identity and the change that occurred in identity performance.

15

CHAPTER I

RAISING RADICAL YOUTHS

On February 8, 1968, the South Carolina Highway Patrol, the Orangeburg City police, and the South Carolina National Guard stood on Watson Street facing a group of South Carolina

State College (SCSC) and Claflin College students. After peacefully demonstrating at the local segregated All Star Bowling Lanes for two days, black students gathered around a bonfire in the blocked street singing “We Shall Overcome.” JP Strom, Chief of the State Law Enforcement

Division (SLED), believed that the flames threatened the nearby electrical lines and called the local fire department. Upon the fire engine’s arrival, the South Carolina National Guardsmen advanced to protect the vehicle and the firefighters as they extinguished the flames. The State

Highway Patrolmen advanced, crossing the street, which pushed the students into the interior of campus. In the last lights of the fire, the students began retreating to their dorms. The Highway

Patrolmen stopped at an embankment between the sidewalk and the SCSC campus, out of sight of the students. Suddenly, nine Highway Patrol officers fired pump-action shotguns into the crowd killing three and wounding at least twenty-eight others. All but two students were hit in their backs or the bottoms of their feet in what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) named the Orangeburg Massacre.1

This chapter will explore numerous aspects of the Orangeburg Massacre. Cleveland

Sellers, a field organizer for SNCC, was an outside agitator who sought to elevate the local movement to the national stage. Some SCSC and Claflin College women fulfilled leadership \

16 And supportive positions in the campus movement. These black students were a part of a long tradition of movement activity in Orangeburg. For generations, radical women taught young activists how to fight for self-determination and black equality. The victories that these radical women achieved created space for student activists to become even more radical. The police brutality that students faced united the local black community despite diverging views on movement tactics.

During the twentieth century, Orangeburg was a unique town in South Carolina because of the presence of the historically black colleges. Founded as a land grant school in 1896, South

Carolina State College (SCSC) functioned primarily as an agricultural and mechanical training facility that became the first public college in the state for African Americans. In 1966, the college began accepting white students and hired white faculty. By 1968, enrollment at the college reached 1,500 students, of which only a handful were white. The SCSC campus was located next to Claflin College, a private Methodist institution that was founded in 1869.

Enrollment in 1968, at Claflin College, boasted 600 students and the institution did not discriminate based on race or religious affiliation in the process of hiring professors or admitting students.2

During the 1950s and 1960s, students enrolled at both colleges were active in the local movement, and their activity influenced the national civil rights movement. Radical South

Carolina State College and Claflin College women occupied the frontlines of the movement in

Orangeburg. Their grassroots organizing caught the attention of national movement leaders who sought to advance the local movement to the national stage. Despite gaining the attention of national leaders, student protest activity on campus remained localized and independently organized until 1967. Prior to the 1967-1968 school year, the SCSC President Benner C. Turner

17 outlawed civil rights organizations on campus. After his resignation in 1967, two student civil rights organizations formed. The first semester as an active organization, 300 members composed the student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP). The second organization, the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee

(BACC), was a more radicalized student civil rights organization with eighteen members. SCSC senior John Stroman was a leader of BACC and was a key orchestrator of the 1968 sit-in at the

All Star Bowling Lanes.3

Soon after these organizations formed, Cleveland Sellers, a former president of SNCC and a close friend of Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael, moved to Orangeburg in the fall of 1967 with plans to enroll at South Carolina State College the following year. This campus was close to his hometown, Denmark, South Carolina, and he was planning on working with students to raise black consciousness and advance their local movement. Previous to his arrival,

Orangeburg experienced a high level of movement activity which caught Sellers’ attention and influenced Sellers’ decision to enroll at SCSC. Throughout the modern movement, national civil rights organizations sent members to southern towns that experienced a significant amount of grassroots organizing because of the extensive networks of activists these local organizers developed. These outside agitators helped propel the local movements to the national stage.

However, in this case, students did not follow Sellers’ advice during the sit-in protests. Although he was present for all of the demonstrations, Cleveland Sellers did not lead or organize the students. Sellers did work with BACC student members and other SCSC and Claflin College students who were already organized and had their own agenda. Due to Sellers’ notoriety and his arrest in the aftermath of the massacre, reporters and politicians focused on his presence at the

18 protests as a source of student discontent. However, these individuals ignored the radical movement activity that students participated in before he moved into town.4

Cleveland Sellers’ affiliation with SNCC, his notoriety as a national civil rights activist, and his connection to Black Power made him an outside agitator in the eyes of the white community. Throughout the civil rights movement, the white media and white politicians told the American people that outside agitators were responsible for the civil unrest in their towns.

Outside agitators were people associated with national civil rights organizations who, in the eyes of local white communities, stirred up trouble in their town and rallied the local black community to push for change. White communities across the South did not understand the local movements. The same was true of Orangeburg, South Carolina. During the week following the massacre, the New York Times quoted South Carolina Governor Robert McNair’s opinion that

“outside influence” caused the crisis. He believed, “there are still outsiders in the area,” which motivated his decision to not reopen SCSC in the weeks after the shooting. Even before the massacre occurred, the white community focused on Sellers’ presence, blaming him for the protest activity because they saw him as an outside agitator. The Charlotte Observer reported on

Sellers’ activity while he was on campus. They even reported where he slept. This attention to his activity convinced most of the white community that Sellers was responsible for the sit-in protests in Orangeburg. Inherent in this understanding, most of the white community believed that the local black community did not want to achieve full integration. They used the idea of outside agitators to ignore the discontent that the local black community felt and expressed.5

Sellers developed a supportive relationship with the student activists, and instead of leading their efforts, he offered advice when possible. Historian Katherine Mellen Charron has demonstrated that national organizers who assisted local activists in the South did not always

19 understand the local problems that activists wanted to address. For Cleveland Sellers, this holds true. He did not think the bowling alley was the most pressing matter in Orangeburg. Instead, he wanted to focus on advancing black pride and black consciousness in the community in order to organize a campaign to alleviate black poverty in South Carolina. Some SCSC students agreed with Sellers that black consciousness raising was an important issue in Orangeburg. SCSC student and BACC member Sarah Bankhead believed, “that unless black people have race pride and black unity we will not emerge successfully in this white power structure.” However, to the radical students involved in the sit-in movement, abolishing the segregation policy at the bowling alley represented more than the right to bowl. To SCSC and Claflin College students the bowling alley became a symbol for all of the racial inequality that they faced in Orangeburg. During this protest, they were not just demanding the right to bowl, they were demanding equal access to private businesses and an equal opportunity to participate in society. Some black community members understood this interpretation of the students’ determination to integrate the bowling alley. SCSC President Maceo Nance knew that the students were using the bowling alley to attack segregation and black inequality that existed in the larger Orangeburg community, and that “the bowling alley merely served as the straw that broke the camel’s back.” However, Nance believed that the white community did not understand the source of student discontent because reporters focused on the bowling alley as the sole source of agitation.6

In this thesis, the word radical describes those civil rights activists whose end goal was a complete overhaul of the established order of the South. Jacqueline Dowd Hall used this definition in her analysis of the long civil rights movement, demonstrating that during the Great

Depression and the New Deal Era black communities mobilized to fight for economic equality which proves that the movement was never simply a legal battle for equal rights. Instead, a

20 radical movement existed that strove to overthrow the American racial caste system that relegated African Americans to the lowest economic rung in society. According to her periodization and analysis, the movement was stronger during the first half of the twentieth century when compared to the second half. She asserts that the 1950s and 1960s saw a decline in the movement.7 This understanding differs from how most historians periodize the civil rights movement as they focus on those two decades when the national movement gained attention and those who see Black Power and black consciousness raising in the latter part of the 1960s as a separate radical movement.8 Her broad definition of radical does not include a negative connotation, nor does it imply that these activists employed violent or extreme measures.

While a radical activist may seem to have had simple objectives, in this case the right to bowl in Orangeburg, the underlying goal, overthrowing a culture of white supremacy, made these protesters radical. Segregation became so ingrained in southern culture that the desegregation of one public facility or private business threatened the white community’s monopoly on political power and the social etiquette that maintained white supremacy.9 The student sit-in at the All Star Bowling Lanes was a radical protest, but the defining factors that made it radical were not the fact that they were demanding the right to bowl or that student protesters planned to get arrested for trespassing during the sit-in in order to legally challenge the segregation policy in the courts.10 When looked at microscopically, those two factors give this protest the appearance of being a liberal attempt to integrate a private business. Instead, the protest was radical when considered in the broader context of what the students strove to achieve through their efforts because the bowling alley represented the larger problem of race relations in

Orangeburg. The students were radical because they used the bowling alley sit-in to challenge the entire culture of white supremacy which threatened the white southerners’ way of life.

21 The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had little effect on eradicating segregation in

Orangeburg, which encouraged the students to become more radicalized. As a rural southern town, railroad tracks helped Orangeburg remain segregated. Many businesses on the white side of town refused to serve the black community and students. The local hospital and doctor’s offices remained segregated in 1968. Despite the passage of liberal legislation, SCSC students still did not see the changes that they wanted to in their town. Student leaders were engaged in negotiations with the bowling alley owner, Henry Floyd, for months attempting to persuade him to desegregate. In 1967, while the negotiations were ongoing, Floyd replaced a “For White

Only” sign with a “Club Members Only” sign following the trend of many white-owned businesses throughout the country after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This coded language communicated the same message to the black community and enabled segregation to continue. The students, including BACC leader John Stroman, became frustrated that they still could not bowl in Orangeburg and that negotiations with Floyd were going nowhere.11

On Monday, February 5, 1968, Stroman and forty SCSC and Claflin College students peacefully sat-in at the bowling alley which illegally discriminated against the black community.

Henry Floyd told Stroman that the establishment was for members only and demanded that he and his friends leave. Stroman knew that “members only” was a covert way of maintaining a

“whites only” policy. The students refused to leave. Floyd tried to physically restrain Stroman in order to forcibly remove him from the establishment. Stroman pushed aside Floyd’s hands and went to the snack bar where employees refused to serve him. Some students used vending machines and the jukebox because the machines could not discriminate against them; however, employees unplugged the machines. Floyd called the police, and, upon arrival, the officers forced the students to leave. Afterwards, Orangeburg City Police Chief Roger Poston and City

22 Administrator Robert T. Stevenson arrived at the bowling alley. They ordered Floyd to close his business for the night in hopes of preventing the situation from escalating further. Content with interrupting Floyd’s ability to conduct business, the students returned to campus without further incident.12

Later that evening, John Stroman devised a plan in coordination with the city police for a peaceful sit-in protest on Tuesday. Stroman planned to get arrested with the intent of challenging the segregation policy in court. If the snack bar inside the All Star Bowling Lanes qualified as a restaurant, the courts would force integration under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This type of peaceful protest was acceptable to the white power structure. John Stroman wanted to use direct nonviolent methods, and the police wanted to control the protests in order to prevent racial tensions from rising.13

Forty students, sixteen men and twenty-four women, returned to the bowling alley on

Tuesday, February 6, 1968, and sat-in. Before the arrests, Stroman told the women to leave, and encouraged any men who did not want to be arrested to leave. Ultimately, fifteen men remained inside and prepared to be arrested. Previously, SLED Chief Strom had told Stroman that only a small number of students needed to be arrested because he did not want a large group of protesters. The students who went to the bowling alley with Stroman did not know that Stroman planned on being arrested. He did not tell them beforehand because he wanted a show of numbers, and he was concerned that the male students might not follow him if they did not want to be arrested. SCSC and Claflin College women who were sitting-in did not want to leave the bowling alley. Stroman remembered having to force them to. Stroman knew that black women were vulnerable to sexual assault from white male police officers. He did not want the women in

23 the vulnerable position of being arrested. Despite the planning and peaceful nature of this sit-in, these arrests did not end the evening’s protest activity, instead they incited a larger protest.14

The arrests contributed to the escalation of racial tensions as more students joined the effort, and the white power structure struggled to maintain peaceful order in Orangeburg. After students watching a movie in an auditorium on the SCSC campus heard about the arrests, 400

SCSC and Claflin College students decided to go to the bowling alley to demand the release of their classmates. The high number of protesters intimidated and overwhelmed the local police force, and SLED Chief Strom called for reinforcements. Fifty riot-gear wearing South Carolina

Highway Patrolmen arrived to suppress the protest. The protesting students were not aware of the planned nature of the arrest, and the police did not know how to respond to the angry crowd.

The uncertainty and confusion enabled emotions to heighten among the law enforcement and protesters. The police negotiated with two SCSC deans, and the SCSC student body president,

Robert Scott. The police agreed to release the arrested students if they encouraged the others to return to campus. Upon implementation, the plan began to work as the crowd dispersed. John

Stroman remembered enlisting the help of women to encourage others to leave. According to

Stroman, “[as a civil rights leader on campus] I usually get most of my support from females and football players.”15

However, racial tensions escalated again when SLED Chief Strom also called for a fire truck as back-up which infuriated the students. When the engine arrived, the students stopped retreating towards campus and continued to protest, angrier than before, in order to demonstrate that they would not be intimidated into complacency. Throughout the movement in Orangeburg, violent suppression of peaceful protest did not deter student activists. Instead, it reaffirmed their commitment to the movement and pushed them to radicalize. Before 1968, law enforcement

24 officers had used fire hoses to disband civil rights protesters around the country, and when the students saw the fire truck approaching they knew that the hoses could be used on them. When the fire truck arrived, the police officers moved to protect the engine which seemed to be the main focus of the students’ discontent. When the officers moved, the students shifted their focus towards the bowling alley. The students soon experienced the same violent response from the police that civil rights protesters had experienced for decades. Since the students did not see the process of desegregation of private industries and public facilities progressing at a rate that they wanted and they faced the same violent reaction to their activities, the students became even more radical. When faced with two choices, either give up the fight or fight harder, the students felt they only had one option: fight harder.16

Confusion and heightened emotion escalated the tension between the protesters and the law enforcement officers. The officers wanted to maintain control of the situation to prevent the night from turning into a riot. When someone broke a window next to the bowling alley entrance, the police moved away from the fire truck to protect the establishment from property damage.

SLED Chief Strom identified SCSC freshman Arthur Dodson as the perpetrator, and the

Orangeburg police arrested him. One woman alerted the crowd to his arrest when she yelled,

“hey! What are you going to do with him?” Her question implies that she did not think Dodson would be safe in the police’s custody. It was obvious they were arresting him, the question she asked did not address the arrest. Instead, her question expressed that she was concerned with what would happen when the police were alone with the black student. Historian Leonard Moore defines police brutality as composing a broader set of behaviors not limited to physical assault or deadly force. In his definition, harassment and unwarranted arrests constitute police brutality.

25 Therefore, using this understanding, the evening’s police brutality began with the sit-in protesters’ and Arthur Dodson’s arrests in the eyes of the students.17

Sensing that they did not have control of the situation, the police officers resorted to a last ditch effort to force the students to disperse, using riot batons, billy clubs, and their fists to push the students away from the bowling alley. During the melee, police officers targeted black women as they assaulted the students. One officer restrained SCSC student Emma Cain while another assaulted her. The numerous injuries that she sustained required medical attention after the altercation. Faculty and staff members from SCSC and Claflin College were among the group of protesters, and they witnessed the attack on Cain and other women. Faculty members were also vulnerable to police brutality. The SCSC Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) commander, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Mebane, stepped in between police officers and Ida

Dash, a nurse at SCSC, as they prepared to assault her. South Carolina had a long history of violent suppression of civil rights activity and police brutality towards the black community, and

Orangeburg was no exception.18

In response to the police brutality they experienced, some students damaged white-owned cars and storefronts on their return to campus which created the image of a violent riot in the minds of the white community. Some activists in the civil rights movement used destruction of property in the face of escalating racial tensions, which the national white community perceived as violence. From 1964 to 1968, urban uprisings broke out in cities across the country making white communities everywhere nervous about uprisings in their own town. Historian Manning

Marable has determined that urban riots from 1964 to 1968 changed the direction of the movement because the direct nonviolent tactics implemented in the South were not useful in northern cities, and civil rights leaders could not control the local movements in these cities.

26 However, this change was not limited to the North because the same change was taking place in the Orangeburg student movement. During these national urban uprisings, 250 people died and

60,000 people were arrested, and liberal politicians could not understand why liberal legislation was not reducing racial tensions in these cities. Historian Jason Sokol has determined that after the movement achieved liberal legislation, the activists shifted their focus to economic equality, an end to de facto segregation, and other cultural changes that threatened the white southerners’ way of life. Activists had these goals prior, but liberal federal legislation gave the activists the legal support to overthrow the racial caste system. White resentment grew as the white community tried to maintain their way of life. These uprisings, coupled with the emergence of

Black Power enunciated by Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 passionate speech, in Greenwood,

Mississippi, frightened many white communities who believed any peaceful protest teetered on the edge of becoming a riot.19

When the students arrived back on campus after the police brutality at the bowling alley, they held an impromptu meeting outside White Hall on the SCSC campus to discuss future action to pursue the next morning. The students involved in the sit-in movement did not have a long-term articulated plan of action for desegregating the bowling alley. The police brutality they faced further complicated their agenda as the bowling alley represented the larger problem of white supremacy in Orangeburg. Students and faculty members discussed multiple courses of action late into the night. Sellers briefly advocated for creating a human chain and blocking traffic across College Avenue, but he did not gain any support from the students. Student meetings took place until 2:30 AM when the students decided their next course of action was to draft a list of demands and to obtain a permit to march downtown. Sellers attended these meetings, but according to Jack Bass’ and Jack Nelson’s research, he added little to the

27 conversations. After the students rejected his advice, he supported the decisions that the students made. On Wednesday, administrators from both colleges encouraged students to remain on campus to prevent a violent altercation because of the heightened tensions in Orangeburg.

However, staying on their side of the railroad tracks would not allow racial tensions to dissipate.

Classes were canceled on both campuses. A student committee, with members from both colleges, delivered their demands to the Orangeburg Mayor, E.O. Pandarvis. This meeting did not alleviate the student’s concerns. Mayor Pandarvis was not willing to call a session of the all- white city council to discuss their demands and told the students they could speak to the council at their next regular meeting in two weeks. White city officials were not willing to work with the students immediately because they did not think the problems outlined on the list were especially time sensitive. However, the white politicians did want to prevent future peaceful protests and denied their permit request. The white community believed that another protest would escalate to a riot as the local Times and Democrat headline on Thursday read, “National Guard Called to

Protect City; Law Officers Keep Armed Vigil at College.” The students returned to campus dejected, and the campus administrators and the local NAACP leaders wanted to find a peaceful outlet for the students’ discontent. The administration knew the students were becoming even more radical in the face of violent suppression of peaceful protest.20

At the meeting on Wednesday, the students presented a radical list of demands to the mayor. On the surface, their demands appear liberal because federal legislation justified them.

However, they were radical because the demands threatened to overthrow the established social order of the South. These civil rights activists wanted an end to de facto segregation which would require deeper cultural changes than liberal legislation could provide. The students wanted the right to bowl in their town, which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 afforded them. To the

28 Orangeburg white community, the black community gaining the right to bowl threatened the racial hierarchy they struggled to maintain for centuries. Their demands included an end to police brutality; the establishment of a biracial Orangeburg Human Relations Committee; integration of the local hospital, the local Health Department, and the doctor’s offices; the establishment of a fair employment commission; the redistricting of the city limits which were gerrymandered; and that the local hospital begin accepting Medicare.21

The mayor did not respond to these demands even though he came to the SCSC campus for a meeting with the student body. While on campus, Mayor Pandarvis made matters worse when he offended the students with his inability to pronounce the word “negro.” When he said

“nigra,” numerous students booed and hissed because they believed “whites using it [nigra] really meant ‘nigger.’” John Stroman believed “they couldn’t pronounce the word [negro]. They were so used to saying ‘nigger,’ they couldn’t say the word [negro].” The students were disgruntled about the continuation of illegal segregation policies, police brutality, and the physical assault of black women. However, the mayor did not think these matters were pressing enough to require immediate action. Mayor Pendarvis did think that the racial tension in

Orangeburg was serious enough to warrant asking Governor McNair to call in the South Carolina

National Guard. After receiving the mayor’s request, McNair sent fifty additional Highway

Patrolmen and 250 guardsmen to protect the public utilities and set up roadblocks in town on

Thursday.22

South Carolina’s political leaders’ and white reporters’ responses on Wednesday deflected blame away from the police officers which alienated the students and pushed them to radicalize further. Earlier that day, the Charlotte Observer reported Governor McNair’s belief that the confrontation on Tuesday night was “the most serious incident we have had in some

29 time. It was the first time…where auto windows, store windows were knocked out. Some officers were hit with rocks and sticks.” According to his statement, what made the protest significant was the destruction of property that took place, not the police brutality. In his statement, he neglected to mention the peaceful sit-in demonstration that began the evening.

McNair urged civil rights activists to take their concerns to the “conference table, to the courts, and not to the streets.” This rhetoric further alienated the black community from the white power structure. That same day, the students attempted to mediate the situation with the mayor and the city council. The white politicians had turned them away and told them to wait two weeks. Also, the United States Department of Justice was considering the case of Floyd’s bowling alley to determine if the snack bar qualified as a restaurant. The radical students were growing tired of waiting for the city council to allow them to sit at the conference table, or for the courts to decide if African Americans had the right to bowl in Orangeburg.23

In addition to the students, estrangement from the white power structure, racial tensions remained high on Wednesday as a few white Orangeburg locals attacked students. The campus remained blockaded Wednesday evening. One car passed through the blockade, and two white teenagers drove erratically through the campus firing a gun indiscriminately. There were no injuries, and when the driver became trapped in a dead-end street, some students threw bottles at the car in retaliation. The car escaped, but most of the students believed that the police allowed the car through the blockade to initiate violence on campus. Later that night, white Orangeburg local Bert S. Hartzog, who had nothing to do with the bowling alley protest, shot three Claflin

College students. The three black men were simply walking by his house when Hartzog opened fire on them believing the need to protect his property justified his actions. Edward Pough,

Thomas Smith, and James Jones were admitted to the hospital that night because Hartzog

30 thought they threatened the safety of his family, and he shot them. The police blockade illustrates that the police believed the students posed a threat to the white community if they left campus.

The police contained them on campus to prevent more property damage. Members of the white community, however, posed a greater threat to the students when the two teenagers and Bart

Hartzog fired weapons at them with little police intervention.24

Those who perpetrated the violent and potentially deadly assaults against the students did not receive legal repercussions. Despite the fact that Police Chief Roger Poston refused to disclose the names of the shooter and the driver who passed through the blockade and fired a gun on campus, journalists with the Times and Democrat were able to determine they were white teenagers from Orangeburg. The teenagers led the campus security forces on a four-mile car chase, after trying to evade capture. The two teenagers were ultimately released on a twenty-five- dollar bond, and the driver was later charged with reckless driving. However, the police did not charge the teenagers for firing a gun because they never found a weapon. Further, the police officials, when questioned about Hartzog’s actions stated, “that man had every right to shoot those people.”25

During this violent week, SCSC and Claflin College students looked to activists and leaders for advice as they negotiated their place in the national movement. After hearing what other activists suggested, they developed their own path in the movement. During the 1960s, students attending black colleges in the South changed their schools from conservative institutions into hotbeds of movement activity. The race relations in the surrounding town heavily influenced campus activism. Orangeburg was no exception. On Thursday, February 8,

1968, when classes resumed on both campuses, students looked for direction from professors, campus leaders, and the administration. Under the direction of the administration, faculty

31 members encouraged students to remain on campus. They thought this was the best way to prevent another violent altercation. If the students remained on campus, they would be theoretically isolated from the white community. Most of the students listened to their professors and did not venture off campus that evening.26

In addition to looking for advice from their campus community, students tapped into the resources that state and national leaders could offer them. Even though the students did not take

Sellers’ advice, his presence, and the presence of other civil rights leaders, validated the students’ struggle. The involvement of busy national leaders demonstrated how important their local movement was to national civil rights organizations. Cleveland Sellers began his college education at Howard University expecting to find the campus rife with movement activity.

Instead, he was severely disappointed when most of his classmates were not interested in becoming activists. When he moved to Orangeburg, planning to enroll at SCSC, he wanted to help mobilize the student movement to elevate their activities to help cause state wide change for poor African Americans in South Carolina. During the sit-in movement, students sought out other leaders for advice as well. A small group of SCSC students contacted Modjeska Simkins, a state civil rights leader, who had provided help to Orangeburg’s movement organizers throughout the 1960s. Additionally, a large crowd of students from both colleges gathered on the

SCSC campus after hearing a rumor that South Carolina NAACP Field Secretary I. DeQuincey

Newman would address the students’ concerns demonstrating that they were interested in what state leaders had to say about their activity. Newman did not speak to the crowd of students before the massacre. However, he was in Orangeburg attending strategy sessions with the

NAACP and a small group of SCSC student leaders that evening. Once the group of students realized he was not coming, some of them gathered on the edge of campus at 7:30 PM near

32 Watson Street milling around and socializing. They remained on campus because they lacked a clear plan of action, and they heeded the advice of their professors.27

Thursday night was cold, with temperatures as low as twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, and some students decided to start a bonfire for warmth in the barricaded Watson Street which drew a large group of students to the edge of campus. In total, 500 National Guardsmen were mobilized in Orangeburg on Thursday, many of these military men were standing on the opposite side of Watson Street with the South Carolina Highway Patrolmen, the Orangeburg City

Police, and a few members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). At 9:30 PM, while standing around the bonfire, the students began singing traditional civil rights movement songs including “We Shall Overcome.” To keep the bonfire burning, the students took shutters and banisters from an abandoned house adjacent to campus. Later, the New York Times reported that this gathering was a riot, citing Governor McNair who inaccurately referred to the students as

“militants [who] are continually crying ‘Burn, baby, burn’ and shouting that blood is going to flow.” The bonfire created fear in the law enforcement officers who began to think they were facing off with rioters. Sellers was not present at the impromptu gathering. After attending meetings throughout Wednesday night, he was catching up on sleep in a dormitory on the SCSC campus. A student woke him to alert him to the on-going confrontation. Due to their lack of a clear plan, the students made decisions in response to their immediate situation in order to continue the momentum of their protests. The rumor that Newman would speak drew a crowd of students to the edge of campus. The light of the bonfire attracted more students to join the group.

There was no planned protest for this evening. SCSC senior, Thomas Kennerly walked to the front of the campus after escorting his fiancé back to her dormitory. He simply wanted to “find out what was going on.” Ernest Shuler, a junior at Wilkerson High School in Orangeburg,

33 walked to the SCSC campus with a group of his classmates after the high school play he attended that evening ended. This group of high schoolers wanted to enjoy the recreational activities available in the SCSC student center. Upon arrival, he and his friends did not go into the student center because they “noticed the commotion going on, and was curious.”28

During the gathering, the officers escalated their tactics to include deadly force and “riot” suppression. SLED Chief Strom called the fire department at 10:30 PM to prevent the fire from damaging the nearby electrical lines. Officers advanced to protect the fire truck. Together with the National Guardsmen, the officers pushed the students back further into campus, away from the blocked street. At 10:33 the South Carolina Highway Patrol advanced even further to protect the abandoned house that was to the students’ left. Prior, some students took wood from earlier for the fire. Meanwhile, a piece of wood, thrown from the direction of campus, hit an officer’s face. At 10:34 the police called for an ambulance, and most of the students retreated towards

Lowman Hall which was located directly behind them. Some students remained in the area taunting the officers chanting “you’re mama’s a whore.” At 10:38, from the safety of an embankment 100 feet away, nine Highway Patrolmen fired pump-action shotguns, loaded with buckshot, into the crowd of retreating students.29

The number of victims of the Orangeburg Massacre has remained an elusive number. By the next morning, three black students had died. The exact number of wounded victims has remained difficult to determine because of the chaos and confusion that ensued. Additionally, many of the students were too afraid to seek medical attention in Orangeburg. Black newspapers and organizations reported varying numbers of injured students during the month that followed the massacre. The Southern Regional Council, an organization that published reports on racial conditions in the South, reported that twenty-eight students were wounded. The Pittsburgh

34 Courier reported three deaths and thirty-nine injuries. Atlanta University published a statement that did not report the number of injured students, but reported four deaths, one of whom remained unidentified. White newspapers also reported numbers that varied. The Times and

Democrat published the names of the three dead students and reported that over thirty individuals were injured. According to their report the names of the injured students could not be determined “because of confusion and the rash work which kept doctors and assistants in the

Emergency Room of the Orangeburg Regional Hospital too busy to take time to make records.”

The Charlotte Observer reported thirty-four injuries. Information surrounding this massacre changed rapidly and conflicting reports sometimes ran in the same newspaper. The New York

Times reported two dead and forty wounded in an article on February 9. Later, on February 18, the Times changed these numbers to three deaths and thirty-four injuries. For decades after the massacre, the black community believed that twenty-seven students sustained injuries.

Originally, a monument erected on campus listed twenty-seven names. However, after 2001, another survivor came forward, and their name was added.30

Despite the confusion, some facts cannot be disputed: Henry Smith, Delano Middleton, and Samuel Hammond, Jr. died that night, and some of the African American students who died and suffered injuries were not civil rights activists. The deaths of peaceful protesters and bystanders demonstrated the lack of safety afforded to the black community, their children, their brothers, and their sisters. Their deaths united the black community despite varying beliefs about the movement, radicalization, and Black Power. Smith was an SCSC student from Marion, South

Carolina, who was involved in the bowling alley sit-ins. He was enrolled in the ROTC program on campus and attended church with his family proudly wearing his uniform. Middleton was a seventeen-year-old high school student whose mother worked on the SCSC campus as a maid.

35 The night of the massacre, he stopped by campus after basketball practice as he frequently did.

He was not interested in participating in civil rights activity. Hammond was an SCSC student who was not active in the civil rights movement, according to his friends. His father attended

SCSC after World War II, and Hammond thought the most important thing in life was an education. The black community, which in 1960 was sixty-percent of the total population in

Orangeburg County, knew that refraining from engaging in civil rights activity would not keep them safe from police brutality. Nevertheless, some African Americans did not want to participate in the movement because of the violent suppression activists faced. Even Cleveland

Sellers’ mother feared for his safety and did not want him to become active in the movement when he was enrolled at Howard University in the early 1960s. However, the Highway

Patrolmen did not differentiate between Black Power advocates, traditionalist activists, or students who were uninterested in the movement as they fired into the crowd.31

In the aftermath of the Orangeburg Massacre, numerous national civil rights leaders released statements expressing the frustration that the black community felt demonstrating that the massacre impacted the national movement and the radicalization of local activists in other states. Police brutality was an issue that united most of the black community regardless of their views on civil rights tactics. In an open letter to the Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr. voiced the black community’s anger and vexation that they did not have accurate information regarding the shooting. He demanded the Attorney General “act now to bring to justice the perpetrators of the largest armed assault undertaken under color of law in recent Southern history.” His letter demanded justice for the pain and suffering of the surviving families and the wounded students, which he listed as a number anywhere from thirty-seven to fifty students. Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP, released a statement which was

36 quoted in the Dallas Express that stated, “there is no report that the students were leaving the campus or that their conduct was disorderly or threatening the public peace. We request emphatically that the reason for their being shot be ascertained through a prompt and thorough investigation.” The presidents and executive directors of six colleges and universities in Georgia, including President Thomas D. Jarrett of Atlanta University, released a joint public statement.

Their statement was intended for President Lyndon B. Johnson, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and law enforcement officers across the nation. These academics believed American law enforcement has adopted “a ‘get tough’ national policy based on the use of armored and armed police and guardsmen in [the] killing [of] American citizens at the slightest provocation.”

Benjamin E. Mays, civil rights leader in Atlanta, President of Morehouse College, and alumni of

SCSC, after reading the statement from the college administrators, came out in full support of their statement. Mays’ statement, published in the most influential black-owned newspaper the

Pittsburgh Courier, called for the protection of American college students. News coverage spread the details and confusion about student movement activity in Orangeburg and the massacre to the national black community.32

Radicalization of the movement in Orangeburg did not begin on the Monday before the massacre, or at the bowling alley sit-in. Instead a long history of civil rights activity in

Orangeburg and South Carolina taught the students how to fight for self-determination and radical changes in their communities. During the Great Depression and the New Deal Era,

African Americans mobilized to fight for economic equality demonstrating that the civil rights movement was never a simple movement for desegregation, but instead a radical movement that strove to overthrow the established social order of America that relegated African Americans to the lowest economic rung of society.33

37 During this process of radicalization, black women in South Carolina played a large role in resisting Jim Crow, and their example provided lessons for others. Historian Peter Lau has demonstrated that black women in South Carolina were an active group in the movement even before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. These radical women supported the movement through organizations including the Young Women’s Christian Association and the National

Association of Colored Women. These grassroots organizations created networks of activists and helped win seemingly small victories for the movement that created space for the next generation to push even farther. After generations of South Carolina’s black women pushed for radical change, their networks were not a stagnant force waiting for an outside agitator to tap them.

Instead, by 1968, they were radicalized organizers who knew they had the power to change their society.34

On the SCSC campus, some of the women who participated in the bowling alley sit-in were active in the movement during their childhood and adolescence. These women felt a sense of personal responsibility to be committed to the struggle for black equality. Arleathia Jones, a twenty-two-year-old SCSC student, attended marches with her father as a child in her hometown of Huntington, New York, and in Washington, DC. The night of the massacre, Jones and her friend Louise Cawley, a twenty-seven-year-old married and pregnant senior at SCSC, were present at the bonfire before the shooting began. Cawley remembered later that she protested at the bowling alley and the bonfire because she wanted her voice to be heard. She was an avid activist in the movement, and she helped start the bonfire on Watson Street. She remembered later, “I wanted to be there personally myself to participate in the bonfire… and if we were going back down to the bowling alley, I was going to go down there, too.” To Louise Cawley her

38 activity in the movement was a personal obligation. During the shooting, both women laid on the ground behind a tree. They escaped injury as they heard bullets hit the leaves above them.35

Due to the high level of civil rights activity and student radicalization, Sellers came to

Orangeburg to raise black consciousness. However, the local activists already knew that they were oppressed, and they were actively working to dismantle the oppression they faced. Sellers, as other members in SNCC, did not force the locals to adopt his agenda or tactics. He helped in any way that he could and offered advice from experience when appropriate. On the night of the bonfire, before the shooting began, he attempted to find John Stroman in the crowd to tell him that the gathering was not safe. He believed from his experience the time of night unsettled law enforcement officers. The nine Highway Patrol officers began shooting before he could tell

Stroman that the students should retreat further into the interior of campus for safety.36

During the process of radicalization, some African Americans gained a sense of empowerment that was not tied to their desire to integrate society. Local movements radicalized and grew when more members of the black community learned to fight for self-determination while they benefited from the work that radical black women undertook. Septma Clark’s work educating poor, rural African Americans in the 1950s at Citizenship Schools in South Carolina drastically changed the lives of the adult students who attended. At these schools, African

American adults learned to read in order to pass the literacy test required to register to vote.

However, the ability to read radicalized the lives of these adults as they gained a personal sense of empowerment. Rural, southern African Americans gained personal self-determination as they no longer needed to depend on others to read letters from their children who lived away from home, or the ability to fill out simple government documents. Whether they successfully registered to vote or not did not determine their radicalization, although voting did increase their

39 sense of empowerment and self-determination. The ability to read alone radicalized the men and women at Clark’s Citizenship Schools.37

The efforts of Septma Clark and others contributed to the radicalization of the movement through their involvement in national, state, and local organizations. These women learned how to be leaders and activists from their childhood role models. At Septima Clark’s first Citizenship

School class in South Carolina, eleven black women and three black men attended classes in

1957. Citizenship Schools opened in other southern states, and because of their success, the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) took over the programs in 1961. Clark’s efforts with these Citizenship Schools enabled 9,575 African Americans to register to vote in

1961 and 1962. In addition to the women who worked to advance voting rights, those who organized behind economic goals and against lynching influenced younger activists as well.

Modjeska Simkins, the “long-time matriarch of the civil-rights movement in South Carolina,” planned boycotts and met with white politicians to discuss civil rights concerns demonstrating that women held powerful positions in the movement. Historian Jacqueline A. Rouse’s work describes how previous generations of women anti-lynching and voting rights activists had a significant impact on Simkins and other women leaders of the movement at the local level.38

Along with being great leaders, African American women were frontline activists and helped civil rights organizations operate. The roles that black women played were not always visible to the public during the movement. Within the NAACP, African American women held vital leadership roles. Their leadership helped achieve legal victories that the NAACP won and set the stage for the direct nonviolent action of the 1960s. In Louisiana, black women formed the foundation of the NAACP because of the vital operations they completed. Many local chapters owed their success to black women. Black women who worked for the NAACP as investigators

40 helped build cases that Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers brought against unjust laws and white criminals. Rosa Parks, before her part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was influential as an investigator for the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP where she helped build cases against white rapists. Due to her efforts, white rapists were convicted and sentenced to jail time. These victories enabled the NAACP to build stronger cases based on the precedent that even the shortest sentencing created. Despite the high number of women who were active in the movement, their hard work became invisible to white Americans. A journalist who covered civil rights activities, Karl Fleming, stated that “there were no women, period…no visible women on the front lines [of the movement].”39

Movement activists in Orangeburg not only became even more radical as they looked up to women as their role models, but the violent response to movement activity from the white community contributed to their radicalization. When SNCC planned the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi to teach African Americans basic skills including how to read as well as lessons in civics and citizenship, the white community responded to this activity with a resurgence in Ku

Klux Klan membership and violence towards the civil rights activists. Three volunteers, two white men, Mickey Schwerner and Andy Goodman, and one black man, James Chaney, went missing before they were found dead months later. Similarly, in January 1965, Dr. King organized a peaceful march in Selma, Alabama, with the SCLC and SNCC. White police officers violently attacked peaceful men, women, and children to prevent them from registering to vote.

The march resulted in the death of three people in “one of the bloodiest and most violent encounters in the movement’s history.” News coverage of this event broadcasted violence and police brutality to the public.40

41 Even though violent suppression of civil rights activity was not isolated to Alabama and

Mississippi, politicians in South Carolina tried to portray their state as devoid of civil rights disputes and violence. In the 1966 election, South Carolina Governor Robert McNair portrayed himself as a politician with a positive record on civil rights when he campaigned on a platform of compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He portrayed South Carolina as a state that lacked racial tension, and he perpetuated the belief that the black community was complacent with their degraded social, political, and economic status. However, this belief ignored the numerous ways that the state’s black community fought for self-determination for decades and the continued struggle that they waged against segregated schools after 1954. After branches of the NAACP formed in South Carolina between 1915 and 1920, grassroots organizing enabled African

Americans to challenge Jim Crow laws at the local level. Local members were able to shape the national movement through the connection of local activists and national leaders in this organization. The black community was familiar with the long history of civil rights activism in the state, and they knew that racial tension existed in their local communities despite what

McNair believed.41

As most of the black community knew, the bowling alley sit-in protests were not unique events in Orangeburg. The local black community and the students had engaged in civil rights activity for generations prior to this massacre. The students were more radical than the local black community who did not want movement activity to threaten their middle-class status. By

1954, liberal local activists were eager to desegregate public schools. Following the Brown v.

Board of Education decision, the local Orangeburg NAACP chapter actively circulated petitions in 1955 that demanded the city administration rapidly desegregate. As was symptomatic in most southern rural towns, the white community was shocked and fought back against these

42 integration efforts. A White Citizen’s Council united the white locals and opposed the NAACP’s effort. Orangeburg’s black community responded with an economic boycott. As the larger population demographic in the town, they knew that they had purchasing power, and they refrained from shopping at white-owned businesses. However, the white community responded with their own economic boycott of black businesses as white distribution companies refused to deliver goods to black businesses, and white employers fired their black employees. The black community’s efforts were unsuccessful, and the public high school in Orangeburg remained segregated until 1964 when token desegregation began. By the 1965 school year, before

McNair’s election, more than half of South Carolina’s public schools remained segregated, and no school had achieved full integration.42

During the school desegregation movement, the SCSC campus was a hot-bed for movement activity as the students became devoted to desegregating the local high school. The black community sent their children to Wilkinson High School, which was established in 1937 as the first public school for African Americans in Orangeburg. As the college students became active in the desegregation effort, the increased visibility of the campus movement activity drew criticism and overt suppression from the white power structure. Under orders from South

Carolina Governor George Bell Timmerman, SLED officers occupied the SCSC campus in 1956 to conduct surveillance and investigate the students’ involvement in the local movement. After the dispute escalated to a student strike demanding the removal of the law enforcement officers, the administration expelled fifteen students for their organizing efforts, and fired five faculty members for offering support to the students. After years of organizing, Orangeburg High School desegregated in 1964 due to the efforts of student and local activists despite the opposition they faced from campus administrators and the white community.43

43 Throughout the effort to desegregate schools, black women and girls did not always have a choice about becoming activists. Experienced activists would prepare young girls in

Orangeburg as they were thrust into the movement as they desegregated public schools. During their childhood, girls had to learn how to conduct themselves in a hostile environment, and they experienced physical violence and verbal abuse while in school from other children and adults.

Girls were often the first black students to desegregate high schools throughout South Carolina.

In Orangeburg, June Manning was the first black student to attend Orangeburg High School in

1964. She prepared at a Freedom School before the school year began, but as historian W.

Marvin Dulaney has written “nothing could have prepared her for the three years of name calling, [and] harassment” she endured, which was nothing compared to the physical violence.

After some white students pushed her into lockers, she went home bleeding on at least one occasion.44

Even though the campus movement was gaining visibility during the desegregation efforts, one SCSC administrator, President Benner C. Turner, did not tolerate civil rights activity on campus because he wanted to maintain a good relationship with the white community members, especially the members of the Board of Trustees. Turner was president of the college in 1956, and he notified the fifteen student activists of their expulsion. In 1967, the Board of

Trustees was composed of six white and two black members, and they did not want any civil rights activity on campus. SCSC President Turner fired faculty or staff members, which were exclusively African Americans until 1966, who joined the NAACP. Even tenured professors were vulnerable to termination if they joined civil rights organization or supported desegregation efforts. The Board of Trustees made it clear to Turner that they were not interested in integration,

44 and they expected him to rein in the student movement. Despite his efforts, the campus experienced a great deal of radical movement activity among the students and faculty members.45

Women educators at SCSC learned to hide their involvement in movement activity from the administration, but they did not hide their dedication to radical change from their students.

These women did not follow Turner’s orders to academically punish student activists. SCSC students fought to change their campus by placing African Americans who were proud supporters of the movement in positions of power. In 1967, due to a student protest, President

Turner resigned, and the Board of Trustees appointed M. Maceo Nance, Jr. acting president. The students approved of this appointment because of Nance’s support of the students’ movement activity. At this time, the fundamental nature of black colleges, which had previously been white controlled, across the South changed as the students fought to have African American Board of

Trustee members and administrators.46

These students who demanded changes on college campuses learned their radical tactics from teachers and other more experienced activists in the movement. Generations of black women taught young activists in Orangeburg to fight for self-determination and black equality.

When those young activists became adults, they taught students and their own children valuable lessons about the movement. Geraldyne Zimmerman was a math professor on the SCSC campus who remembered that her mother had inducted her into the movement at an early age. Her mother, Hazel Pierce, learned how to fight for civil rights from the generation of activists before her. Zimmerman remembered that her mother was a fierce, radical woman who would drop what she was doing to support impromptu student protests even late in her life. After much persistence

Zimmerman and Pierce registered to vote together in 1932. She remembered that “my mother and I never missed an opportunity to vote when they finally let us. We used to laugh and say if

45 you were voting on cat or dog, we were there.” For Zimmerman and her mother, voting represented an act of resistance and gave them a sense of empowerment.47

Later in Zimmerman’s life, her views became more radicalized as she resisted traditionalist and conservative black community members who attempted to limit civil rights activity in Orangeburg. During her career as an SCSC educator, Zimmerman was strong-willed and determined to support the civil rights movement. The students went on strike to protest

President Turner’s refusal to join the economic boycott in solidarity with the local black community in 1956. During this strike, Turner told the faculty and staff if they joined the students, they would lose their job. Despite Turner’s orders, Zimmerman and other educators did not refrain from being active in the movement, instead they hid their activity during Turner’s presidency. One way that Zimmerman continued to maintain her commitment to the movement and keep her job was to reject the presidents orders. She refused to penalize striking students in her attendance policy. Furthermore, she overtly supported the students efforts as she encouraged them to leave her classroom. One day during the student strike, Zimmerman only had one male student in her classroom and she told him, “if you don’t get out of here, if you are not going to join those students in that march, I’m going to give you an F.” Historian Tiyi Morris suggests economic repercussions did not prevent women from participating in the movement, and those women learned how to navigate as activists without drawing attention to themselves from their employers. Indirect ways of supporting the movement became easier as Modjeska Simkins set up fake companies that allowed women educators in South Carolina to donate money to the

NAACP without exposing that they supported the organization. Black women in Orangeburg used these covert methods of supporting the movement without jeopardizing their economic

46 stability. Even though these women did not always employ radical tactics, they still strove to achieve radical change.48

SCSC and Claflin College students learned their tactics not only from local black women, but also from national black leaders. Localized movements had the potential to shape the national movement as activists adopted methods of protesting that they saw activists in other states utilize. In 1960, the North Carolina A&T student sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro,

North Carolina, gained national attention. SCSC and Claflin College students quickly decided to initiate their own sit-in at segregated lunch counters, which lasted from February 1 to March 15 in 1960. The sit-ins ended after police officers sprayed 388 people with fire hoses and arrested them. These protesters were detained in a quickly built stockade outside, wet in forty-degree temperatures. The police arrested those who tried to bring dry clothing and blankets to the incarcerated students. Despite the students’ efforts, the lunch counters remained segregated.

Nevertheless, the students continued to use this method of resistance throughout the decade to fight for change in their town. Direct nonviolent action like this sought to radically change southern racial segregation. Together with the local movements throughout the South, these sit- ins helped achieve the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.49

When the student movement in Orangeburg achieved victories during the 1960s, they tried to maintain their momentum to push for even more radical social change. Student protest activity in 1967 successfully brought changes to the SCSC campus. Most of the students felt empowered and radicalized after they forced President Turner to resign. This victory enabled them to believe they had enough power to change the bowling alley’s segregation policy. SCSC

President Turner’s decision to lay off three popular white professors sparked the protest that would cost him his job. The students petitioned demanding that the faculty be reinstated because

47 they viewed these professors as effective teachers. The students did not think their termination was in the best interests of the students. Further, the students wanted a voice in the administrative decisions on campus. During this protest, they continued to use direct nonviolent tactics, and they initiated two overnight sit-ins, one at Turner’s campus residence and another in the student center.50

After the two nights of peaceful protests, Turner began the process of expelling the student leaders involved in these demonstrations. Ultimately, the administration suspended three students, Joseph Hammond, John Stroman, and Benjamin Bryant, barring them from the campus until August 1970. The student body responded with a boycott of classes, and on March 2, 1967, seventy percent of the enrolled students refused to attend class. The situation caught Governor

McNair’s attention, and he met with Turner in an effort to end the strike. McNair issued an ultimatum promising that disciplinary action “will be justly and rapidly administered” if the students did not return to class by March 10. This deadline did not deter the student strike, and the three student leaders were expelled from the college. State NAACP leaders met to discuss legal action to reinstate the expelled students. NAACP lawyer Matthew Perry represented the students in court. In his defense, he argued that their expulsion violated the students’ freedom of speech. The court ordered that the students be reinstated at the college, and the undergraduates began attending classes again before the end of March.51

In addition to getting the expelled students reinstated, the student protesters won a massive victory when Turner resigned following the protest and the Board of Trustees appointed

M. Maceo Nance as acting president. The students demanded President Turner’s resignation before they agreed to return to the classroom. During negotiations, Governor McNair believed this demand could not be met. However, ultimately, the students won when Governor McNair

48 conceded their demand in order to end the strike. Historian Jeffrey Turner’s analysis of historically black colleges during the 1960s suggests that student protests called for the resignation of presidents who did not represent the best interests of the black community and changed the nature of black colleges. After their efforts, SCSC students had an administrator who supported the civil rights movement, and their ability to cause that change in campus leadership empowered them. Seeing that their efforts had such power to cause change helped the students believe they could advance civil rights and black equality in the local town as well.

Historian Charron suggests that local activists in South Carolina experienced an increased sense of personal empowerment coupled with a decreased level of fear of the white power structure when they achieved victories in the movement. The students in Orangeburg experienced the same feelings after they successfully realized change in 1967. SCSC student, Isaac Williams was active in the strike to reinstate the expelled students. Later, he believed, “if there was no

[dramatic events of] 1967…there would not have been the energy for what happened in

1968…the more things we did, the more empowered the students felt.”52

The student activists in Orangeburg used their empowerment to push for more radical changes, and they were a part of a tradition of activism that built momentum for years prior to

1968. State and national leaders were aware of and involved in Orangeburg’s movement activity.

Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at the Trinity Methodist Church in 1967. Before Cleveland

Sellers moved to Orangeburg, the local movement was recognized for its activism as various state leaders took interest in the local civil rights activities. In addition to representing the expelled students in 1967, Matthew Perry provided legal counsel to Orangeburg’s local NAACP chapter to help the local black community pursue the desegregation of private businesses and public facilities. However, economic repercussions made the local black middle-class want to

49 utilize the legal method of integration instead of direct nonviolent sit-in protests. Ultimately, after seeking Mathew Perry’s advice, the middle-class black community did not take any action against Henry Floyd, owner of the All Star Bowling Lanes. They feared that white backlash might threaten the job security of a local black man who worked in the same shopping plaza.

That same year, Reverend I. DeQuincey Newman worked in Orangeburg to help with the student strike against President Turner. As a state leader in the movement, Modjeska Simkins led the economic boycotts that took place in Orangeburg before 1967, and students consulted her during the week of the bowling alley sit-ins.53

By 1968, the students were confident they had enough power to change the bowling alley’s segregation policy. After the student chapter of the NAACP and BACC formed in 1967, the organizations wasted no time focusing their attention on integration at the bowling alley.

They began participating in negotiations with Floyd in the summer months with students who lived nearby under the mentorship of SCSC Dean Oscar Butler, who loved to bowl and frequently drove to Columbia where there was an integrated bowling alley. These talks continued throughout the fall semester, but Floyd refused to integrate maintaining that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not cover his bowling alley because there were no interstate highways nearby.

Further, he claimed that his snack bar did not constitute a restaurant. When the students failed to reach their goal through negotiations with Henry Floyd, they radicalized their tactics. The students grew tired of meetings and negotiations, and Dean Butler was out of town when John

Stroman rallied a group of students to sit-in.54

The students, especially SCSC and Claflin College women, played an integral role in the effort to desegregate the All Star Bowling Lanes despite the fact that newspaper reports ignored their efforts and focused on Sellers as the leader of the protest. Newspaper reports covered

50 Sellers’ activities and arrest in Orangeburg which enabled the white community to believe that national leaders were responsible for civil unrest in their town. These reports ignored the local grassroots organizers who built the movement. While Cleveland Sellers’ presence validated the students experience and empowered them, some members of the black community believed that the white power structure capitalized on this protest as their chance to target Sellers. The

Highway Patrolmen who shot into the crowd have never disclosed a specific motive for their actions. Whether they received an order to shoot has remained to be determined. Some members of the black community believed that the Highway Patrolmen fired their weapons specifically to kill Cleveland Sellers because of his work as a national leader and his connection to Black

Power. In the aftermath of the massacre, universities and colleges in the South released statements that rejected the claim that Sellers was the source of the students’ unrest. These statements believed that the massacre occurred because of the officers’ desire to kill Sellers and their blatant disregard for anyone who was murdered or injured in the process. The administration at Atlanta University reported in a press release that the white police officers and the National Guard specifically targeted Cleveland Sellers at the massacre. They believed that the National Guard instructed the South Carolina Highway Patrolmen to aim and shoot at Sellers in the crowd. The Southern Regional Council echoed this sentiment in their report released on

February 24, 1968. They argued that the similar builds, clothing styles, and hairstyles of the three dead students led them to give “serious consideration to a theory that a deliberate effort was made to shoot Mr. Sellers.” The report “found no evidence to support charges by Gov. Robert E.

McNair that Black Power advocates, specifically Cleveland Sellers of SNCC instigated the Feb.

8 violence.” During the shooting, Sellers suffered a wound in the shoulder, but he resisted going to the hospital until SCSC football players agreed to accompany him. When the Orangeburg

51 Police discovered Sellers in the emergency room, officers arrested him. As they escorted him to a patrol car he repeatedly yelled, “I’m with the sheriff” so that people would know he was arrested. Later, he remembered, “I was concerned that if I got out into the car with the sheriffs and the deputies, and nobody knew where I was, that anything could happen.” He was afraid that the police officers would kill him “understanding what had transpired with Goodman, Turner, and Cheney [sic.] down in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”55

Wounded students, including Sellers, arrived at the hospital through the aid of African

American women who made numerous trips to and from campus. Often, women supported the movement by fulfilling supportive, yet vital, roles like this. Cleveland Sellers wrote in his memoirs that women at SCSC helped take care of his wounds in the aftermath of the massacre.

He wrote, “I do not believe we would have made it without people like her – those who rolled up their sleeves and came to our aid.” Some members of the national black community were aware of how instrumental women were to the movement and the preservation of the black family. In a

Richmond Afro American editorial, Preston Yancy expressed his gratitude for black women because of their strength and support, which made them vital to the community struggle. He stated, “for our hopes and aspirations are alive today because they made tremendous efforts for the race.” He called on black men to express adoration and gratitude to black women who have

“held her race together over the years.” Jones and other SCSC women exhibited strength and composure in the aftermath of the massacre. Jones remembered very matter-of-factly that she

“didn’t really get frightened… we helped the guys, carried them to the infirmary.” After the shock wore off, she remembered feeling the effects of her experience and what she saw later that night. She was able to remain calm during the confusion and high emotions because she needed to help her classmates. On one of their return trips from the hospital, police officers stopped

52 Jones and Cawley. An officer physically assaulted Cawley after she argued with them. Cawley stayed overnight in the hospital due to her injuries, and she suffered a miscarriage in the following weeks.56

The Orangeburg Massacre contributed to the radicalization of local movements throughout South Carolina. In the weeks and months following the massacre, students and members of the black community traveled to Columbia to protest outside of the state capitol building. Students at South Carolina State College agreed to share the cost of chartering seventeen buses to the state capitol for the protest. On March 13, fifteen students presented a list of grievances to Lieutenant Governor John C. West while 1,000 others peacefully marched.

Students and faculty members from a variety of colleges and universities in South Carolina composed the group of protesters. Governor McNair met with a small number of students to discuss South Carolina State College’s funding and the need for an investigation into the massacre. While the college did receive $6 million in bonds, they did not receive the investigation that they asked for. Despite the fact that there was no violence, five students were arrested after they attempted to read their list of grievances from the state senate floor. Also, two marching students who used profanity were arrested, while others called the state law enforcement officers “murderers” and “hired assassins.” On the same day, Ralph McGill, a journalist in Atlanta, Georgia, said, “the Justice Department in Washington, in the face of the utter failure of local governments to act responsibly and demand adherence to law, took out an injunction against the bowling alley ownership…it may be asked why the City of Orangeburg and the State of South Carolina did not themselves.”57

In Orangeburg, South Carolina, black students were a part of a long tradition of civil rights activity on the South Carolina State College and the Claflin College campuses. Women

53 were active radical grassroots organizers and powerful leaders in the fight for racial equality. The work that radical women completed to advance the civil rights of the black community created space for student activists to become even more radical in the following generations. The

Orangeburg Massacre was the culmination of a week long protest to desegregate the All Star

Bowling Lanes. The students radicalized their tactics after they saw the limitations of negotiations with the bowling alley owner and city officials placed on the movement. They radicalized even further after they realized their capacity to cause change on the SCSC campus.

Three students lost their lives after a confrontation between students and law enforcement officers at a bonfire on Watson Street. Women were active participants in the sit-in demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday, and at the bonfire on Thursday night February 8, 1968.

As frontline activists and powerful leaders, SCSC and Claflin College women played an imperative role transporting the wounded to the local segregated hospital. These radical black women looked to SCSC professors as role models who helped student protesters through small acts of resistance against the college administration who did not tolerate civil rights activism before 1967.58

54

CHAPTER II

DIVERGING FROM REALITY

Orangeburg’s white community, like most white Americans, lived under a cultural façade that enabled them to deny how American culture was rooted in white supremacy. In South

Carolina, the southern traditions and customs that comprised the white community’s culture reinforced the racial caste system.1 Some South Carolina State College (SCSC) and Claflin

College students connected the black community’s inferior social, political, and economic status to their status as second-class United States citizens. SCSC student Mathew Turner believed that their status as second-class citizens meant that “as a race we have never really gained our freedom.”2 Despite the passage of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, state legislatures passed laws that eroded the rights of most African Americans. Some members of the white community used intimidation to prevent the black community from realizing their voting rights.3

Racial segregation in the private and public sector became deeply ingrained in southern culture.

Most white southerners grew accustomed to deferential behavior from the black community and denied the presence of racial tensions in their town. As historian David Goldfield wrote whites

“fancied themselves as experts on black behavior and feeling.” Part of this expertise included the belief that blacks “behave in certain ways because that is the way they are, and they are happy that way.”4

During the modern civil rights movement, South Carolina’s politicians prided themselves on having a good reputation for race relations which denied the black community’s discontent,

55 their long history of movement activity, and the current struggles they were fighting to overcome. Most of the white community seemed oblivious to the racial discontent in

Orangeburg. However, the black community knew that social problems existed due to their lived experience. African American students enrolled at SCSC believed that the Orangeburg Massacre

“brought to the attention of the public that there is, existing in Orangeburg, racial strife and discrimination that should be abolished.”5 The white politicians’ inadequate response to the massacre exemplified the inferior status that the black community occupied. On both campuses, some SCSC and Claflin College students interpreted South Carolina’s politicians’ lack of concern as a complete disregard for the lives of black men. In the weeks after the massacre, the white community believed racial tensions had dissipated and that, “Orangeburg [was] calm as

[the National] Guard patrols” the black neighborhood.6 However, this calm atmosphere meant that “armored personnel carriers and soldiers armed with rifles blocked the entrances to the deserted schools…and the force of some 600 guardsmen has been reduced, leaving about

350…to cruise the streets of the Negro section in jeeps and trucks.”7 Only a few short weeks after the student deaths, the white community was once again able to enjoy the blissful harmony that they believed existed before the massacre. The national white community deflected their own guilt and denied their participation in the escalation of racial tensions as a strict “curfew,

[and a] student exit gives SC race peace.”8

The atmosphere on the campuses was anything but calm during those weeks.

Orangeburg’s black students organized protests, a letter writing campaign, and participated in the larger black community’s economic boycott. On March 13, 1,000 black students from across

South Carolina protested at the state house calling for the black community to vote Governor

Robert McNair out of office.9 The Charleston News and Courier reported that these students

56 “were demanding something beyond the law – in other words, mob action.”10 SCSC student John

Corley believed that Governor Robert McNair’s and Lieutenant Governor John West’s lack of concern about the lives lost at the Orangeburg Massacre continued to escalate the “situation which may erupt into a small Civil Rights war unless action in the right direction is taken by higher officials” to rectify the prejudices of the law enforcement officers in South Carolina.11

The racial tension in Orangeburg was symptomatic of the larger problems of black poverty and racism in America that urban uprisings exposed throughout the country. Every summer from 1964 to 1967 cities throughout the country experienced urban uprisings that resulted in a total of 250 deaths and 60,000 arrests. After liberal legislation did not prevent racial discontent from escalating into uprisings, President Lyndon B Johnson commissioned a study to determine what was causing these conflicts. In May 1968, the Kerner Commission published a report that examined the civil unrest in numerous cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Newark.

The Kerner Report determined that the black community was deprived of political and economic power in their local communities which contributed to the racial discontent. The senators on this commission determined that “white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”12 This report foreshadowed more incidents of civil unrest leading to massive arrests, potential deaths, and property damage if programs were not instituted to alleviate poverty and to give the black community a voice in their local and state governments.13

When this report was released, President Johnson felt the conclusions reflected poorly on his social policies, and he did not adapt the findings into his political agenda. However, other politicians rejected this report more overtly than President Johnson in favor of a platform of law and order.14 In 1968, Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon ran on a platform of law

57 and order. Nixon received over 300 Electoral College votes. The findings of this commission did not sway President Nixon’s political stance and urban uprisings continued to occur throughout the country. Nixon’s policy of law and order implemented a violent suppression of “rioters.”15

African Americans who were disgruntled over racism continued to protest and faced violent suppression. On May 11, 1970, the Mississippi Highway Patrol killed two students at Jackson

State College. After this shooting, a federal report found that “a significant cause of the deaths…is the confidence of white officers that if they fire weapons during a black campus disturbance, they will face neither stern department discipline nor criminal prosecution or conviction.”16

What enabled the white police officers to kill innocent peaceful protesters without repercussions? Why did most of the white community condone the breach of constitutional right of due process? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by exploring the ways that cultural ideas about race, gender, and class influenced the way the social groups involved in the massacre perceived reality. Individuals in the white community and the black community perceived reality through the cultural lens that they adopted throughout their life. These cultural lenses enabled one group to see a peaceful protest while another saw a riot. Or, more likely since most did not witness the protest first-hand, for one group to read about a riot in the newspaper and to believe that African Americans were likely to riot in their town, while another group read the same article and noticed that newspapers usually labeled black peaceful protesters rioters.

How the two communities in Orangeburg perceived the student protest diverged from the other’s. This chapter examines these diverging perceptions of reality and how they altered the potential to peacefully resolve civil unrest.

58 The social groups that this chapter considers includes some of the white law enforcement officers and politicians, the black students, and the local white and black community members.

Individuals internalized their racial, gender, and class identities and manipulated them to define their own American identity. As some of the black community fought for civil rights, they utilized a rhetoric that appealed to American democratic ideals in order to demonstrate that as

American citizens they were entitled to the same rights and privileges that the United States

Constitution protected in the white community. The system of inequality that race, gender, and class supported remained at odds with American democracy.17 Race, gender, and class categorized Americans into neat boxes that theoretically defined who they were. These categories enabled individuals to have a basic understanding of how those category members should act. Individuals began to expect those individuals to exhibit acceptable behaviors for their category.18 Due to this categorization and the expectation of acceptable behaviors, social groups developed divergent perceptions of reality. The altered world view of various social groups clouded their ability to communicate effectively, to peacefully resolve civil rights violations, and recognize the struggles that their neighbors faced in daily life.

Throughout the country racialized perceptions of African Americans altered the ability of most white community members to understand the struggles that African Americans fought to overcome during the modern civil rights movement. Most white community members had an altered perception of African Americans that they knew and with whom they regularly interacted. Racialization, systematic racism, and an altered perception of reality was not limited to the South. African Americans who relocated to northern cities after the end of Reconstruction were confronted with the same racism and racial segregation that hid behind a different set of political and social policies than in the South. According to historian Gary Gerstle, after the

59 bitter Antebellum sectionalism and bloody Civil War, civic nationalism united the national white community. This nationalism was inherently racist and demonstrated how racialized ideas were prevalent throughout the United States.19

Some white community members enforced their version of reality as they ran out of town

African Americans who became uppity, reached too far for economic advancement, or did not submit to deference.20 Racial etiquette enabled the white community to maintain the racial caste system and to believe that their local towns were devoid of racial unrest. Some members of the white community could not fathom that their world view might not be the same as an African

Americans’. This altered perception of reality enabled locals to believe that outside agitators were responsible for the racial unrest in their towns. Southern culture and traditions attempted to hide the way that real and threatened violence enforced the system as African Americans were lynched, brutalized, and raped in their town.21

Peaceful protesters disrupted the white community’s perception of reality. The white community’s perception of a content black community distorted the way that most of the white community perceived African Americans who peacefully protested for black freedom and equality. Most members of the white community perceived peaceful protesters as militant rioters who threatened law and order in their town. When confronted with a reality that did not match their perception, some members of the white community struggled to hold onto their southern culture. In Orangeburg, most of the white community could not understand why the students suddenly wanted to bowl. This altered perception of reality enabled most members of the white community to accept the killing of peaceful students who simply, yet symbolically, wanted to bowl in Orangeburg.

60 Race and Southern Culture

White politicians defined and redefined race in order to deny full citizenship to racialized groups based on the color of their skin. The concept of race developed in American history alongside the concept of citizenship specifically to deny rights to groups based on their skin color. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, racial categorization was the process of restoring

“the social inequality that citizenship had theoretically abolished.”22 As a concept, race was fluid and its definition continued to change throughout American history. National crises including the

Civil War and Reconstruction required that race be redefined in order to prevent full citizenship from being extended to racial groups. When the United States Supreme Court upheld racial categorization and differential treatment with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, white supremacy gained legal support despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.23 Legal segregation theoretically created a southern culture of separate but equal. However, in practice, segregation created a society where African Americans were treated as second-class citizens who were not afforded the same rights as white Americans.24

The white community internalized the perceived inferiority of African Americans and treated them differently in society. This differential treatment created societal racism, which

George M. Fredrickson has defined as a set of practices that treat one racial group as inferior to another.25 Racialization is the process of relegating a social group to second-class citizenship and a lower social status based on their skin color. After the abolition of slavery, racial definitions remained, but they were redefined and adapted to continue to deny African Americans rights despite their status as American citizens. In order to maintain the monopoly that the white community held on political, economic, and social power, they maintained a definition of blacks

61 as inferior and, therefore, not suited for participation in American democracy, the market, or for social contact.26

Racial etiquette gave white supremacy cultural enforcement. David Goldfield defined racial etiquette as a cultural system of social rules that governed interactions between racial groups. These rules enforced expected behaviors. The black community was expected to treat members of the white community with the respect afforded to proper ladies and gentlemen. On the other hand, the white community treated members of the black community with paternalism as long as they submitted to deference. After centuries of being legally and socially treated as the superior race, most of the white community internalized white supremacy. Southern traditions and customs perpetuated the racial caste system and taught individuals which racial group they belonged to. When white Americans internalized these beliefs and identities, they came to expect acceptable behaviors from racialized group members.27

Racial etiquette enabled some of the white community to ignore how they enforced race through violent methods to maintain white supremacy. Often, when a person violated racial etiquette, some white community members responded with violence.28 Refusing to submit to deference had the potential to open the black community members to physical attack. Sometimes the white power structure supported this enforcement of adherence to racial etiquette. When some white supremacists became members of the law enforcement agencies, this violence became systematic and systemic and left the black community without protection. In 1946, a police officer used his billy club to gauge out veteran Sargent Isaac Woodward’s eyes after he argued with a white bus driver in Aiken, South Carolina. Officer Linwood Shull faced a trial for his actions following the assault that blinded Woodward. An all-white jury acquitted Shull, much to the approval of the spectators in the courtroom who broke out into applause.29

62 After the end of Reconstruction, vigilante justice and lynching enforced adherence to racial etiquette. In South Carolina, from 1880 to 1947, mobs lynched at least 180 members of the black community. Orangeburg County experienced the third most lynching in the state despite being the ninth most populated county in South Carolina.30 After the Civil War, the threat of lynching was so pervasive that some black community members were afraid to directly challenge white men, and they felt powerless. This violence was not limited to African Americans who violated racial etiquette, as white community members who helped African Americans were vulnerable to attack as well.31 Further, some black community members were vulnerable to random acts of violence to enforce the racial caste system. In 1957, six members of the Alabama

Ku Klux Klan randomly attacked Edward “Judge” Aaron. As they castrated him, one shouted,

“you think nigger kids should go to school with my kids?” Aaron survived the attack primarily because the Klansmen poured turpentine onto his genitals to intensify the pain. However, inadvertently, they prevented the wound from becoming infected saving his life. 32

In the South, according to historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, the white community’s use of lynching transformed from a method of “informal law enforcement into outright political terrorism.”33 This threat of violence created a pervasive culture of intimidation that demanded that African Americans adhere to racial etiquette. White southerners enforced racism as they interacted with members of the black community that they knew personally. This enforcement hid behind many faces and operated so subtly that the white community denied their participation in the process. Southerners navigated a society where social rules governed even the simplest of interactions. Who could and could not eat together became an important aspect of racial etiquette that could not be violated.34

63 Racial etiquette was visible to immigrants as well, who quickly learned how the

American racial system operated. During the first half of the twentieth century, Eastern European immigrants were not considered to be completely white because they were not of Anglo-Saxon descent. However, they possessed the potential to assimilate into western culture and become white based on the color of their skin. Most of these individuals, usually of Slavic, Jewish, or

Celtic descent, internalized their own racial superiority and began to enforce racial etiquette in their own lives while they “became white.”35 SCSC Dean and faculty advisor to the Black

Awareness Coordinating Committee (BACC) Dr. Rubin Weston remembered his personal experience with an Italian immigrant. This individual, when questioned how he would respond to an African American eating in a restaurant declared, “I would leave, because they have their places, and we have ours.”36 This immigrant’s use of the term “we” reaffirmed his membership in the white community. In an attempt to secure his whiteness, he differentiated himself from racialized groups. He enforced adherence to racial etiquette and internalized the belief that the black community was not acceptable for social contact to ensure his membership in the superior racial category.

Similarly to immigrants, children quickly learned racial etiquette and became rigid enforcers of race. They observed the differential treatment that race, gender, and class elicited through the symbolic interactions that adults participated in. For example, when a child heard an adult refer to white men using formal titles like “sir” or “mister” and to black men as “boy,” they learned that this was the socially acceptable way to address those members of society. Racial etiquette demanded that children be segregated during their education, and when this system began to break down children responded violently in order to hold their superior social and political status. During public school desegregation, some white children held onto their

64 internalized beliefs about racial etiquette and white supremacy. These children attacked black children to maintain white supremacy. The fact that their parents and other adults violently attacked black students validated these white children’s belief that they had a right to do so. In

1957, Melba Beals, Earnest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, and six other children desegregated Little

Rock High School. These children experienced physical violence from some of the white children in their classrooms.37 Military personnel escorted Beals and her black classmates through the school day because she faced bodily harm at school. 38

This same racial etiquette governed South Carolina and made the desegregation of public schools a battle zone for the struggle to maintain white supremacy. Even though South Carolina did not have their own state politician who reflected Alabama’s Governor George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of South Carolina demanding “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” the state supported school did not desegregate until

1963.39 Orangeburg was no exception and the white community resisted token desegregation until 1964 despite the black community’s active efforts to force integration. The President of

Claflin College’s daughter, June Manning was the first black student to attend Orangeburg

Highschool. Some of her white classmates attempted to enforce racial etiquette through “petty, gratuitous nastiness” and outright violence. While some students refused to acknowledge her presence, others made her uncomfortable as they silently stared at her. This nasty behavior was not the worst treatment she experienced. Some of her white classmates even physically attacked her and shoved her against lockers during the school day.40

The enforcement of racial etiquette in public school classrooms was not limited to the

South. Children in the North participated in the enforcement of racial behavior during school desegregation. Although the most visible violent struggles over school desegregation took place

65 in the South, the practice of segregated schools was not limited to this region. Public schools in the North and West remained segregated into the 1960s through redlining and housing policies.

The NAACP fought legal battles to integrate schools in Cleveland, Ohio, Rochester, New York,

San Francisco, California, and numerous other cities. The struggle for school desegregation in

Boston, Massachusetts, continued into the 1970s as the Unites States Supreme Court revisited the constitutionality of segregated schools to consider the legality of busing. In 1971, the

Supreme Court upheld the right of federal courts to order busing to achieve integrated public schools.41

Race and the Orangeburg Massacre

In 1968, racial etiquette continued to govern social interactions in Orangeburg. While attending SCSC and Claflin College, black students seemed to live in a different world on campus than in the town. While Jordan Simmons recalled that, “the campus was great.” He specifically remembered that this experience had geographic limits. “You know,” he explained,

“it was almost like once you step, quote, across the railroad tracks, things changed a little. I mean you knew your place…Well, it’s just that you knew that it was a separate life style. I mean you knew that you couldn’t go certain places, for instance, the bowling alley.”42 When the bowling alley sit-in began, the white community in Orangeburg could not understand why the black students suddenly wanted access to the bowling alley. For years African Americans had driven to

Columbia where there was an integrated bowling alley. During this time, the white community interpreted the black community’s willingness to drive out of town to mean that they did not want access to the local bowling alley. They used this interpretation to construct their perception that the black community was content with the way things were. Therefore, when the black

66 students demanded the right to bowl at the All Star Bowling Lanes, they challenged the white community’s perception of reality. The white community responded with shock and disbelief.43

After the Tuesday night sit-in that ended with police brutality, Orangeburg congressional

Representative Albert W. Watson released a statement on Wednesday, February 7, that demonstrated his altered perception of the events that transpired the night before. According to his understanding, “the civil disturbance which occurred in Orangeburg, SC, Tuesday night, and which still threatens to erupt again, can, under no circumstances, be termed legitimate, and it was certainly not peaceful dissent.” He did not witness the protest, but he constructed his understanding of the student protesters based on their violation of racial etiquette. His angry response was aimed at delegitimizing a peaceful protest and reinforcing white supremacy. He applauded the law enforcement for “putting down this threat of anarchy,” and he believed that

“the entire nation can look to the example set by these gentlemen in Orangeburg, SC, and gain an insight into the proper way to curb a serious civil disturbance.”44

Racialized depictions, like Representative Watson’s, verified the Orangeburg white locals’ perception of the SCSC and Claflin College student activists. Statements from white politicians and racialized newspaper reports depicted the students as rioters.45 Inaccurate reports printed in the white newspapers verified Watson’s statement. On Wednesday, the Charlotte

Observer reported that “the most serious racial incident in years” resulted in one officer seeking medical attention, but the article did not mention the eight students who stayed overnight in the hospital for injuries resulting from police brutality.46 The stories that the Times and Democrat, the Charlotte Observer, and other South Carolina newspapers reported differed from the first- hand accounts of students and faculty members present at the peaceful sit-ins. The stories that could be read in newspapers depicted the students as “militant” and “an unruly mob.” These

67 descriptions did not seem to be discussing the same group of students who left the Monday sit-in without further incident after the bowling alley closed for the evening. Further, according to these reports, the destruction of property justified labeling the Tuesday night protest a riot.47

After the Tuesday night sit-in and police brutality, most of these newspaper articles reported the number of students injured, but did not mention police brutality. Instead, the student injuries were explicitly justified, in the eyes of these reporters, as “self-defense by police.”48 Not only did this rhetoric deflect blame for the escalating racial tensions away from the white police officers, this language also hid reports of police brutality in plain sight. The newspapers’ inability to label the actions of the police as brutality demonstrates the altered perception of reality and of the

African American identity that the white community had.

Most of the law enforcement officers present at the massacre had an altered perception of the students gathered around the bonfire, which they used to justify the shooting. This perception can be seen in their eye-witness testimonies and interviews with the Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI). The United States Justice Department charged the nine Highway Patrolmen who fired their weapons during the massacre with violating the students’ civil rights. During the

1970 trial, Highway Patrolmen James R. Powers testified that a “violent mood” existed in the group of students. This phrase communicated to the jury that he believed the evening was in the process of escalating into a riot. He remembered that “as many as 200 [students were] in the crowd that was advancing on the highway patrolmen.”49 National Guardsmen at the confrontation repeated this idea that the students were getting closer to the law enforcement in a threatening manner. In numerous interviews with the FBI that took place before the trial as a part of an investigation into the massacre, law enforcement officers claimed that those patrolmen who fired their weapons did so because they “needed to protect their lives from the charging

68 students.” Some officers who did not fire their weapons believed that those who did were justified in doing so based on their perception of the students that they believed “would have injured officers and possibly killed some of [the] officers.”50 Based on their understanding of the student gathering, the patrolmen feared for their safety, and they had to take the actions they did for their own protection.

During the trial, the defense attorney asked questions that potentially misled the jury members and presented the perception of the student protesters as rioters. The defense asked

Highway Patrolman Powers if “you saw them [the students] throwing ballast strays, banisters, pieces of cement, brick, and making threats towards the highway patrolmen.” He responded,

“yes, sir. I saw them throwing banisters.” Upon redirect examination the prosecutor asked him to clarify, “what did you see thrown?” He testified that he remembered that the students only threw two banisters taken from the vacant house adjacent to the campus. The judge who presided over the case did not prevent this line of questioning from occurring. When the defense attorney presented his question, he forced a positive answer from the witness that students threw multiple objects and were making threats towards the officers. Powers clarified in his answer that the other objects were not thrown. However, Powers’ testimony potentially presented the jury with an image of the student group as rioters.51

In addition to citing the fact that a few students threw banisters, many law enforcement officers present at the massacre used their perception that the students were firing weapons at them to justify the shooting. A majority of the police and guardsmen later claimed when a banister struck an officer, they thought someone had shot him. Their understanding of this officers’ injuries was built on their perception that the students were firing weapons before the massacre took place. Numerous officers believed they heard “intermittent small arms fire… from

69 the direction of campus.” One officer claimed he “could hear [the] impact of bullets hitting [the] warehouse” behind them. However, during the Highway Patrolmen’s trial, two FBI agents delivered conflicting testimonies regarding whether bullets were found embedded in the wall behind where the officers stood. Further, a few officers did not believe that the students were firing weapons. State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) officer, Carl Stokes remembered that it was clear Officer David Shealy was not shot. Stokes witnessed the banister hit Shealy while

“standing there [on Watson Street], and Officer Shealy was hit, and I didn’t have any idea whatsoever of anyone having been shot. From looking at Officer Shealy, I would have never thought he was shot because he was bleeding in the face. A gunshot wound is not going to cause that damage.”52

In some cases, the white community and politicians encouraged black activists to adopt militant tactics and tactics they perceived as violent because they welcomed the chance to violently suppress activists. In South Carolina, white politicians did not know how to handle nonviolent protesters because they did not want the negative attention that other Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama received after the police violently assaulted peaceful black men, women, and children peacefully protesting for voting rights. McNair believed it would be easier to justify violently suppressing the students’ activity and slowing the process of integration if the students destroyed property. SCSC students met with Governor McNair in

Columbia to address their concerns about how he handled the Orangeburg Massacre. Dr. Rubin

Weston, advisor to BACC, was present to help facilitate this discussion. When the conversation seemed to be unproductive, one student asked McNair, “Well, Governor, suppose we took this place apart?” The governor responded with “I wish you would” demonstrating that he would

70 gladly welcome the chance to arrest the students. McNair would use their behavior as justification for forcibly removing them from his office and dismissing their concerns.53

The white community’s perception of the student activists differed from the black community’s. Most of the black community did not believe the white newspapers’ depictions of the student protesters. Zaccheus White wrote in the Richmond Afro American on March 9, 1968, that he did not believe the white media reports which claimed that the students fired guns at police officers before the Highway Patrolmen opened fire. Further, he believed that “calling this massacre a riot is the height of deception.”54 Some black community members understood that the police officers had an altered perception of reality because of the racialized system. Some black students even strove to understand the white police officers’ perception of reality. Charles

Hildebrand, an SCSC sophomore in 1968 was shot in the chest and the leg during the massacre.

During his process of dealing with the attack he came to realize that, “those police officers were just pawns, perhaps trying to do what somebody told them to do, and just doing their jobs, as they saw it.”55

Some activists were also aware that racialization fostered a dehumanized image of the

African American identity in the white mind, and some activists strove to remind white politicians that they were humans. During a letter writing campaign, the students urged Governor

McNair and Lieutenant Governor West to initiate a thorough investigation of the massacre and to prosecute the officers involved. These students strove to remind the white politicians that the black community members were human. James Meminger did not believe the students were

“asking for much only for a little human dignity.”56 In addition to requesting human dignity, other students attempted to diminish the differences that existed between the racial groups.

Bettye Donorant, wrote to West because she wanted to make sure he knew that “black people

71 also have feelings…My feelings are expressed just as any other human being.” These statements were designed to humanize those the massacre hurt and elicit empathy from their elected officials.57

In addition to reminding politicians that they were humans, most of the students rejected their relegation to second-class citizens, and they strove to remind their representatives that as

American citizens African Americans had the same rights that white Americans did. Many of these letters appealed to their representatives to remined them of their duty to their constituents.

Robert Reeves asked Lieutenant Governor West if he believed he was “honestly fulfilling your duty or has McNair brainwashed you into thinking you are doing a great job as Lieutenant

Governor?”58 His question was designed to shame West into realizing he was obligated to represent all of South Carolina’s citizens. In their letters to West, some students explicitly reminded him that re-election was coming and that African Americans had gained more voting power so they could vote against him and McNair. Amy Simmons pointed out to West that his

“integrity is truly being jeopardized by your chief, the Governor. He is not going to be in office next year.”59 Another SCSC student, Peggy L. Bryan wrote to West to inquire about the list of grievances she and other students left at his office when he was not there. She hoped that he would look at their list even though “you are a busy man…I know there has been a big strain placed on you the last month or two; don’t worry elections will be coming up soon and you won’t be bothered with this problem much longer.” Her statement foreshadowed that his actions would cost him the support of the black voters and the election. As these students reminded their elected officials that they represented both the black and white communities in South Carolina, they were manipulating their racial identity to define their American identity.60

72 By 1964, South Carolina had the highest percentage of registered voters in the black community when compared to the other Deep South states. However, some black community members continued to face interference when trying to register and exercising their right to vote even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Civil rights organizations continued to implement voter registration campaigns because of the low number of registered voters in the southern black community. Members of the white community prevented and discounted black ballots through violence, intimidation, and gerrymandered voting districts. This left most black citizens unable or unwilling to vote in local elections.61 By 1966, Stokely Carmichael explained that his rallying cry for Black Power meant that local black communities needed to organize themselves politically and unify their voting power to elect black representatives.62

White politicians attempted to diminish black voting power in Orangeburg as well. The black community composed sixty-percent of the county population in 1960. However, within

Orangeburg’s city limits, the black community composed only thirty-nine-percent of the population. As the county seat, Orangeburg City had a population of 13,852 people which included 5,499 black and 8,353 white. However, before segregation was ruled unconstitutional, the town’s population totaled 15,322. In 1950, the black community composed fifty-one percent of the city’s population with 7,883 members. The white community composed forty-eight- percent with 7,439 members. The decline of the black community population from 1950 to 1960 in Orangeburg City conforms to general data, as four million southern African Americans migrated to northern cities for better employment, housing, and to escape Jim Crow laws from

1940 to 1965. However, less than half of black eligible voters were registered in Orangeburg before 1968. The city’s elected politicians remained all members of the white community in

73 1968 despite the fact that the black community composed the majority of the population in the county.63

Gender

The national white community’s has analyzed and developed an understanding of gender in the black community through a lens which compares the black community’s family structure to the white community’s. However, the black community’s gender roles have “turned inside out” the white male patriarchal structure of families. Some of the white community used the reversed roles of parents in the black community to explain black poverty. These whites believed that black poverty resulted from the instability of black family life as black men refused “to support their children, [so that] women feel they can get along without husbands, and the husband-wife family unit is no longer desired [by black youth].” The white community connected the break-down of the black family to their understanding of the African American identity, and they believed that the reversed roles of black parents and the cycle of poverty to be a “self-perpetuating African American cultural deficiency.” When the white middle-class patriarchal understandings of gender became the standard of normal by which all other gender roles were compared, the white community denied the way that race and class have intersected with gender in the black community.64

The breakdown of the black family demonstrated that black men did not possess the same power within the family unit that white men did in their families. Most of the white community believed in the “inadequacy of black fathers.” However, this limited understanding ignored the way that racialization denied black men the ability to protect and provide for their families.

Black men connected their second-class citizenship and racialized identity to “their lack of manhood.”65 Some black men adopted a sense of their own inadequacies and developed a self-

74 loathing.66 During the civil rights movement, black men strove to reclaim their manhood which they believed racism denied them in addition to denying them full citizenship. The struggle for racial freedom and equality was also a struggle to reclaim black manhood. Eldridge Cleaver’s

“To All Black Women, From All Black Men” best exemplifies how black men strove to reclaim their manhood as they fought for civil rights. His letter served as a manifesto for black manhood and his personal apology to black women for not being able to protect them from white men.

Cleaver believed he, like other black men, after “four hundred years minus my balls…I feared to look into your eyes because I knew I would find reflected there a merciless Indictment of my impotence and a compelling challenge to redeem my conquered manhood.” 67

Black men, like Cleaver felt that racialization denied them their manhood partly because the enforcement of adherence to racial etiquette involved gendered sexual violence. Some of the white community used sexual violence and genital mutilation along with lynching to subjugate black men.68 In addition to submitting to deference, black men had to reign in their manhood for their personal safety. The white community adopted the belief that black men were naturally inclined to rape because of their racist ideology. According to the perception of the white community, the black man could not control his sexual appetites, and his manhood threatened the sexually pure white woman. After Reconstruction ended, black men accused of sexually violating a white woman were the primary target of lynching. This myth of the black beast rapist added an additional dehumanizing layer to the identity of African American men.69 Civil rights leader Angela Davis wrote that “[white] men who were motivated by their duty to defend their women could be excused of any excesses they might commit.”70 Most white women believed this cultural myth, and some participated in the drama as they falsely accused black men of

75 raping them. Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused Emmitt Till of making lewd comments and inappropriately touching her, later admitted that she fabricated the story.71

Some of the white community in Orangeburg believed that the black men enrolled at

SCSC and Claflin College were threatening to the local white women. The defense of white womanhood led Bert Hartzog to shoot three Claflin College students on Wednesday, February 7,

1968. Hartzog claimed, in addition to needing to protect his property, that he needed to protect his wife and daughter from the black men who were walking by his home. Presumably, his wife and daughter needed protection from the black men who were hypersexual and might rape them.72 The white power structure supported Hartzog’s perception of black men as rapists and his right to protect white womanhood. Before the massacre, the police officials, when questioned about Hartzog’s actions stated, “that man had every right to shoot those people.” Further, the

FBI, in a statement to President Lyndon B. Johnson, echoed the sentiment that Hartzog’s house needed protection in the event that the students came back to burn it down in revenge. On

February 9, the FBI cited a local informant who believed “negroes planned to burn [the] home of

Bert Hartzog…who resides with his wife and daughter.” The safety of the white women who lived with Bert Hartzog was a top priority for the law enforcement in the aftermath of the massacre. The FBI reported to President Johnson that the “Orangeburg [Police Department] PD

[was] in contact with Hartzog and plans [were] made to afford protection.”73 Members of the FBI made certain that the Orangeburg Police protected Hartzog’s house in order to keep his wife and daughter safe.

In addition to denying black men political rights and bodily safety, racialization prevented black men from accessing Orangeburg’s night life. SCSC and Claflin College men had limited options for taking black women on dates, which they connected to their manhood. Some

76 students felt that the segregation policy at the All Star Bowling Lanes mixed with the strict regulations that dormitories inflicted on SCSC women infringed on their ability to date black women. Some male students wanted to take their dates bowling. These men wanted to avoid driving forty miles to Columbia to the closest integrated bowling alley. Due to dorm restrictions,

SCSC women who lived on campus had a strict curfew of 11:00 PM on the weekends. If they violated curfew dorm mothers would write them up. Some of the students were determined to desegregate the bowling alley partly because they wanted access to the night life in Orangeburg to regain some of their manhood.74

Police brutality reminded them that they lacked manhood because some black men were unable to protect their families.75 The violence their families endured assaulted their manhood.

Some black fathers and brothers faced a dilemma. They could act on their anger and face the consequences from the white community. Doing so would be refusing to submit to deference and might involve their own physical assault or murder. The other option was to submit to deference in an attempt to protect themselves from harm. SCSC sophomore, Charles Hildebrand was shot three times, in the back of one leg, his hip, and in his arm pit. Hildebrand’s father was just one example of the black men who refused to adhere to racial etiquette after the massacre. His injuries kept him in the hospital overnight. He remembered his friend, Poogie Brown “had come in there [the hospital] to see about his brother, raising cain… and they [ the law enforcement officers] took him out and brought him back in, oh, a half hour or so later, with his head bandaged up, bleeding.”76 When Hildebrand’s father came to the hospital “raisin the same kind of Cain about who shot my son? Where is he? Let me take care of him…he was lucky enough where they didn’t bother him.” Hildebrand believed that his “daddy was angry…I sensed that he sensed powerlessness. You shot my son and there is nothing that I can do about it.”77

77 Although racialization endangered the physical safety of black women similarly to black men, the process had a paradoxical effect on the power that black women had. Black women had access to better jobs, steadier employment, and more educational opportunities compared to black men after the end of Reconstruction. African American women’s status as the primary bread winners in the black family reinforced the matriarchal structure of the black family.78

However, racialization took away a black woman’s power over her own body. “A black woman’s body was never hers alone” as she “has been sexually molested and abused by the white colonizer.”79 Some white men responded to “the efforts of the freedman to assume the role of patriarch, able to provide for and protect his family” after the abolition of slavery with a campaign of the rape of black women. This campaign was aimed at maintaining the racial caste system and terrorizing the black community.80

Rape and sexual violence directed at black women served two functions. First it was a crime against and an attack on black women. Secondly, the rape of black women “sent a message to black men.”81 Some white men used the rape of black women to reaffirm their position as the dominant social group. 82 American manhood was associated with the ability to resist being dominated by others. Throughout the country, civil rights activists sought to protect the black female body which white men systematically brutalized and raped. Black men active in the movement gained an increased sense of manhood as they gained control over their own lives and refused to submit to deference. When the black women were attacked on Tuesday night, and the black men were unable to protect them, the attack threatened their reconquered manhood.83 After the police assaulted her, Emma Cain spent the night in the college infirmary. In the morning, while classes were canceled, she left the infirmary with her arm in a sling. Cain, and other

78 students, had visible lacerations and bruises from the assault. SCSC men not present at the bowling alley protest could have seen her injuries at the student body meetings on Wednesday.84

The white power structure most of the time protected white men who raped and assaulted black women. The white community perceived the identity of black women as sexually loose, and therefore, they were not victims of rape. The judicial system used this perception in cases against white rapists to prevent them from being convicted. In Pine Island, South Carolina, Lila

Belle Carter, after being raped and murdered, her attacker left her in a puddle of mud in October

1945. In Louisiana, four white men kidnapped Annette Butler from her home while they held her mother at gunpoint in 1956. The men drove Butler into the woods where they all raped her. Even after these men confessed to their crimes and sought a plea bargain, none of them were convicted of rape. If a case went to trial against a white man who raped a black woman, the defense attorneys would frequently portray the black woman’s identity as sexually loose and, therefore, she enjoyed the act. This portrayal made the encounter not rape in some of the white community’s understanding.85

The national black community was outraged about these rapes and strove to draw attention to the crimes in hopes of increasing the chances of obtaining a conviction. Black newspapers spread awareness about these crimes across the country. African American ministers vocalized their outrage and frustration at the inability of the judicial system to convict white rapists. Civil rights organizations were heavily involved in the fight to convict white rapists.

James Lee Perry attacked Ruby Atee Pigford in 1947. Perry drove the black teenager to a bar after offering her a job taking care of his children. After he beat her unconscious, he raped her, tied her to his vehicle, and drove through town dragging her body. The Pittsburgh Courier published pictures of Pigford to spread awareness of the vile nature of Perry’s crimes. The

79 Mississippi NAACP conducted investigations into Pigford’s case and strove “to hold [James Lee

Perry and other] white men accountable for raping black women” through achieving national awareness of the crimes these men committed. Mississippi’s courts did not provide Pigford with justice.86

By 1968, SCSC and Claflin College women were well aware of the threat that white men posed to them and how dangerous interactions with police officers could be. Some police officers participated in the systematic rape of black women. On the night of the massacre, two police officers pulled over Louise Cawley and Arleathia Jones while they were transporting wounded students to the hospital. During the traffic stop, Cawley, a pregnant SCSC senior, argued with the officers. The officers physically assaulted Cawley, but they did not arrest the two women. Cawley later explained that she argued with the officers hoping to avoid being arrested because she “was worried that we weren’t going to make it to the police station.”87 Black women still strove to have control over their bodies, and their bodies often became a battle ground during their involvement in the civil rights movement.88 In that moment, Cawley maintained control over her body by determining which type of assault she might endure. She argued with the officers knowing they might physically assault her, in an attempt to prevent them from sexually assaulting her. Cawley preferred to put herself in the immediate risk of physical assault rather than to comply with the officers’ request and be at risk of sexual assault while in police custody.

Gendered perceptions of the black manhood and womanhood made interactions between the black community and white police officers precarious. The law enforcement officers who stood on Watson Street supported Orangeburg white locals’ right to protect white womanhood.

The officers were on edge about the presence of Black Power activists, and most of the officers

80 perceived the men gathered around the bonfire as threatening. The black men were refusing to submit to deference and adhere to racial etiquette. Most of the police officers perceived them as rioters. Gendered racialization further dehumanized black men, and to the Highway Patrolmen, justified firing their weapons into a crowd of retreating students.

Class

Class divisions within American society and American consciousness often intersects with race. In the Antebellum South, poor white trash perceived themselves as a class above the slaves, even as the use of slave labor degraded the value of their own labor. After the abolition of slavery, white southerners struggled to hold onto their economic superiority over blacks in order to maintain the racial caste system.89 Racial prejudice remained present in the consciousness of poor white trash. Racialization complicated American class divisions and changed the perception poor whites had of their own economic status. Most white families did not care about their own poverty level as long as it was at least one step above the poverty level of the neighboring black family. President Lyndon B. Johnson believed that “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”90 Some white community members’ perception of their own economic superiority ignored the economic advancements that some black families made during the twentieth century.

After the abolition of slavery, the white community used a system of black economic dependence to complete the systematic oppression of the black community. Sharecropping ensured that the black community was dependent on the white community in the southern agricultural economy. Most African Americans connected their ability to gain economic independence to the freedom struggle. Some members of the white community tried to use their

81 economic dependence to monitor and control the black community’s behavior and enforce racial etiquette. Economic elites continued to treat the black community and poor whites paternalistically into the twentieth century. Economic oppression and paternalism was designed to reinforce racial and class divisions. Black employees exposed as “troublemakers” were often fired from their jobs and vulnerable to vagrancy laws. In South Carolina, some black employees took precautions to prevent their NAACP membership from becoming public knowledge.

Economic repercussions did not completely prevent the black community from fighting for black equality and against economic inequality. Some African American workers joined communist organizations during the Great Depression and the New Deal Era. In some cases, southern workers cooperated across racial lines.91

During the 1950s and 1960s, Orangeburg’s civil rights activists continued to live under the threat of economic repercussions for their activity. Orangeburg native, Jamal Hasan was active in the movement since he turned fifteen-years-old in 1963. During his life as an activist he experienced economic repercussions for his activity. Once, after he participated in a civil rights rally, he appeared on the evening news. Soon after, he lost his job at Smith Corona. Televised news coverage of the movement broadcasted the violent suppression that peaceful activists faced. However, the news coverage also potentially exposed the faces of local activists to their white employers.92

Some black employers wanted to distance themselves from those activists labeled

“troublemakers.” After the massacre, some student activists could not find employment in

Orangeburg even from black businesses and institutions. John Stroman believed that he was unable to find meaningful employment, even from African American employers throughout his life because of his leadership of the bowling alley sit-in. The severe beatings he suffered during

82 the Tuesday night melee caused him to struggle with seizures for a few years. When his health recovered, he tried to find employment again. However, when he “applied for a job on [the

SCSC] campus, and I couldn’t even get a job on campus, not even as a janitor. Locally, I couldn’t get a job.”93

The middle-class status of the black community in Orangeburg challenged some of the white community’s perception of reality and their perception of the African American identity.

The local black community in Orangeburg experienced economic advancement after the abolition of slavery and a black middle-class began to flourish. The presence of SCSC and

Claflin College contributed to the black community’s economic advancements and independence. By 1968, Orangeburg’s black community no longer resembled a mudsill class that was bred for hard labor and who lacked intellectual ability. Some of the white community members struggled to maintain white supremacy and their perception that they occupied a higher class status than all African Americans. Fourteen years after the Supreme Court ruled legal segregation of public schools unconstitutional, four years after legislation outlawed the segregation of restaurants, the white community in Orangeburg was determined to maintain the racial class divisions that were already dissolving.94

In Orangeburg, employment opportunities available to the black community were scarce apart from the two colleges and the black high school. After the town industrialized in 1960, the agricultural economy disappeared. However, higher paying industrial jobs were primarily reserved for the white community. Further, some local businesses in Orangeburg did not hire black employees. Black students struggled to find employment while attending SCSC and

Claflin College. SCSC Dean Oscar Butler wrote a letter to the editor of the Times and Democrat urging white business owners to integrate their workforces. He pointed out that some members

83 of the white community were less qualified for jobs because they did not have the same level of education as the black students. Despite discrimination in hiring practices, the black community economically flourished because of the jobs available at the black schools. Further, since only small numbers of the black community were employed at the white-owned factories and businesses, the black community enjoyed a small amount of economic independence. This economic independence did not mean that the African Americans in Orangeburg had a firm grasp on economic stability.95

The presence of the two black colleges made Orangeburg’s black community not reflective of the larger impoverished black community in South Carolina. The larger of these two institutions, SCSC, employed only African Americans until 1966. The job opportunities these schools offered drew educated African Americans to Orangeburg. Many faculty members held advanced degrees, including doctoral degrees. Most of Orangeburg’s black community received more education than the average white South Carolinian. Further, the presence of black scholars in the town meant that members of the black community potentially made more money than members of the white community.96

The higher education level and income level of the schools’ employees challenged the white community’s perception of their economic station above all African Americans. Black economic advancement in Orangeburg threatened the racial and class hierarchy. In order to maintain the racial caste system, some members of the white community attempted to actualize their perception of reality. Throughout the South, the white community violently attacked, or ran out of town, black community members who reached too high on the economic ladder. Some students were aware that their movement activity could have negative repercussions for their parents. Jordan Simmons remembered that he knew his activities involved certain risks, “there

84 was a bit of fear of bodily harm, or actual economic harm. In some cases, you were concerned that your parents may be blacklisted, and you had to think about all of those things.Because [sic.] parents could be fired from a job, as a result of something you may or may not have done.”97

Despite the economic threats, most of the black community used its economic power as a tool to fight for black freedom and equality. Economic boycotts were especially effective in areas where the black community constituted larger population percentages, as was true of

Orangeburg County. The local black community organized economic boycotts against white businesses throughout the 1950s and 1960s with the help of state civil rights leaders. These efforts were directed at white-owned local businesses and national distribution companies.

However, some white community members strove to economically impact the black community to stop them from using this movement tactic. When the white community responded with their own boycotts, it threatened the black community’s economic status and delicate grasp on security.98

After the massacre, the black community once again boycotted white businesses. The news of Orangeburg’s economic boycott spread throughout the black newspapers in the country.

Indiana’s Gary-Post Tribune, the Michigan Chronicle, and the Richmond Afro American published articles tracking the evolution of this boycott as “more than 800 persons representing a cross-section of Orangeburg’s Negro community met in Trinity Methodist Church…and overwhelmingly endorsed the boycott.” The black community refused to end the boycott unless segregation policies were eliminated and restitution was paid to the surviving families and the wounded students. Further, the black community demanded a complete removal of the South

Carolina National Guardsmen from the town, the implementation of a system of “busing of pupils for racial balance in the city, [and] adding ‘an equitable number of Negroes’ to local and

85 state police forces and other governmental positions.” During the boycott in February, racial tensions remained high in Orangeburg.99

Some members of the local black community did not support the student movements because they wanted to protect their own economic interests. Class divisions were visible within the black community. In South Carolina, some middle-class African Americans did not associate with working class African Americans. In Charleston, some middle-class members perceived

African Americans who were direct descendants of slaves as occupying a lower economic status.

SCSC President Turner did not socialize with the black community. Most of these black community members supported the students after they suffered police brutality. However, some

African Americans did not support the students and even directed blame at the students stating,

“if they hadn’t been out there, this wouldn’t have happened.”100

The white power structure protected white business owners’ economic interests during the economic battles of the movement. After the city administration closed Floyd’s bowling alley

Monday night, he demanded restitution from City Hall because he believed the city cost him profits. Although Floyd did not receive monetary compensation, the police did not close his establishment on Tuesday night. White patrons continued to enjoy their evening bowling as the police assaulted students in the parking lot. Further, the police officers did not start assaulting the students that evening until after an unknown person broke a window in Floyd’s store front.101

Most white business owners used their belief that they had rights as business owners to operate their business how they wanted in order to resist desegregation. They used their business owner identity as a source of power to occupy positions in the local governments and to sway political opinion supporting white supremacy in their economic policies.102 Henry Floyd refused to integrate after the massacre until the courts forced him. US District Judge Robert Martin ruled

86 that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covered the All Star Bowling Lanes’ snack bar and the establishment needed to integrate later in February. Without incident, John Stroman became one of the first black men to bowl at the alley in March 1968. 103

Most of the white community and the police forces perceived the radical students as threatening to Orangeburg’s established economic hierarchy and their own economic status.

When the black community destroyed white-owned property, the white community perceived this act as a violent attack on their class status. Some of Orangeburg’s black students knew that the education and income level of the black community violated the white community’s perception of reality. Jordan Simmons believed that when racial tensions escalated “part of the problem had to do with what we as students represented.” Every year SCSC and Claflin College students graduated ready to enter the workforce with more qualifications than some members of the white community. Simmons thought that some of the problems had “to do more with the perception of someone being educated, and having more education than another one. That probably grinds very hard against the conscience of a person.” SCSC students “were beginning to move away from being preachers, and teachers, you know. We were engineers, accountants, military officers. And I think we represented something to them [Orangeburg’s white locals] that maybe some of them may have aspired to become.”104 SCSC and Claflin College students received more education than the average person in South Carolina.105

When the law enforcement officers faced off with students at the bonfire on Thursday,

February 8, 1968, they perceived the student group through their cultural lens that was rooted in white supremacy. Race, gender, and class dehumanized the black community and clouded the police officers’ ability to see the students for who they were: peaceful protesters. Civil rights

87 activists fought to gain full citizenship rights that racialization denied them. The South experienced a cultural crisis as desegregation and black advancement changed the very nature of southern tradition and customs. In the process, white southerners attempted to hold onto their southern culture to maintain white supremacy. These activists manipulated their racial identity to define their American identity. During the week of protest black men strove to regain their manhood and protect black women from the police officers. While the white community held most of the jobs at white-owned businesses and factories, the presence of these colleges drew an educated black community to the town. The local black community gained a small degree of economic independence and a fragile grasp on economic security due to the presence of the black colleges. Members of the white community perceived themselves as occupying a class standing that was higher than all the members of the black community despite evidence to the contrary. When the reality the white community saw around them did not fit with their perception some of them reacted violently. The Highway Patrolmen fired their weapons with a complete disregard for black lives because of their desire to maintain their way of life and the racial caste system. In order to rationalize their behavior, they perceived the protesters as rioters which justified, to them, the murder of black men.

88

CHAPTER III

CONTINUED RACIAL TENSIONS

1968 was a pivotal year in American history. Television coverage of the Tet Offensive that began on January 30 shocked American citizens. In March, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term, and by August, a Gallup poll showed that he had reached his lowest approval rating while in office: thirty-five percent. Less than sixty days after the Orangeburg Massacre, James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in

Memphis, Tennessee, while he was there assisting with the sanitation strike. King’s assassination rocked the nation as the black and white communities mourned the loss of their beloved civil rights leader. As historian H. W. Brands wrote, Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June “killed that part of the liberal vision [of America that] the war in Vietnam and the riots in the cities hadn’t already destroyed.” Urban uprisings had occurred across the country in previous years, but the summer of 1968 experienced a massive level of urban unrest, which culminated in the

National Democratic Convention in August. This convention drew thousands of protesters to

Chicago, and televised news coverage broadcasted the police brutality they faced was into living rooms across the country. Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon ran on a platform of law and order, which resonated with American voters as he received 301 electoral votes. In

Mexico City, American Olympic medalists, Tommie Smith and John Carlos shocked Americans as they raised black gloved fists during their medal ceremony in solidarity with the Black Power

Movement. Merely ten days before the games opened, military personnel and police officers shot

89 into a crowd of student protesters in the Tlatelolco Massacre. These and other historical events have overshadowed the Orangeburg Massacre in the national collective memory of that turbulent year, not to mention the tumult of the next several more years. Even retired Lieutenant of the

South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division, Carl Stokes, whose primary job was to handle civil rights disputes, struggled in 2018 to place the massacre correctly in the timeline of 1968.

Stokes was participating in a panel discussion about the massacre that aired on the Public

Broadcasting Service, and during the course of this sometimes heated discussion, Stokes recalled that Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination had taken place before the massacre occurred, which placed the massacre in the context of the riots after King’s death. Bakari Sellers, Cleveland

Sellers’ son, and Jordan Simmons, who also participated in the discussion, passionately corrected him. 1

Within the historical community, the Orangeburg Massacre has been largely forgotten, which has validated the white community’s belief that this event was not as meaningful as local civil rights activists suggested. Most of the college textbooks that examine American modern history do not mention the massacre, and those textbooks that do offer a single sentence without contextualizing the history or the significance.2 Even historians have failed to conduct a thorough investigation into the massacre.3 Most of the historians who study the 1960s have failed to include the Orangeburg Massacre as a seminal moment in the cultural melee of that decade, and those who do mention it diminish the significance of this tragedy as part of a longer story of the violent response from law enforcement to urban uprisings.4 Further, civil rights historians have largely overlooked the massacre in their own studies, with only a few books providing a short synopsis, usually focusing on the presence of Cleveland Sellers.5

90 While the collective memory of the Orangeburg Massacre has diminished outside of the local black community, the past has continued to exacerbate racial tensions in the town.

Beginning in 1968, the South Carolina State College (SCSC) campus community has hosted an annual commemoration inviting African American speakers from South Carolina, including

Modjeska Simkins and Juanita Goggins, the first African American woman South Carolina state legislature, and from out of state, including Jamal Bryant a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Maryland, to deliver keynote addresses to a primarily black audience. From 1974 to 2001, the commemoration ceremonies concluded with a silent meditation and rededication of the memorial to the three lives that were lost: Henry Smith,

Delano Middleton, and Samuel Hammond, Jr. Beginning in 1978, a scholarship program and an oratorical contest has honored one student submission each. In 2000, the SCSC student bowling league held a bowling night on campus in the interest of “keeping their memory alive.”6

The annual commemorations have undergone numerous phases. During the first phase beginning in 1968 and stretching to 1977, the commemorations served primarily as a memorial service for the three students who died. The second phase began in 1978, when the ceremonies continued to function as a memorial service, but the focus shifted slightly to collective memory construction aimed at combating the white community’s silence and distorted memory. During this phase, the theme of the ceremonies was “How Would You Tell It??” demonstrating how the collective memory remained contested in the town. A third phase began in 1998 as the theme shifted to “Lest We Forget.” During this phase, the black community used the thirtieth commemoration to consider “Where Are We Now?” The following year, in 1999, the commemoration continued to focus on using the collective memory construction to draw attention to the current state of race relations in Orangeburg and South Carolina, with the theme

91 “A New STATE of Mind.” During this third phase of the commemorations, the black community connected the building of collective memory construction to organize a political agenda aimed at achieving reconciliation and healing.7

This chapter will examine the Orangeburg Massacre’s annual commemoration as a site of collective memory construction. The commemoration began as a ceremony where those the massacre affected could remember the past and mourn the lives that were lost. However, it became a place where the larger Orangeburg black community could attempt to work towards reconciliation in the town. For some within the black community, the Orangeburg Massacre’s annual commemoration became the site where they challenged the white community’s inaccurate memory and the state’s silence. Survivors who publicly shared their memories directly countered the collective memory of the white community. In 2001, at the thirty-third commemoration, fifteen survivors returned to Orangeburg to share their memories. This chapter will use the transcripts and video recordings of their memories to examine how the survivors dealt with their traumatic experience, how they countered the white collective memory, and how they politically pushed for reconciliation. Survivors constructed their own collective memory and, in the process, provided some of the other survivors with validation and a sense of empowerment enabling them to deal with the emotional and physical trauma that they endured.8 Since 1968, the black community has constructed their own collective memory and used the commemorations to push a political agenda that they believed would work towards the reconciliation of the two communities.

These commemorations directly countered the local white community’s silence and distorted memory as few within the local white community attended these events, or they avoided talking about the massacre for generations. Orangeburg native Jack Shuler remembered

92 hearing “about this book [Jack Bass’ and Jack Nelson’s The Orangeburg Massacre] in whispered tones when I was growing up. I remembered a few conversations about the event that led me to believe it was not something discussed in polite (meaning white) company.”9 There were many potential reasons that most of the white community thought it was impolite to talk about that night in February. Since Orangeburg was a rural town with a population of 13,852, many had a personal connection to the past. Shuler exposed his personal connection to

Orangeburg’s history in his book Blood & Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town, which recounted his experience learning about the massacre in adulthood. 10 He recalled that his grandmother adamantly refused to discuss the massacre, which he believed was tied to the fact that his great-uncle, her brother, was a member of the South Carolina Highway Patrol present that night.11 Additionally, according to Shuler’s understanding, some of the white community believed that, “to continue to discuss it simply pours fuel onto the fire of racial animosity.”12

However, racial tensions persisted in the town whether they were obvious to the white community or not. The continued presence of a Confederate monument and a Confederate flag in the town center as of 2017 best exemplified these tensions.13

Orangeburg’s white community’s reluctance to discuss their past was symptomatic of how the national white community’s collective memory of the civil rights movement has distorted historical truths. White America diminished the significance of civil rights and African

American history in the national collective memory. Despite numerous historical investigations that demonstrate to the contrary, the memory of the civil rights movement has been limited to occurring between 1955 and 1965. Most Americans believe that Black Power, black nationalism, and the armed self-defense tactics of Black Panther Party fractured the movement. A “great man” understanding of the national movement has diminished the importance of local grassroots

93 organizing and marginalized the radical black women who built these movements across the country.14 Many different groups have contributed to, and some benefited from, this distorted collective memory. Historians Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford have demonstrated that in using misconstrued representations of the civil rights movement “state actors seek, with varied success, to suit their perceived political and ideological agendas…[because] the state has a strong interest in using the memory of the movement as a tool of nation-building and of fostering and fomenting hegemony through consensus.”15

The Orangeburg Massacre was a traumatic experience for the local black community.

According to sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, cultural trauma alters the identity of the group affected and the collective identity of the community. Membership in the community for the traumatized is contingent on the acknowledgement of the trauma, and acceptance of moral blame from those who were not traumatized during the event. By failing to acknowledge their trauma, the community fails to extend the traumatized membership in the community’s collective identity. During the process that Alexander terms “constructing cultural trauma,” the process of reconciliation between two collectives cannot begin until the groups can arrive at a consensus about what happened, and what that meant for their future collective identity.16 Using this theory, the massacre can be seen as an event that culturally traumatized the survivors and changed their collective identity. After the massacre, most of the black community rallied behind the students.

A shared racial identity united those who were not at the massacre, or a part of the movement, with students who were. The group identity that African Americans in Orangeburg shared opened the potential for the larger black community to take on the students’ traumatic experience. Meanwhile, when the local white community refused to acknowledge that the massacre was a traumatic event, the two communities became even more divided, which

94 hindered the potential for reconciliation, and the formation of a shared collective identity of

“Orangeburg local” across racial lines.

Survivors of the Orangeburg Massacre faced a long road of emotional work to deal with their traumatic experience on an individual level. Some survivors did not want to talk about the massacre for years afterwards because of the pain of these memories. According to psychiatrist

Judith Lewis Herman, in order for individuals to recover from a traumatic experience they need to reconstruct their own understanding of that event and be able to put their experience into words. Once the survivor is able to articulate their traumatic experience, they begin to understand what happened to them, and they can move towards the healing process. Further, she believes that “denial, repression, and dissociation [which hinder the healing process] operate on a social as well as an individual level.” Therefore, the act of publicly sharing their experience could prove to be therapeutic to survivors.17

When survivor, Arleathia Jones, shared her memory in 2001, she used her time to discuss her path towards emotional healing which she hoped would help others work through their own trauma. Jones was not injured during the massacre; however, she sustained emotional trauma from her experience. After graduating with her Bachelor’s degree from SCSC in 1968 and going on to earn a Master’s, she became a teacher, from which she retired in 1999. She remembered that she did not talk about the massacre for years after it occurred. When she encountered Jack

Bass’ and Jack Nelson’s book, The Orangeburg Massacre, when her son enrolled at SCSC in

1998, and he brought the book home, she “found [the book] extremely difficult to read.” After that encounter, Jones took the first steps on the long road towards emotional healing. As a part of her healing process, she exposed in her memory that she has taught her students about her experience in the movement and the massacre during her career. She remembered that her

95 students wanted to know her story in order to develop an understanding of “why things are the way they are now...[she believed] they need[ed] to know their history. It [black history] is more than just one month.”18 While on the SCSC campus at the commemoration in 2001, Jones’ memory focused on her belief that other survivors needed to know that if they did not talk about their experiences and work through their emotions, they would not feel the empowerment that healing provided her. She urged others to undergo the emotional work that she did because

“there are probably others like me that simply don’t realize how something is affecting you; that you’ve got to talk about it.”19

Another survivor’s memory demonstrates the way that, during the healing process, some survivors needed to rectify the beliefs that they once held that the traumatic experience shattered.

When Emma Cain shared her memory in 2001, she focused on the police brutality she endured two nights before the massacre. Two officers held her down as a third assaulted her with a billy club. As tears streamed down her face, she began to recount her story with a reference to her childhood understanding of what a billy club was. As Cain gazed off into the distance, she recounted, “even as a child I always thought a billy club was just a piece of wood, but I mean there were still rocks inside of those sticks.” Her understanding of the assault went beyond the physical abuse of her body. Although this moment was memorable because of “the sense of pain when they were beating me,” she connected it to a larger system of oppression because she felt that “it was almost like they were trying to teach me a lesson or something.”20 She agreed to publicly share her memories despite how much it caused her pain to talk about the assault in order to participate in the collective memory construction to prevent the memory from being lost.

Presenting the change of her childhood understanding demonstrated how much this traumatic experience impacted her life. In order to incorporate this trauma into her identity, she had to

96 develop new value systems and beliefs that reconstructed her sense of the world.21 Her memory about her lost understanding of what a billy club was revealed how the massacre was a pivotal moment in her life that changed her sense of a collective identity in Orangeburg. Her continued eye contact with the interviewer as she talked about her physical injuries and the feeling of rocks inside the billy club provided insight into the sense of empowerment she gained when retelling the story. Reconstructing and publicly sharing her memory empowered her and affirmed the significance of her experience.22

Emma Cain’s memory provides insight into how some survivors worked towards healing and how they used their memory to counter the white community’s understanding of the past.

After recounting what happened on that Tuesday in 1968, she detailed of student group at the bowling alley. She remembered that the students were unarmed and that they were not throwing anything at the police officers, believing the violence was unjustified.23 According to her recall, the students were not threatening to the officers and the police officers had no reason to be afraid of the students. The officers’ actions constituted police brutality and runs counter to the white community’s understanding of that Tuesday night as a “riot” that the police adequately responded to.

Survivor Robert Davis’ interpretation also runs counter to the white community’s belief that the students were rioters. When the shooting began, he was 100 feet from where the patrolmen stood and was crawling towards a dorm building. He thought he had crawled far enough, but when he stood up, he was shot in the back and a buckshot pellet lodged near his spine. Davis recalled that while he was waiting for medical attention in the segregated hospital, he was crying out in pain asking for medication for relief. A National Guardsman yelled, “nigger shut up. If you don’t shut up, I’d take the butt of this gun and I’d finish killing you.”24 Davis was

97 afraid that the soldier would kill him if he did not do as he asked. His body was tense communicating his anger while he retold this story, as if he was still engaged in the confrontation in 2001.25 Davis was deeply invested in the struggle over the collective memory. He agreed to publicly share his memory and countered the white collective memory in order to preserve a historical record of his experience. When the federal trial of the South Carolina Highway

Patrolmen who fired their weapons at the massacre was held in 1969, the defense argued that the students posed a threat to the officers which led them to fear for their lives, which of course was how the white community recalled the event. 26 Davis’ recall countered their understanding, suggesting that he knew real fear that night and that neither he nor the students posed a threat to the patrolmen. They however, posed a threat to him and the others.

Davis’ recall contradicts the collective memory that existed on the other side of

Orangeburg’s railroad tracks. His memory of the fear he felt that night was grounded in the direct threat that he received and the fact that he was already injured at the hands of the patrolmen. According to his understanding, the law enforcement officers were not afraid for their lives on the night of the massacre because the students did not pose a threat to them. However, the students were the ones whose bodily safety was threatened that evening. The white community’s refusal to label the shooting a massacre hindered the process of community reconciliation. Davis’ act of articulating his memory strove to affirm that his experience was traumatic and potentially provided a validation of his experience that the white community denied him.

The white community’s silence and collective memory construction distorted historical truths and hindered the possibility for the reconciliation of the communities. Some of the white community’s memory rested upon the idea that outside agitators were responsible for the campus

98 unrest. Field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Cleveland Sellers’ presence on campus, who had moved into Orangeburg in the fall semester of 1967 to help elevate the local movement to the national stage, moved him to the forefront in the memory of the massacre as a campus leader and diminished the significance of the long history of radical grassroots organizing on campus. However, this distorted memory was not surprising since most of the historical documents about the massacre found in newspapers only mention Sellers by name. Most newspaper articles did not mention any other student activists who were involved.

His fame and notoriety as an outside agitator has made the significance of his presence morph into a collective memory where he incited and motivated the student protest in addition to leading it. He spoke at the South Carolina Historical Association conference in 1999 on a panel focusing on the massacre where no student activists were asked to give their thoughts.27 At a

2003 civil rights history conference held at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, Sellers spoke on a panel with one survivor, Jordan Simmons.28 However, while on campus in 1968,

Sellers did not lead the students, and he did not think the bowling alley was the most pressing concern that the student activists needed to address.29

In an attempt to counter this understanding, numerous survivors who publicly shared their memories situated the activism of SCSC students in the center of their memory. John

Stroman asserted that he was the leader of the campus movement, beginning with the student activists in the 1967 student strike that successfully pressured President Benner C. Turner to resign. He then asserted that he was a leader of the 1968 sit-in. He recounted how, as the leader, he was actively engaged in the struggle to abolish the bowling alley’s segregation policy before the 1967- 1968 school year began. Even while he was not in Orangeburg, he recalled he was actively developing a strategy to change Henry Floyd’s policy. After Stroman talked with other

99 bowling alley owners, he devised a plan to create pressure on Floyd from other avenues besides the judicial system. Stroman asserted that the bowling alley was “all I could think about when I was in Savannah, [Georgia,].” While sharing his memory, he talked about how much he loved bowling and how much he utilized other bowling alleys during his time at SCSC. Stroman included anecdotes about his passion for bowling which began at an early age. His recall worked to achieve numerous goals. When he recounted that he “was a league bowler ever since I was about 16 years old,” he was countering the white community’s understanding that the black community did not want access to the bowling alley before Cleveland Sellers moved in to town.30 Stroman’s role and recall disrupted the white community’s understanding that Sellers led the students and that he incited the protest activity on campus in 1968. Stroman conveyed that he, an Orangeburg resident and SCSC student, wanted access to the bowling alley and was determined to abolish Floyd’s segregation policy prior to the arrival of Sellers.

Stroman was not the only survivor who placed himself at the center of the movement in their recall. Even students who were not present at the massacre or enrolled in SCSC in 1968 put themselves the center of the collective experience when they publicly shared their memories at the 2001 commemoration. Isaac Williams graduated from SCSC in 1967. However, in his memory his resistance and radicalization drove the student activists, and he even asserted that he led the student protesters. He claimed to be the sole leader of the 1967 student strike; however, in his memory, he believed that after he graduated the students did not have another leader.

According to his understanding, “in ’68 was that there was no single source of power or control within the student leadership, on the campus. It was too fractional. That did not exist in 1967.

There was absolute control. In fact, I was often referred to as almost a tyrant.”31

100 In addition to forgetting about the students’ civil rights activism before the arrival of

Sellers, the white community’s collective memory has portrayed the Thursday night gathering around the bonfire as a riot. This memory has diminished the significance of the lives that were lost and the trauma that the survivors endured. The white community’s portrayal worked to achieve multiple goals. First, making the protest into a riot justified the Highway Patrolmen’s actions. This portrayal deflected blame from the white power structure and suggested that the students died because of their own actions. Therefore, the patrolmen were not at fault, and the students who died were not victims. Finally, based on this understanding, some of the white community has asserted that “the Orangeburg incident,” as they called it, was only a small blemish on the good record of race relations in South Carolina during the turbulent modern civil rights movement.32 However, this memory hindered the two communities from working towards reconciliation, denied the existence of de facto segregation, and ignored the continued struggle that African Americans faced in Orangeburg.

The continued struggle that John Stroman faced exemplifies how the past remained pertinent in the town. Stroman connected other downfalls in his life to his traumatic experience of not being present at the massacre. He stayed in Orangeburg after 1968, and he felt alienated from the town. Throughout his life, he struggled to find stable employment, which he linked to his involvement in the campus movement. To Stroman, the continuation of the annual commemoration validated his pain and suffering, which did not end in 1968. He remembered that after President M. Maceo Nance retired in 1986, the new president of SCSC, Dr. Albert

Smith, did not want the annual commemorations to continue. Stroman recalled that he and two unnamed students from the bowling alley sit-in advocated for the continuation of the commemorations. The new campus administration believed that the ceremonies dredged up too

101 much pain for the families of the murdered students; however, Stroman and others felt that the ceremony was a powerful event that offered them validation of their personal struggles as activists. Stroman was not present at the massacre because he could not get onto campus due to the police barricade, and he remembered that, “I always hated myself until maybe about the last six or seven years, that I wasn’t on campus.” The connection to the commemoration that

Stroman felt is representative of other African American survivors who did not witness the massacre. During the discussion with the new administrators, Stroman reminded them that “this

[commemoration] is [about] more than the families. What about the students that were injured?

And the students that were involved?... We have feelings…what we did, you know, we just can’t throw it away.”33

Most of the black community rejected the white community’s understanding of the massacre as a riot and used the annual commemorations to combat the distorted collective memory. Staff writer for the Richmond Afro American, Zaccheus White wrote that “calling this massacre a riot is the height of deception.”34 Emma Cain remembered that the students did not have any weapons.35 According to historian Jacques Semelin’s definition of massacre, a collective group must perpetrate the deadly violence, those who are killed must be civilians who are not trained in military combat, and the victims may often belong to the same community as the perpetrators.36 The events that transpired in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968, met all three of these requirements. Those who fired their weapons into the crowd of students were all members of a state or local law enforcement agency forming a collective group. Despite the fact that some of the SCSC students were veterans of the Vietnam War, most of the student protesters were civilians who had no military experience. Most of the students were from South Carolina meaning that both the perpetrators and the victims were members of the South Carolina

102 community. Even Cleveland Sellers, who was shot in the shoulder during the massacre, was born just twenty miles from Orangeburg in Denmark, South Carolina.37

Shortly after the massacre, the white community down-played the significance of the black students who died and deflected any blame from the white community for their deaths. In the days following the massacre, most white South Carolina politicians did not mourn the black lives that were lost; they mourned the good civil rights reputation that South Carolina had built in the national white community. At a press conference the day after the massacre, South Carolina

Governor Robert McNair did not address the murdered black students. Instead, he used this conference to discuss the significant impact “this unfortunate incident in Orangeburg [had on] our reputation for racial harmony [which] has been blemished.”38 His understanding of what made the events of the night prior a tragedy had nothing to do with the lives of the dead students.

In Orangeburg, white politicians and community members used the perception of the massacre as a blemish on the state’s positive record of civil rights to create their own sense of victimhood.

McNair and the white community believed this perception of their reputation on civil rights despite the recent history and the long struggle for black equality in South Carolina. The fact that the University of South Carolina remained segregated until 1963 when NAACP lawyers

Matthew Perry and Donald Sampson successfully brought a case against the school’s segregation policy demonstrates how African Americans continued to face discrimination in education after the Brown decision in the state.39 Moreover, after separate law schools formed in South Carolina in the late 1940s, the state implemented a plan in 1945 that discriminated against black students by granting diploma privilege to students who graduated from white institutions which exempted them from the Bar exam.40 McNair’s statement also ignored the campaign against the white primary that the NAACP and the Negro Citizens Committee of South Carolina, a group formed

103 specifically to advance black voting rights and challenge the white primary in 1942, waged; the white primary continued to exclude African Americans from the election process until the 1944

Smith v. Allwright decision.41 Further, Strom Thurmond stated, “all the laws of Washington and all the Bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement” in 1948 as a presidential candidate for the

Dixiecrat party. He served as South Carolina’s Senator from 1954, when he won as a write-in candidate, until 2003.42

McNair’s understanding of the “riot” as a blemish on a good civil rights record was adopted into the white community’s collective memory, despite its historical inaccuracy. As most of the local whites referred to the massacre as “the Orangeburg incident,” they denied the fact that it was a massacre. The inability of the white community to call the shooting a massacre conveyed their political and racial views. Constructing a collective memory of a riot directed blame at the black students and further divided the white and black communities. The dispute over whether the protest was a riot or a massacre goes deeper than demonstrating that diverging perceptions of the past existed in the town. The two conflicting collective memories demonstrated that the communities continued to be divided over race and were unable to provide healing after the massacre and achieve reconciliation. According to historian Renee Romano,

“when history itself becomes a field of contest, when there is no consensus about what happened or why, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to put a violent past to rest.”43

This contested collective memory of a violent past was similar to the contested memory of the May 4th Shooting that occurred on the Kent State University campus in 1970, which claimed the lives of four white students. The collective memory of these two shootings remain rigidly divided over whether the shootings were massacres and whether the protesters were

104 rioters. In both cases, the federal courts participated in this collective memory construction.

During the trial against the Ohio National Guard in 1974 the defense called the white students

“terrorists.” During the trial of the South Carolina Highway Patrolmen in 1970, the defense portrayed the black students as rioters. After both the May 4th Shooting and the Orangeburg

Massacre, a large group of the local populations blamed the protesters for the violence that occurred. The collective memory continued to be contested and further divided both towns well into the twenty-first century.44

The white community’s collective memory construction of their own sense of victimhood in South Carolina is similar to the local white community’s memory in Little Rock, Arkansas, of the public school desegregation crisis. Some of Little Rock’s white community centered their own victimhood in their memory of the desegregation of Central High School. These individuals remembered how the turbulent process disrupted the normalcy of their high school experience even though most of the extracurricular activities and school events continued as normal even after the school closed for one year to prevent desegregation. In 2001, one white community member told Terrence Roberts, a member of the Little Rock Nine, “you ruined my senior year.”45 This sentiment is similar to Governor McNair’s mourning of his civil rights reputation.

Some of the whites in Little Rock believed that they were victimized when their town had become an occupied state because of the federalization of the Arkansas National Guard and the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division.46 Here is where the similarities break between

Orangeburg and Little Rock. During the National Guard occupation in Orangeburg, tanks and jeeps full of state employed military personnel patrolled the black neighborhood.47

In addition to creating their own victimhood, during the process of collective memory construction in the white community, some whites forgot about Jim Crow, their own racism, and

105 white resistance to black equality and the civil rights movement.48 Dean Livingston was the editor of the local newspaper the Times and Democrat in 1968. He witnessed the massacre while he was taking photographs of the stand-off between the students and the law enforcement for the paper. The first newspaper articles that ran on Friday after the massacre reported that an exchange of gunfire took place between the officers and the students. On February 9, the title of

Livingston’s staff writer Frank Meyers’ article read, “Officers Blast Rioting Negroes.”49

However, in 2001, Livingston remembered that his staff writers reported that, “Floyd was on a collision course.”50 His statement implied that he did not support segregation or Floyd’s determination to maintain his policy. When he presented this idea, he suggested that he supported the student sit-in at the bowling alley and their struggle to desegregate.51 However, in doing so, he diminished the white community’s resistance to desegregation and the civil rights movement in Orangeburg. Governor McNair remembered that in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, “most people [in South Carolina] at the time, felt that ‘with all deliberate speed’ mean that we have taken a hundred years to get where we are, and it will take us another hundred years to get from where we are to where we ought to be.”52

Livingston’s memory deflected blame from the white community and denied the continued presence of racial tension in Orangeburg. The white community remained largely absent from the annual commemorations and the state officials continued to silently ignore these events. However, Livingston did not believe that their absence and silence strained race relations.

According to Livingston, the real indicator of Orangeburg’s race relations was that “in

Orangeburg here, Jack Bass’ book is accepted. Jack did a good job.” He was referring to the same controversial book that Jack Shuler remembered was only discussed in whispers. He believed that since the white community knew what happened, they had accepted their history.

106 When confronted with the fact that McNair had never attended the commemorations, he speculated that his absence was not due to any racial bias or residual tensions. Instead,

Livingston deflected blame for his absence onto the black community when he asked, “has he ever been invited.”53

Livingston’s deflection of blame away from the white community and former Governor

McNair for their failure to attend the annual commemorations demonstrates how the collective memory of white southern political figures has distorted historical truths. Most white community members who were not vocal segregationists during the 1950s and 1960s have distanced themselves from the most vocal white supremacists of that time. Whites who identify with colorblind policies that ignore race have forgotten about white resistance to civil rights and use their historical amnesia to deny that conservative political policies are tied to white supremacy.

Political figures like Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi strongly objected to integration efforts during the modern movement. However, the collective memory of his career has been reimagined to have moderate views on race relations and integration. Further, his memory has portrayed Stennis as a firm believer in equality based on a colorblind rhetoric. This memory has distorted the way that Senator Stennis used a colorblind rhetoric in an attempt to block passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.54

For decades after the massacre, the state remained silent about their past. The state has failed to conduct a thorough investigation into the events that led to the massacre. The lack of an investigation has contributed to the conflicting collective memories because many of the facts about that night remain disputed and unverified. For years, the black community struggled to determine whether the Highway Patrolmen’s shotguns were loaded with birdshot or buckshot.

This fact mattered to the black community because the latter were deadlier. According to the

107 black community’s understanding, if the guns were loaded with buckshot, the Highway

Patrolmen’s goal was to use lethal force against the protesters.55

The state of South Carolina’s choice to remain silent instead of initiating a thorough investigation into the massacre was a political stance. According to Jay Winter’s theory of strategic silences, the state can use silence to choose peace over justice after human rights abuses. Investigations can provide justice to the victims when they learn the truth about the past.

However, when the past remains controversial, the process of uncovering the truth can lead to more conflict. Winter has demonstrated that political parties have a stake in choosing silence as public opinion might shift after the commission’s findings expose the truth, which has the potential to alienate their voter base. Members of the black community in Orangeburg pushed for a state investigation as recently as 2007.56 However, the political climate in South Carolina has not allowed the legislature to initiate an inquiry. Truth commissions have been used after violent conflict to provide truth, justice, and reconciliation with success in numerous countries.57

However, despite the success of these commissions, some countries have failed to implement this method of transitional justice. In Spain, when a new state formed after the end of Francisco

Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, the state did not conduct an investigation into the human rights abuses that occurred under the previous government. Most of the Spanish people accepted and adopted the government’s silence. However, this silence was a political strategy used to maintain peace and order that disregarded justice.58

In one case of racial violence that occurred in North Carolina, the state did not choose silence, and provided an example of how a state investigation could uncover historical truths. In

1979, Ku Klux Klan members opened fire on a group of African American members of the

Communist Workers Party who were peacefully demonstrating in Greensboro. In this case, the

108 perpetrators were civilians making it easier for the local police to arrest the shooters, however the justice system failed to provide the victims with justice in both cases. Similarly to the Highway

Patrolmen’s trial after the Orangeburg Massacre, a jury acquitted the six klansmen who stood trial after the murders of their crimes after the defense argued they acted in self-defense. After the Greensboro shooting, a truth and reconciliation commission modeled after the one used in post-apartheid South Africa, exposed that the state and the law enforcement were complicit in the white supremacists’ violence, and therefore, bore some guilt for the deaths. The commission in Greensboro provided more truth than previous federal court cases against the perpetrators had.59 In Orangeburg, the perpetrators were not civilian members of a white supremacist group, instead those who pulled their triggers were state employees. The nine Highway Patrolmen were acquitted for their actions, and their trial did not uncover the truth about that night in 1968.

Members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lied about their presence at the massacre, and FBI agents delivered conflicting testimonies regarding whether evidence showed that the students fired weapons at the law enforcement officers before the massacre occurred. Some members of the black community have pointed to these lies under oath as a cover-up conspiracy.60

As survivors publicly shared their experiences and memories, some called upon the state to recognize the past and apologize for the massacre. One survivor, Frankie Thomas, believed that healing between the two communities could begin only if the white community and white power structure admitted to their wrong doing. At the time of the massacre, Thomas was a freshman enrolled at Claflin College. He sustained numerous injuries. The worst of which was the result of a buckshot hit his left cheek. “The remedy [to the continued racial tensions] is going to see an apology. I think that’s what most of us are looking for…whether it comes out in the

109 headlines, whether it is one on one, I get a letter from [current] Governor [Jim] Hodges that says:

Hey, Frankie, I’m sorry…I’m sorry about what happened, but we learned from it; and we all learned from it.”61

South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges did not offer an adequate apology during his time in the statehouse from 1999-2003. However, he attended the commemoration in 2001 as the keynote speaker.62 His attendance and speech marked a shift in the white community’s collective memory of the massacre. During his speech, he acknowledged that the shooting was a massacre, but he did not accept blame or responsibility on behalf of the state. The theme of that year’s event was “A Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation” which demonstrated how the black community believed that the larger Orangeburg community could come together when they agreed upon the past.63 On behalf of the state of South Carolina, Governor Hodges stated that

“we deeply regret what happened here. The Orangeburg Massacre was a great tragedy for our state.” Even though he did not apologize, he expressed that, “even today, the state of South

Carolina bows its head, bends its knee and begins the search for reconciliation”64 He did not include any statement of remorse or sorrow, nor did he accept blame or place responsibility.

However, his use of the phrase the Orangeburg Massacre, which remained a point of contention in the white community, did acknowledge that the shooting was a massacre. The limited national news coverage of his statements, however, couched this admission with their decision to use sneer quotes in their headlines. One headline read, “S.C. College Marks ‘Orangeburg Massacre’

Anniversary.”65 The response to Governor Hodges’ speech did exemplify that the healing process could begin for some of Orangeburg’s residents. The State, a statewide newspaper published out of Columbia, reported that while he was recalling the events of 1968, Cleveland

Sellers became so overcome with emotions that he had to step away from the podium mid-

110 speech. Despite quoting Governor Hodges’ speech at length, the article only included a limited number of quotes from Sellers’ speech, primarily that Sellers believed, “we must tell the truth about this tragedy.”66

On February 8, 2003, Governor Mark Sanford finally offered an official apology from the state of South Carolina to the black community for the Orangeburg Massacre. He apologized a few months after he was elected governor. He did not publicly apologize at the commemoration, but released a short statement expressing that “his prayers and thoughts went out to the friends and family of the men killed.” He went farther than his predecessor in his statement, writing that the time had come “to tell the African-American community in South Carolina that we don’t just regret what happened in Orangeburg 35 years ago -- we apologize for it.” After Governor

Sanford apologized in 2003, he said that his Christian beliefs informed his personal stance on forgiveness and motivated his actions. Sanford believed that the people of South Carolina needed to heal the racial divide that persisted, and he hoped the Orangeburg community and South

Carolina could move forward together.67

In his apology, Governor Sanford built upon the previous governor’s statement about the massacre to construct a successful expression of sorrow and remorse that accepted blame and admitted responsibility for the tragic event on behalf of the state. Governor Sanford’s reference to the former governor’s account in his apology recognized that Governor Hodges’ failure to repair the damage by not offering a full apology. In the reports of this apology, the Associated

Press finally dropped the sneer quotes around “the Orangeburg Massacre” and accepted the shooting as a massacre.68 The Associated Press reported a quick synopsis of the resulting death and pain the black community endured in 1968. These newspapers articles challenged the white community to accept the black collective memory of the massacre.69

111 Some of the black community members believed that this apology could enable the healing process to begin between the two communities. Local community members, as well as national members of the black community, expressed gratitude for Governor Sanford’s apology.

Civil rights leaders in the state released their own statements praising Governor Sanford for his apology and expressed hope for the future of race relations in South Carolina. They believed this apology might begin the healing process because the public recognition of past wrong doing offered validation to the black community’s past trauma. South Carolina NAACP President

James Gallman supported the governor’s actions and was “glad that we have someone that recognizes that this was a massacre, and it’s long overdue.” NAACP program director in South

Carolina Lonnie Randolph believed that, “it’s now possible healing will take place that hasn’t taken place over the years.” 70 Henry Smith’s sister, Ora Susan Smith Hughes, recalled that the moment she received the news of her brother’s death, her mother “collapsed screaming, it really hurt me and my other two brothers also.” She believed that “the fact that he did that [apologize] speaks volumes to me because I feel the state actually is trying to acknowledge that they are culpable or responsible for some of, of the well, the Orangeburg Massacre period.” However,

Hughes expressed that this apology could only provide so much comfort because “when you lose a loved one…especially if it’s a tragic situation, there is never any closure…I don’t have any closure because he, he was snatched from us.”71

Political scientist Melisa Nobles’ membership theory of apology demonstrates a greater understanding of the healing nature of official apologies. According to her work, official apologies extend national membership to victimized groups when they acknowledge that current social inequality has historical roots in oppression. 72 Healing within the larger Orangeburg community could not begin until the white community acknowledged, validated, and accepted

112 the traumatic experience that the black community endured.73 The massacre negatively affected most of the survivors’ sense of belonging in the larger Orangeburg community and their collective identity. Most of the white community, which owned most of the businesses in the city, blamed John Stroman, in addition to Cleveland Sellers, for the students’ deaths. His interpretation of how this blame affected his ability to find meaningful employment led to his diminished sense of community in the town.74 After Governor Sanford’s apology, the potential existed for the white community to extend to him membership in the Orangeburg community at large. Whether this apology effectively met that level of reconciliation remains to be determined.

Official apologies can work toward reconciliation within a community as individuals are confronted with their own culpability as silent supporters of discrimination or the injuries that their denial of the past caused.75 Some members of Orangeburg’s white community began attending the commemoration after the turn of the century demonstrating that some whites wanted to achieve reconciliation. Over 250 white and black community members, who were “a group of people dedicated to racial harmony in Orangeburg,” signed a written statement that ran in the Times and Democrat in 1999 that encouraged the commemorations to be used as a place

“to move forward.”76 In 2001, six members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol asked the organizers if they could attend. Although they were never barred from attending the ceremony, no Highway Patrolmen had previously attended. Despite the fact that officers who attended the ceremonies in 2001 were not present at the massacre, their attendance was a symbolic gesture that communicated that some of the law enforcement wanted to heal the racial divide in

Orangeburg.77

According to sociologist Nicholas Travuchis, an apology from one community to another is primarily symbolic and works best to achieve healing between individuals if paired with

113 reparations. Nobles has demonstrated that official apologies can work towards a political climate that supports reparations for the victims of human rights abuses.78 However, this was not the case in Orangeburg. Four years after Governor Sanford’s apology, South Carolina Senator Robert

Ford introduced a resolution in the state Senate in January 2007 to create a commission tasked with investigating the massacre and making a recommendation for reparations to the surviving families and injured individuals. The joint resolution did not pass. Some members of the South

Carolina Senate admitted that they agreed with Governor Sanford that the events in Orangeburg were unjust and wrong; however, their inability to pass Senator Ford’s resolution demonstrated that the white community continued to resist reconciliation. Reparations can accompany apologies, but they are difficult to pass through legislatures for numerous reasons. The victims of the Orangeburg Massacre did not receive reparations for their psychological trauma, their medical expenses, or the funeral costs.79

Numerous members of the white community that supported the apology continued to refuse to support reparations or an official investigation. After Governor Sanford’s apology, civil rights activists called for an investigation of the massacre because of the persisting confusion regarding why the Highway Patrolmen shot into the crowd of students. However, Governor

Sanford’s apology did not cause the political climate of the state to shift enough to realize an investigation or reparations. State Senator John Hawkins admitted that the apology was necessary, and the event was a tragedy. However, he did not express any personal sorrow or remorse for the massacre when he stated, “I think it’s unfortunate some people want to take the governor’s apology and drive a Mack truck through it by having some sort of political investigation.” 80

114 Newspaper coverage of this event illustrated the tensions that existed before the apology and the hope that this apology would offer reconciliation. They acknowledged the fact that

Governor Hodges did not apologize. Further, they admitted that the massacre was a tragedy, which helped the black community validate their own traumatic experience. Some newspaper articles reporting on the apology ended with a statement about how Sanford was apologizing for the massacre by saying that the Highway Patrol was responsible for the shooting. There was no admission of state support of the violence or the white resistance to black equality. While the white community was taking the first steps towards reconciliation, the journey would be a long one. The collective memory continued to distance the white community from responsibility for the massacre.81

Official apologies cannot provide every victim with the healing they need. After a violent event such as this, individuals struggle to come to terms with their trauma. John Stroman exemplifies the inability of an apology to help victims work toward healing. At the commemoration in 2001, Stroman expressed that an official apology would not bring him any comfort. He continued to state that the only person he wanted an apology from was former

Governor McNair, had he apologized in 1968. 82 Emma Cain interpreted the apology as not

“meaning anything because…it’s just like offering me a cookie. I mean, if you have a tribe over here who has hurt you and you’re another tribe, and they still, they, they hate you. And they are gonna show you that they hate you when they go to the voting booth, um what good is an apology uh if your behavior is not going to change.”83 Thirty-five years passed before a South

Carolina governor offered a meaningful apology, which diminished the effectiveness of the apology for some of the survivors on an individual level. An official apology, however, cannot provide every individual with the healing they need.

115 The collective memory of the Orangeburg Massacre remains contested well into the twenty-first century. The memory of most of the white community marginalized Floyd’s segregation policy and forgot about Jim Crow, their own racism, and white resistance to civil rights advancements. Many facts surrounding the night remained disputed and lacked verification. The degree to which the state was actively involved or complicit in the massacre remains to be determined. Most of the white community has not attended the annual commemorations, as some believe discussing the massacre creates racial tension.

Every year since 1968, the South Carolina State College campus has hosted a commemoration to remember the lives of those that the Orangeburg Massacre affected. This commemoration became a site of collective memory construction for the black community.

Survivors of the massacre who publicly shared their memories constructed a collective memory that countered the white community’s understanding of the past. The collective memory construction that took place on the South Carolina State College campus reaffirmed that the massacre was historically significant. Further, the local black community used their collective memory to push for political action regarding the massacre. South Carolina Governor Mark

Sanford officially apologized for the massacre in 2003. However, the black community was unable to pressure the state into initiating an official investigation. The annual commemoration on the SCSC campus began as a place where the black community could mourn the loss of three young black men, but through the years, it became a place where they could use their collective memory construction to push a political agenda aimed at reconciliation in the larger Orangeburg community.

116

CONCLUSION

When entering the South Carolina State College campus through the only entrance that is not gated by fences topped with barbed wire, visitors must stop at a security guard’s station.

After gaining entrance to the campus, visitors come upon a memorial for those killed and wounded at the Orangeburg Massacre. A three-sided pillar bares the names of the dead and their birth and death date. Three other pillars encircle that monument and hold plaques that list the twenty-eight names of the known wounded students who survived the massacre. Dr. William C.

Hine, retired professor from the college, has stated that the campus community is prepared to add more names to the list, if more survivors come forward.1 A sign displays pictures of Henry

Smith, Delano Middleton and Samuel Hammond, Jr. and provides some history of the massacre, which it lists as “one of the least remembered chapters in U.S. Civil Rights history.”2

A short distance away, the All Star Bowling Lanes sits tucked away in the back corner of the A&P shopping plaza. The bowling alley has been abandoned, and cob-webs cover the doors’ locks demonstrating that no one has entered from the front entrance in a long time. Visible from the glass doors, it seems that the alley was abandoned in a hurry as there are still bowling balls in the counter’s display case and a can of Sprite sits next to a bowling pin on the counter. Electrical cables that powered light fixtures at one time suspend ceiling tiles mid-air.3 Near the road the alley’s sign still stands, but it is mostly unrecognizable as the display faces have been knocked out.4

117 In 2018, the Public Broadcasting Service aired a South Carolina Educational Television

(SCETV) special panel discussion to examine how “despite the passage of time the specter of the

Orangeburg Massacre still haunts us.” The discussion clearly demonstrated that, “conflicting accounts of what happened persist and numerous questions remain.” However, most importantly, this special demonstrated that, “beneath the surface for many the wounds still festers.” Beryl

Dakers moderated the discussion. Dakers began her career in television broadcasting in 1970 and became, as the South Carolina Department of Education wrote, “one of the state’s most influential broadcasters and documentary filmmakers.”5 The panelists represented numerous points of view in the discussion. The five participants were retired SLED Lieutenant Carl Stokes, journalist and contributing author of The Orangeburg Massacre Jack Bass, SCSC alumnus and massacre survivor Jordan Simmons, Cleveland Sellers’ son and former South Carolina State

Representative Bakari Sellers, and official photographer for Governor McNair’s office who witnessed the massacre Bill Barley. 6 This discussion remained primarily civil, however at some moments the panelists passionately disagreed about the facts surrounding the massacre. Most notably, Stokes claimed that he had never heard reports of whites firing guns on campus on the

Wednesday night before the massacre.7 This was just one example of the facts about the context in which the massacre took place that is highly contested.

The highly contested collective memory of the massacre demonstrates how rigidly divided South Carolina and Orangeburg remain over race. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the white community forgot about white resistance to civil rights advancements, Jim

Crow, and their own racism. They used the perception of the Tuesday night protest as a riot to label the students present at the Thursday night confrontation as rioters, which deflected blame for the massacre onto the student victims. The silence from historians on the significance of

118 Orangeburg’s past verified the white community’s understanding that it was insignificant. To most of the white community, the Orangeburg Massacre was insignificant and only represented a small hiccup in South Carolina’s positive record on race relations. This perception ignored the movement history in the state, the continued racial divisions, and the black community’s continued struggle to overcome racial barriers.

Despite a skewed collective memory, historical truths remain. Radical black women created the foundation of the local movement in Orangeburg and provided the next generation of activist with role models. Their successes and failures provided lessons for the radical students who were actively forming their own identity as activists. Historically black college campuses were hot-beds of movement activity and their local organizing caught the attention of national civil rights organizations. The Orangeburg Massacre affected the national movement’s process of radicalization. In the aftermath of the massacre, black students at colleges and universities across the South mourned the death of these students and demanded justice for the Orangeburg

Massacre at their own protests. A woman at Virginia Union University led a peaceful group of

650 black and white protesters. Students at Atlanta University organized the Orangeburg Student

Defense Fund where the black community could send financial support or telegrams to student organizer Mary Cammack. 300 students at Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina, and

400 students from Alan and Benedict Colleges in Columbia demanded that Governor McNair dismiss the officers responsible for the death of the three students. 200 students at the University of South Carolina participated in a memorial and believed that “state law enforcement officers of

South Carolina have so little respect for the lives of colored people.”8

As civil rights activists fought for the full citizenship rights and the freedom that were afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution, they manipulated their racial

119 identity to define their own American identity. They appealed to American ideals and projected their own American identity to demonstrate that racialization denied them the rights and privileges that the constitution protected in the white community. After the massacre, most of the black community believed these murders demonstrated that “police, who have harbored intolerant attitudes [towards the black race] all along, are encouraged to let them rise to the surface- not only victimizing the innocent, but also undermining our cherished freedoms of speech and assembly.”9 Racialization created a culture in America where some of the blame for social unrest resided in the “one-sided justice and [the fact that] it’s being condoned by leadership that has created many of today’s serious problems.”10

Some members of the black community believed that the bias of the white power structure stretched beyond denying them equal representation in their local government.

Orangeburg City Administrator Robert Stevenson addressed an auditorium of black students on

Wednesday after the police brutality of the night before. The students met His introduction with laughter and heckling. He seemed almost amused as he continued, “I’ll pause when I say this, that in order for you to hiss; some of you. But, I can truthfully and consciously say that, that uh, it is the philosophy of the city administration that we do treat all of our citizens right; the same.”11 As Stevenson predicted, students booed and hissed at his claims; however, from the volume of the students’ outcry, most of the students participated in this verbal rejection of his claims. When Mayor E.O. Pandarvis addressed the students following Stevenson, he did not alleviate student concerns and said that he was limited in the actions he could take because he was “prescribed to work within the law.”12

The comments that white politicians and city officials made on Wednesday were reminiscent of those who supported the policy of law and order to violently suppress protests.

120 Some of the black students did not perceive the police officers as protecting law and order for everyone in Orangeburg. Amy Simmons equated police officers with “assassins of a particular race of people.”13 Students who marched at the statehouse in protest of the massacre in the weeks after carried placards that called the police “assassins.”14 Andrew Hugine called for the

“dismissal of all patrolmen who fired at students on this tragic night. Their actions should show that they are unfit to be called the protectors of law and order.”15 Charles Hildebrand wanted to remind the state officials that “state troopers should be in a position where they are protecting life, not taking lives. As far as I know, there was no reason for anybody to die that night. There was nobody’s life or limb in danger other than ours…the system was protecting itself.” 16 These statements demonstrate that these students perceived the police forces as protectors of racial inequality and white supremacy.

Desegregation created a cultural crisis in the South. A sign in the All Star Bowling Lanes storefront window changed from “white’s only” to “club members only” demonstrating that some white southerners were determined to maintain the racial caste system in the face of federal legislation aimed at abolishing de jure segregation.17 While lynching was not as common by the

1960s, Orangeburg experienced its fair share of vigilante justice. The last African American lynched in Orangeburg was a woman, Rosa Richardson, suspected of participating in the death of a twelve-year-old white girl in 1914. The Times and Democrat, reporting about the last lynching claimed that, “why a mob of men would take justice into their own hands is beyond comprehension, even for that time in our society.”18 However, in 1968, one white local shot three

Claflin College students, and the students he shot, Edward Pough, Thomas Smith, and James

Jones, received no justice. The Confederate Flag continued to fly atop of the state capital until

2015.19 Racial prejudice persisted in South Carolina after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As racial

121 etiquette no longer adequately kept African Americans relegated to the lowest social, economic, and political rung, a cultural crisis created a space where whites felt unsure about the future of the superior status of their race.

This thesis has been a study primarily of identity formation and cultural change. Each of these chapters has examined individual, group, and collective identities to demonstrate how divided South Carolina was and remains over race. Fifty years after the massacre occurred, the two communities cannot agree on what happened and why. In the SCETV panel discussion in

2018, moderator Dakers concluded by stating, “I am not sure that we have moved this discussion forward, but we have certainly had a discussion. And, what we have proved is that… the recountings [sic.] still go on, the accounts are different, but the Orangeburg Massacre remains

South Carolina’s shame and an impetus for our learning more about race relations in our state.”20

Without a mutual understanding of the past, it is unlikely that reconciliation will be reached in the town. The next generation of the campus community have demonstrated how committed they are to maintaining the collective memory of the massacre. While many of the survivors are still alive today, the next generation of activists have begun to move to the forefront of the collective memory construction at the annual commemorations and the political struggle for truth and reconciliation in Orangeburg. Cleveland Sellers’ son, Bakari Sellers, has used his political career as a member of the South Carolina State House of Representatives to keep the memory of the massacre alive. He was the keynote speaker at the commemoration in 2018 in addition to participating in the SCETV panel discussion.21 The continued racial tensions that exist in

America have come to represent the past to some of the survivors. Emma Cain stated that, “every time it happens today, it’s just a reminder of what happened then. I mean, when I see Ferguson, I see Orangeburg.”22

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Notes

Notes to Introduction

1 Jack Nelson, and Jack Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1970). 2 “Orangeburg Students Fired No Guns, Deaths Not in Self-Defense,” Michigan Chronicle, March 2, 1968. 3 Barry Barkan, “Richmond NAACP Told Horror of Orangeburg Massacre: ‘It Could Happen in VA.’,” Richmond Afro American, March 23, 1968. 4 “Rap Brown Calls for Revenge,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 10, 1968. 5 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 90-92; 95-6. Aleathia Jones-Wilson, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection (hereafter referred to as OMOHC), Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Arleathia Jones changed her name after the massacre and some sources include her hyphenated name after she got married of Jones-Wilson. For the sake of clarity, this thesis will only use the name that she had during the massacre. Ernest Shuler, interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Charles Hildebrand, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Jordan Simmons, interviewed by Ted Rosengarten, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Reverend Frankie Thomas, interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, February 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 6 Harold Riley, interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, Transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 7 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre. 8 “Negro Bowls at Alley Near S.C. College,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 9, 1968. 9 “S.C. Students Seek Hearing for on Killing of Three Men,” Toledo Bronze Raven, March 23, 1968. 10 Delores Irene Shaw, March 29, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor West, nbn, folder 608, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 11 Albert Dawson, March 28, 1968, Letter to Honorable Lt. Governor West nbn, folder 611, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 12 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 9-10; Cleveland Sellers, with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973) 206-219. 13 Sellers, The River of No Return, 206-223. Cleveland Sellers, interviewed by Jack Bass, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 14 The Southern Regional Council cited the similar hairstyle and clothing that the three dead students had to support their belief that the Highway Patrolmen made an effort to target Sellers during the shooting. Southern Regional Council Hits Shooting of Students,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968. Sellers discussed how much Smith resembled himself, and how that led him to believe that the patrolmen thought they were shooting him, not Smith, during the massacre. Sellers, The River of No Return, 218 15 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 185-221, 230. For a list of all the promotions that Henry Morrell Addy received see “Maj. Henry Morrell Addy Ret. Obituary,” Charleston Post and Courier, Nov. 28, 2011. 16 “Orangeburg Unfinished,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968. 17 “The Orangeburg Tragedy-From a Thirty Year Perspective,” edited by Robert J. Moore, The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association no issue number (May 1999)122, 127. 18 “Dusk to Dawn Curfew Enforced: NAACP Supports,” Dallas Express, Feb. 17, 1968. 19 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no 4 (March 2005): 1233-1263. 20 Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).

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21 Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008). 22 The three civil rights workers murdered during the Freedom Summer were Micahel Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. Here Sellers mentions Turner, but it is not clear who he is referring to. Most likely, he meant to list all three of the workers, but he listed an incorrect name. The transcript misspells Chaney’s name. Also, in the interview, Sellers recalls that he was trying to reach Henry Smith before the massacre began to warn him that the gathering around the bonfire was dangerous because it was so late at night. Cleveland Sellers, interviewed by Jack Bass, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 23 Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 24 The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights- Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006). 25 See Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Washington, 1968. 26 “Dr. King Demands U.S. Action Against Killers of Negro Students,” Dallas Express, Feb. 24, 1968. 27 Bob Miller, “Jailed Rap Brown Wants:‘10 Detroits for Every Orangeburg’” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968. 28 “North Carolina Negro Students Halt Proceeding of Legislature,” Jackson Advocate, March 16, 1968. This article title contains a misprint. The article discusses the activities of students in South Carolina, not North Carolina. 29 “Sympathetic White Students Dominate the Trial of Black Panthers,” Jackson Advocate, Feb. 28, 1970. 30 “The Orangeburg Tragedy – From a Thirty Year Perspective,” 123. 31 Ken Burger, “Orangeburg Massacre Subject of Play that Needs to be Seen” Charleston Post and Courier, Sept. 26, 2010. 32 Ibid. 33 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 166. 34 Southern Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013); Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights- Black Power Movement edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas, and V.P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001). 35 See David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Benjamin Houston, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2011); Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2016). 36 History and Memory in African-American Culture, edited by Genevieve Fabre, and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, edited by Renee C. Romano, and Leigh Raiford (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006); Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, edited by Carole A. Barbato, and Laura L. Davis (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2012).

Notes to Chapter I

1 Jack Nelson, and Jack Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1970) 60- 75. 2 Among the white students enrolled at SCSC in 1968 were John Bloecher, Carrie Tyson, and Carla Mancari. The college year book did not include the names or pictures of the white students. South Carolina State College, The Bulldog: 1968 Volume XV, (Orangeburg: The Graduating Class of 1968, 1968), Miller F. Whittaker Library Archives, South Caroline State University; South Carolina State College, The Bulldog: 1967 Volume XIV, (Orangeburg: The Graduating Class of 1967, 1967), Miller F. Whittaker Library Archives, South Caroline State

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University; South Carolina State College, The Bulldog: 1966 Volume XIII, (Orangeburg: The Graduating Class of 1966, 1966), Miller F. Whittaker Library Archives, South Caroline State University; “History” Claflin University, accessed April 25, 2017, http://www.claflin.edu/about/history; “History of SC State University,” South Carolina State University, accessed April 25, 2017, http://www.scsu.edu/aboutscstate/historyofscstateuniversity.aspx; George Brown Tindall, South Carolina Negros: 1877-1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952) 226-230; Jack Shuler, Blood & Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town (Columbia, The University of South Carolina Press, 2012) 73. 3 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 1-17; William C. Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protests, 1955-1968,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 97, no. 4 (Oct., 1996): 310-315. 4 Cleveland Sellers, interviewed by Jack Bass, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection (hereafter referred to OMOHC), Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York: Morrow and Company, 1973) 206-219; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 1-17; for a better understanding of how local movements gained the attention of national leaders see Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 5 Jack Bass, “Bowling Alley Reopens,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 9, 1968; Douglas Robinson, “South Carolina’s Governor Says Black Militants Caused Rioting,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1968; see Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America. 6 “The Orangeburg Massacre” Fact Sheet,” Lowcountry Digital Library, 2013, http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:23650; “Southern Regional Council Hits Shooting of Students,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 55; Cleveland Sellers, interviewed by Jack Bass, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Katherine Mellen Charron, “We’ve Come a Long Way: Septima Clark, the Warings, and the Changing civil rights movement,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005); “The Orangeburg Tragedy-From a Thirty Year Perspective,” edited by Robert J. Moore, The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association no issue number (May 1999)113-131. 7 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no 4 (March 2005): 1233-1263; for a understanding of how Hall’s new definition of radicalism has been applied to the history of black women in the movement see Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Dayo F. Gore, Jeannne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 8 For a comprehensive understanding of how the Black Power movement existed before 1966 and coexisted with the traditional civil rights movement see The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006). 9 For a deeper understanding of racial etiquette see David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture 1940 to Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) and Benjamin Houston, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012). These ideas are expanded upon to demonstrate how a radical movement sought to overthrow the culture of white supremacy in the South in Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008) which relies heavily on Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s interpretation of radicalism. 10 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 17-35. 11 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 18-20; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-75. 12 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 18-20; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-75. 13 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 34-35. 14 Only a few names of men participants can be found in historical records. Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 34-35. 15 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 35-37; John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 16 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 30-44; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-88. 17 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 30-44; John Stroman is quoted in Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-88 remembering that a woman he did not see yelled the quote in this paragraph; Leonard Moore, Black Rage in New

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Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2010) 1-16. 18 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 36-38; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 77-78; for more about the violent response to civil rights activity in South Carolina see Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 19 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 39; Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007) 90-94; Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006) 238-308. 20 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 42-59; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 81-82; Tom Dent, Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997) 83-86; Bob Dennis, “McNair Won’t Stand ‘Brutality, Violence’” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 8, 1868. 21 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 49-52; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-110; Grievances with the City of Orangeburg, nd., file 12, Annette Lewis Phinazee (1920-1983) Papers, 1925-1969, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 22 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 49-55; “National Guard Called to Protect City; Law Officers Keep Armed Vigil at College; Shooting Occurs,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968; John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 23 Bob Dennis, “McNair Won’t Stand ‘Brutality, Violence,’” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 8, 1968; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 46-55; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-111. 24 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 55-75; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 80-82; “New Racial Violence Breaks Out at Orangeburg,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 8, 1968; Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013) 28-29; Frank K. Myers, “Officers Blast Rioting Negroes,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 9, 1968; “2 More Units of Militiamen Are Activated,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968; Jack Bass, “Bowling Alley Reopens,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 9, 1968. 25 Frank K. Myers, “Officers Blast Rioting Negroes,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 9, 1968; “2 More Units of Militiamen Are Activated,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 56- 57, 65. 26 See Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 60-75; To FBI Director, From Columbia FBI, Feb. 10, 1968, Box 1, Sect. 1, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 27 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 60-75; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-88; Modjeska Simkins, interviewed by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, July 28-31, 1976, Modjeska Simkins Papers, University of South Carolina University Libraries, Columbia, SC; Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower; Sellers, The River of No Return, 57-66, 206-219. 28 Douglas Robinson, “South Carolina’s Governor Says Black Militants Caused Rioting,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1968; Thomas Kennerly, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Ernest Shuler, interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 66-78. 29 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 61-82; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 81-82, 96; “Orangeburg, SC: Weather History KOGB 1968,” Weather Underground, Accessed April 24, 2017, https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KOGB/1968/2/8/DailyHistory.html?req_city=&req_state=&req_stat ename=&reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=. 30 Jack Bass, and Bob Dennis, “3 Dead, 34 Hurt at Orangeburg,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 10, 1968; “2 Killed, 40 Hurt in Carolina Riot: Negro Students Trade Fire with Police and Troops,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1968; Frank K Myers, “Officers Blast Rioting Negroes,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 9, 1968; “The Orangeburg Massacre” Fact Sheet,” Lowcountry Digital Library, 2013, http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:23650; “Southern Regional Council Hits Shooting of Students,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968; Douglas Robinson, “South Carolina’s Governor Says Black Militants Caused Rioting,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1968; “S.C. Assembly Lists Students Grievances,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 30, 1968; William C. Hine, interview by author, Orangeburg, June 27, 2017; “About SRC,” Southern Regional Council, accessed on Oct. 5, 2017, http://www.southerncouncil.org/about.html

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31 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 125-137; Sellers, The River of No Return, 3-32; U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Density by Race, 1960,” prepared by Social Explorer, accessed on Nov. 1, 2017, https://www.socialexplorer.com/63ffebb349/edit. 32 The institutions of black higher education that jointly released a statement condemning the massacre were Morehouse College, Clark College, Morris Brown College, Spelman College, and Atlanta University. “6 College Heads Demand Action Against ‘Storm Troop’ Tactics No Response Four Days After Pleas,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968; “Dusk to Dawn Curfew Enforced NAACP Supports Students,” Dallas Express, Feb. 17, 1968; “Dr. King Demands U.S. Action Against Killers of Negro Students,” Dallas Express, Feb. 24, 1968; The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, directed by Stanley Nelson, (Half Nelson Production, 1998); Benjamin E. Mays, “My View: Student Protection Needed,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 16, 1968. 33 Hall, “The Long Civil rights movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History, 1233-1263; see Lau, Democracy Rising. 34 Lau, Democracy Rising, 15-48 35 Arleathia Jones-Wilson, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001 Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 72- 96. 36 Sellers, The River of No Return, 206-219; for the involvement of national leaders in local movements see Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 37 Charron, “We’ve Come a Long Way,” 116-139. 38 W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil rights movement” in Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2013) 117-132; Jacqueline A. Rouse, ““We Seek to Know…in Order to Speak the Truth”: Nurturing the Seeds of Discontent- Septima P. Clark and Participatory Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas, and V.P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 115; Charron, “We’ve Come a Long Way,” 116-117. 39 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 65-66; Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class” Gender and Society 7, No. 2 (June 1993) 173. For a discussion of the jobs women held in the NAACP see Lee Sartain, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001); and Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil rights movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010) 3-38. 40 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890- 2000 (New York: Viking Penguin Group, 2001) 282-293; Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 107-109, 176-178; John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998) 261-266;. 41 For a comprehensive study of the NAACP in South Carolina see Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 42At the time of the Brown versus Board of Education decision, the average white resident of South Carolina completed an average of 8.7 years of education, and all of the state’s public schools were poorly funded. For a study of the desegregation efforts in Orangeburg see W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil rights movement,” 122-130. Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 114-181; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protests, 1955-1968,” 310-315. 43 “The Origins of Wilkinson High School,” Times and Democrat, Aug. 28, 2017; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 318-331. 44 Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 13; Hine, “Civil Rights and Camus Wrongs,” 310; W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil rights movement,” 122-130; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 65-66. 45 Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 325-331. 46 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution of Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) 1-12; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 55-69; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 325-331. 47 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 63-66; see Kibibi Voloria Mack-Shelton, Ahead of Her Time in Yesteryear: Geraldyne Pierce Zimmerman Comes of Age in a Southern African American Family (Knoxville, The University of Tennessee Press, 2010).

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48 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 63-66; Jeffery A. Turner, Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010) 67-72; Mack-Shelton, Ahead of Her Time in Yesteryear, 77-112; Tiyi Morris, “Local Women and the Civil rights movement in Mississippi: Re-visioning Womenpower Unlimited,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005) 193-213; W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement,” in Southern Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013). 49 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 55-76; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 320-325. 50 Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 310-331. 51 Ibid., 310-331. 52 Ibid., 310-331; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 1-19; Turner, Sitting In and Speaking Out, 46-47, 136-164; Isaac Williams, interviewed by William C. Hine, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Charron, “We’ve Come a Long Way,” 116-139. 53 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 22-28. Shuler mentions that King visited Orangeburg in 1967 in Shuler, Blood & Bone, 68. Modjeska Simkins, interviewed by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, July 28-31, 1976, 70-76; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 328-330. 54 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 71-74; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 7- 13. 55 “The Orangeburg Massacre” Fact Sheet,” Lowcountry Digital Library, 2013, http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:23650; “Southern Regional Council Hits Shooting of Students,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 55; Jack Bass, “Bowling Alley Reopens,” Charlotte Observer, February 9, 1968; Cleveland Sellers, interviewed by Jack Bass, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 56 Arleathia Jones-Wilson, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 72- 96; Cleveland Sellers, The River of No Return, 219; Preston M. Yancy, “We Owe Our Women Big Debt,” Richmond Afro American, April 20, 1968. 57 “Carolina Students Will Go to Capitol,” New York Times, May 13, 1968; “Continue to Protest the Orangeburg ‘Massacre,’” Iowa Bystander, March 21, 1968; “Protest Realizes Nothing,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 23, 1968; “North Carolina Negro Students Halt Proceedings of Legislature,” Jackson Advocate, March 16, 1968; “Student Protest Bringing Results,” New York Times, March 24, 1968. 58 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 191-205

Notes to Chapter II

1 See David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Benjamin Houston, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012). 2 Mathew L. Turner, “An Open Letter to the Student Body” nbn, folder 617, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 3 For a discussion of how Jim Crow laws, including literacy tests, the grandfather clause and others, kept most black men from realizing their voting rights see C. Vann Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); R. Volney Riser, Defying Disenfranchisement: Black Voting Rights Activism in the Jim Crow South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. For a discussion of black voting power during the modern civil rights movement see Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944- 1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Charles S. Bullock III, and Ronald Keith Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 4 Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern, 3-5. 5 Loretta Nash, March 29, 1968, Letter to Lieutenant Governor West, nbn, folder 608, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 6 Douglas Robinson, “Orangeburg Calm as Guard Patrols,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1968.

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7 Ibid. 8 “Curfew, Student Exit Gives S.C. Race Peace,” Gary Post-Tribune, Feb. 10, 1968. 9 Hugh Gibson, “Negroes March on State House,” Charleston News and Courier, March 13, 1968. 10 “Student Impudence,” Charleston News and Courier, March 9, 1968. 11 John Corley, March 29, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor West, nbn, folder 608, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 12 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Washington, 1968, 3. 13 Ibid. 14 Clay Risen asserts that President Johnson was “personally insulted by the reports’ conclusions.” Risen also quotes Nixon who believed the report “has put undue emphasis on the idea that we are in effect a racist society.” Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, INC. 2009) 24. 15 In this paper, I do not use the term rioters in reference to the student protesters at SCSC and Claflin College. Here I am using this term with sneer quotes because that is how the media and the Nixon administration perceived those involved in the urban uprisings. For a discussion on law and order as a way to quell urban uprisings see Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 16 “Racism Pulled the Trigger,” Richmond Afro American, Oct. 10, 1970. For a discussion on the Jackson State College shooting see, Tim Spofford, Lynch Street: The 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1988). 17 This chapter discusses identities as a performance. Although these identities are discussed individually in this chapter, my approach is intersectional. 18 This chapter takes a symbolic interactionism and social constructivist approach to social identity. See R. T. Serpe, and S. Stryker, “The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective and Identity Theory,” in Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Shwartz, Koen Luyckx, and Vivian L. Vignoles (New York: Springer, 2011); Landon E. Hancock, “Ethnic Identities and Boundaries: Anthropological, Psychological, and Sociological Approaches,” in The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by R. A. Denmark (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers INC., 2010). 19 See Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For a better understanding of racism in the North see, Thomas J. Surge, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006; Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 20 See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). 21 See Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern. 22 See Patrick Wolfe, “Race and Citizenship,” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 5 (Oct. 2004): 66-71. 23 South Carolina began using a literacy test in 1895, held all-white primaries from 1896 to 1947, charged a poll tax from 1895 to 1950, and used other methods of hindering the black community from registering to vote and discounting black ballots. See Bullock, III, and Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South. 24 See Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision that Legalized Racism (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004). 25 See George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Fredrickson believed that historians need to examine how culture created racial groups just as much as they examine the inequalities that racialized groups faced. 26See Wolfe, “Race and Citizenship,” 66-71. 27 See Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern; Houston, The Nashville Way. 28 See Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern; Houston, The Nashville Way. 29 The Lynching of Emmitt Till: A Documentary Narrative, edited by Christopher Metress (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 14-15; Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmitt Till (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2017); Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, 28-29. 30 U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Density County & State, 1960,” prepared by Social Explorer, accessed on Feb. 28, 2018, https://www.socialexplorer.com/8e961dfb6c/explore.

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31 Whites in the South were lynched for helping black community members or participating in the anti-lynching campaign. The South only accounted for 79% of the total lynching that took place in the country from 1882 to 1968. Most, but not all, of the lynching in the North and West targeted whites accused of stealing cattle or other crimes. For facts about lynching in the South and other parts of the country see “History of Lynching,” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 2017, accessed on Nov. 11, 2017, http://www.naacp.org/history-of- lynchings/. For a deeper understanding of Emmitt Till’s murder see The Lynching of Emmitt Till, 14-15; and Tyson, The Blood of Emmitt Till. 32 For a discussion of Edward “Judge” Aarons attack see Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, 28-29; Schuler, Blood & Bone, 51. 33 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Mind that Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” Southern Exposure 12 (Nov./Dec. 1984): 61-71. 34 See Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern; Houston, The Nashville Way. 35 See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 36 Dr. Rubin Weston, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection (hereafter referred to as OMOHC), Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 37 The other students who desegregated Little Rock High School were Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, and Thelma Mothershed. 38 Melba Patillio Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate (New York: Pocket Books, 1994); W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement,” in Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud, and Merline Pitre (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013). 39 For an understanding of the movement in South Carolina see Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006). Alabama Governor George Wallace was quoted in “‘Segregation Forever’: A Fiery Pledge Forgiven, But Not Forgotten,” National Public Radio, Jan. 10, 2013, accessed on Nov. 11, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169080969/segregation-forever-a-fiery-pledge-forgiven-but-not-forgotten. For a discussion on the desegregation of the University of Alabama see B. J. Hollas, Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013). For a brief synopsis on the desegregation of the University of South Carolina see “50th Anniversary of Desegregation: Biographies of the Three,” University of South Carolina, accessed on Feb. 17, 2018, http://www.sc.edu/desegregation/bios.htm#counsel. 40 During her educational career, Manning also integrated Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. However, after the Orangeburg Massacre she left South Carolina and enrolled at Michigan State University. Eve Silberman, “June Manning Thomas: Building a Better Detroit,” Ann Arbor Observer, Dec. 2015. 41 Racial segregation was prevalent in the North after the Great Migration started which segregated the school systems. For an understanding of the ghettoization of Cleveland and how these housing patterns affected the black community see Todd Michney, Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900-1980 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). For an understanding of Boston’s struggle of desegregation see Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern; Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement”; June Shagaloff, “A Review of Public School Desegregation in the North and West,” The Journal of Education Sociology 36, no. 6 (Feb. 1963): 292-296. 42 Jordan Simmons, interviewed by Ted Rosengarten, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 43 Fredrickson defines societal racism as practices that treat a group as inferior without a clear doctrine and institutional racism as intentional even though the dominate societal group does not evoke a doctrine of innate racial differences. This thesis uses these definitions when evaluating the persistent racism in South Carolina. It becomes necessary for historians then to examine racism by the effects that it caused and not the intent of individuals who enforced institutional racism. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination. Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 18-19. 44 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 54-55.

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45 For a discussion on how racial depictions in news reports and the imagery used in print media shaped the way that the white community imagined the black community see Melissa L. Cooper, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 46 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 54; “Orangeburg Policeman Hurt in Race Fracas,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 6, 1968. 47 “2 More Units of Militiamen are Activated,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968; Bob Dennis, “McNair Won’t Stand ‘Brutality, Violence,’” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 8, 1968; “McNair Says State on Top of Situation,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968. 48 Bass, Jack, “Economic Boycott Threatened,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 8, 1968; 49 Mr. James R. Power, Direct Examination, May 20, 1969, p. 15, box 1, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 164-184. 50 Members of the South Carolina National Guard carried weapons, but they were not issued ammunition on Thursday evening. First-hand accounts and historical documents did not support the scene these men depicted. The identity of these men was concealed in the FBI report. To Director, From Columbia, Feb. 13, 1968, p. 4, box 1, sect. 1, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 51 Mr. James R. Power, Direct Examination, May 20, 1969, p. 15, box 1, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 52 To Director, From Columbia Interview of Five Law Enforcement Officers, Feb. 10, 1968, box 1, sect. 1, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 91-111. 53 Dr. Rubin Weston, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 54 Zaccheus White, “Orangeburg Farce,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968. 55 Charles Hildebrand, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 56 Meminger was enrolled at SCSC in 1968. James Meminger, March 29, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor John C. West, nbn, folder 608, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 57 Donorant was enrolled at SCSC in 1968. Bettye Donorant, March 29, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor John C. West, nbn, folder 612, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 58 Reeves was enrolled at SCSC in 1968. Robert Reeves, March 29, 1968, Letter Mr. John West, nbn, folder 611, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 59 Simmons was enrolled at SCSC in 1968. Amy Simmons, March 29, 1968, Letter to The Honorable West, nbn, folder 611, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 60 Peggy L. Bryan, March 28, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor West, nbn, folder 607, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 61 See Peter F. Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006); 37.3% of South Carolina’s black community was registered to vote in 1964. See Charles S. Bullock, III, and Ronald Keith Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 62 Stokely Carmichael interview quoted in Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney, DVD-ROM (California Newsreel, 2009). 63 From 1965 to 1970 over 16,533 African Americans left South Carolina for other states. See Bullock, III, and Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South; Hine, “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs,” 312; Fairclough, Better Day Coming, 298; Thales Parker and Edward McClean, “Migration Into and Out of South Carolina” Technical Bulletin 1055 (Clemson: Clemson University, 1975) 9; Schuler, Blood & Bone, 50-51, 69; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 18-19; U.S. Census Data, “Population Statistics by Race, 1960,” prepared by Social Explorer, accessed Feb. 28, 2018, https://www.socialexplorer.com/a9676d974c/explore. 64 Patricia Hill Collins, “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 875-884. 65 John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1994). 66 See Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Assassination of the Black Male Image (Los Angeles: Middle Passage Press, 1994). 67 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968) 205-210. 68 See Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body,’” 61-71. 69 See Steve Estes, I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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70 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 71 See Tyson, The Blood of Emmitt Till; Richard Perez-Pena, “Woman Linked to 1955 Emmitt Till Murder Tells Historian Her Claims Were False,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 2017. 72 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 56-57, 65. 73 “Racial Disturbance, Orangeburg, South Carolina, February Nineteen Sixty-Eight,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, February 9, 1968; “2 More Units of Militiamen are Activated,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968; Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 56-57, 65. 74 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 18-19. 75 See Estes, I Am a Man!. 76 It is unclear from Charles Hildebrand’s interview who Poogie Brown came in to see specifically. No one with the last name Brown has been listed on historical accounts of the injured students. Further, presumably Charles Hildebrand meant that Orangeburg Police Officers or National Guardsmen took out his friend and assaulted him. Orangeburg Police Officers remained in the hospital. But, National Guardsmen were also stationed in the hospital that night and threated students who were waiting for treatment. Charles Hildebrand, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. 77 Charles Hildebrand, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 84-85. 78 See Patricia Hill Collins, “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life.” 79The first quote in this sentence is a Fannie Lou Hammer quoted in Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2011) 191. The second quote is from Frances M. Beals, “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female” Meridians 8, no. 2 (2008): 168. 80 See Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body,’” 64-65; Beals, “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female”; McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street; Estes, I Am a Man!. 81 See Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body,’” 61-71. 82 Men affirmed their manhood through social interactions with other men as well as women. The rape of black women told black men and women that white men dominated them. As black men fought to regain their manhood, rape threatened their reconquered manhood because they were unable to protect black women. See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996). 83 See McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street. 84 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 39-40. 85 See McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street. 86 Ibid., 36-37. 87 Arleathia Jones-Wilson, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001 Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 88 For an understanding of how women used their bodies in the feminist movement see Sara M. Evans, “Sons, Daughters, Patriarchy: Gender and the 1968 Generation,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 331-347. 89 In the Antebellum South, poor whites composed a barrier class between the slave and the large plantation owners. These poor whites were often referred to as “clay eaters,” “sandhillers,” and “white trash.” The economic elites perceived poor white trash as not quite human. The white community perceived the black community as a “mudsill” class that could not be helped out of poverty. See Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2016). 90 Quoted in Isenberg, White Trash, 264. This perception hindered Johnson’s efforts with the Great Society and opened programs that provided food to impoverished women and children to racial attacks. See Jill Buerr Berrick, Faces of Poverty: Portraits of Women and Children on Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 91 See Susan A. Mann, “Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 774-798; and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement,” 119.

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92 Jamal Hasan did not list dates for the two examples from his life that he was fired for being black or for his movement activity during his interview. Jamal Hasan, interviewed by Frank Beacham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 93 John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC; See W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement.” 94 See Isenberg, White Trash; Gilmore, Defying Dixie. 95 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 10-11; Oscar P. Butler, Letter to the Editor, Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968. 96 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 1-17. For the economic impact that SCSC had on the community see Thomas J. Stewart, Joseph M. Prinzinger, James K. Dias, John T. Bowden, James K. Salley, and Albert E. Smith, “The Economic Impact of a Historically Black College Upon Its Local Community,” The Journal of Negro Education 58, no. 2 (Spring, 1989): 232-242. 97 Jordan Simmons, interviewed by Ted Rosengarten, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 98 See Lau, Democracy Rising. 99 “Boycott Businesses in Orangeburg, S.C.,” Gary Post-Tribune, Feb. 12, 1968; “Boycott Grows in S.C.,” Michigan Chronicle, Feb. 17, 1968; Mike Davis, “Orangeburg Remains Tense as Citizens Boycott Stores,” Richmond Afro American, Feb. 17, 1968. 100 See W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement.”; William C. Hine, interview by author, Orangeburg, June 27, 2017; Leonard Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2010). Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 3-9. 101Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 76-98. 102 See Sokol, There Goes My Everything; Estes, I Am A Man!. 103 “Negro Bowls at Alley Near S.C. College,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 9, 1968; “S.C. College Expects Calm,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968; 104 Jordan Simmons, interviewed by Ted Rosengarten, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 105 The average number of years of education that an individual received in South Carolina at this time was 8.7 years. W. Marvin Dulaney, “Women in the South Carolina Civil Rights Movement.”

Notes to Chapter III

1 For a sampling of the historical significance of 1968 see 1968: Memories and Legacies of Global Revolt, edited by Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2009); 1968, The World Transformed, edited by Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Wyatt, When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); and Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988). For statistics on the Richard Nixon’s success in the 1968 presidential election see Election of 1968, The American Presidency Project, accessed on Feb. 17, 2018, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1968. Historian Brands is quoted from H. W. Brands, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2010) 161-162. For a discussion about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination see Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Michael S. Martin, “ “A Peaceful Demonstration of Our Feeling Toward the Death”: University Students in Lafayette, Louisiana, React to Martin Luther King, Jr’s Assassination,” Louisiana History: The Journal of Louisiana Historical Association 41, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 301-316. For statistics on President Johnson’s approval rating see “Presidential Approval Ratings – Gallup Historical Statistics and Trends,” Gallup, accessed on Feb. 17, 2018, http://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx. For an understanding of how television coverage of the Tet Offensive and the Democratic National Convention affected American viewers see David Culbert, “Television’s visual Impact on Decision-Making in the USA, 1968: The Tet Offensive and Chicago’s Democratic National Convention,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (July 1998):

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419-449. For an analysis of the 1968 Olympics and American black athletes see Amy Bass, Not the Triumph But the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). For an understanding of the Tlatelolco Massacre see Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). This SCETV special aired on PBS on February 8th and 11th in 2018. Bakari Sellers and Carl Stokes disagreed over whether or not students fired weapons at the law enforcement officers and whether the protest was a riot or not. During the disagreement, Bakari Sellers said, “well, then I don’t even know why we’re having this special.” This disagreement demonstrates how contested the details and interpretations of the past remained in South Carolina. The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/. 2 Of three of the textbooks used in modern American history survey classes at Kent State University, two do not mention the Orangeburg Massacre at all. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History, vol 2: From 1865 5th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). Michael Schaller, et. al, American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context, instructor ed. vol 2: Since 1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The one book that does mention the massacre offers one sentence and refers to the shooting as the “so-called Orangeburg Massacre.” Nancy A. Hewitt, and Steven F. Lawson, Exploring American Histories: A Brief Survey with Sources (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2013) 861. 3 The two books that examine this massacre were written by journalists. 4 Of the historians who study the 1960s, some mention Orangeburg, South Carolina in the context of the civil rights movement only Milton Viorst mentions the massacre, which he claims was ignored because of how common violent responses from police officers during urban riots had become. Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979) 525. The other historian, David Farber, mentions Orangeburg cites an incident in 1960 when student protesters had firehoses turned on them and, after they were arrested, they were detained in a quickly built stockade made of chicken wire. David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994) 79. For a sampling of the historians who did not mention the massacre see Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Morton Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991); Terry H. Anderson, The Sixties, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson, 2004); Brands, American Dreams. 5 There are a few historians who mention the massacre in passing in their monographs. Martha Biondi’s investigation of student activism offers the best case out of all of the books who mention it. She discusses the massacre periodically throughout her monograph placing the massacre in the context of the larger student movement and radicalization in the face of police brutality. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). W. Marvin Dulaney offers half a sentence to the massacre in his chapter on the female activists in South Carolina in Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013) 130. Dulaney does include more of the history of the local movement in Orangeburg to provide a limited context. Peter F. Lau offers a limited explanation of the massacre in his conclusion of Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Flight for Black Equality Since 1865 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006). Holly V. Scott mentions the massacre in passing placing it within the context of the urban uprisings of the decade to analyze how news coverage portrayed the movement as dangerous. Holly V. Scott, Younger Than That Now: The Politics of Age in the 1960s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). For a sampling of the historical investigations of the civil rights movement that do not mention the massacre see Steven F. Lawson, Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Civil Rights Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013); Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945- 2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 6 In 1975, Juanita Goggins, the first black woman elected to the state House of Representatives spoke on the SCSC campus. Memorial Service of Rededication, Feb. 7, 1975, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. SCSC Alumni and Member of the House of Representatives, John W. Mathews, Jr. spoke at the annual commemoration in 1978. Memorial Service of Rededication, Feb. 8, 1978, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Civil rights leaders, including Modjeska Simkins, have spoken at the ceremonies as well. Memorial Program of Rededication,

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Feb. 8, 1984, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. 7 Memorial Services for Samuel Hammond, Jr., Henry E. Smith, Delano B. Middleton, Feb. 29, 1968, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Memorial Service of Rededication, Feb. 8, 1978, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial and Rededication Program, Feb. 8, 1998, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Smith-Hammond- Middleton Memorial and Rededication Program Activities, 1999, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial and Rededication Program, Feb. 8, 1999, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, South Carolina. 8 For a discussion on how oral history interviewees received validation when they share their experience see Kenneth Bindas, “Re-remembering a Segregated Past: Race in American Memory,” History & Memory 22, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 113-134. For an understanding of how trauma affects identity formation see Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 9 Shuler encountered this book while in school in New York City. Shuler, Blood & Bone, 2. 10 This number is representative of the city’s population in 1960. The Unites States Census Bureau defines a rural town as one that has a population of less than 50,000 inhabitants. “Geography: Urban and Rural,” United Stateslaure Census Bureau, Revised Dec. 8, 2016, https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/urban-rural.html. 11 His great-uncle, his grandmother’s brother, was present at the confrontation on February 8, 1969. He did not fire his weapon that night. However, Shuler wrote that he believed the personal connection was what made his grandmother refuse to talk about the massacre. Shuler, Blood & Bone, 2. 12 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 5. 13 The Confederate monuments was erected in a small park in Orangeburg in 1893. The monument is briefly described as a “uniformed Confederate soldier stands atop a tall pedestal which rests on a tiered base. The figure faces southwest and leans on his rifle with both hands. A canteen and haversack hang from his proper left shoulder and a knife is at his proper left side. He carries a bedroll and a kepi rests on his head. The model for the sculpture was a Confederate soldier named John S. Palmer.” An inscription at the base of the sculpture states, “TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD OF/ORANGBURG (sic) DISTRICT (On east face:) ERECTED BY THE WOMEN OF/ORANGEBURG COUNTY 1893. (On south face:) A GRATEFUL TRIBUTE/TO THE BRAVE DEFENDERS OF/OUR RIGHTS/OUR HONOR/AND OUR HOMES (On west face:) LET POSTERITY EMULATE THEIR/VIRTUES/AND TREASURE THE/MEMORY OF THEIR/VALOR AND PATRIOTISM.” “Orangeburg Confederate Monument, (Sculpture),” Art Inventories Catalog: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Copyright 2016, https://siris- artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!siartinventories&uri=full=3100001~!326484~!0#focus . Lauren Collins, “Secrets in the Sauce,” New Yorker, April 24, 2017. Gene Zaleski, “Historic Bowling Alley Closes its doors- Investors looking at All Star, Focal point of ‘Orangeburg Massacre,’” Times and Democrat, Sept. 16, 2007. 14 For a discussion of radicalism in the movement prior to 1954 see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no 4 (March 2005): 1233-1263; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). For a discussion on how Black Power and civil rights coexisted prior to 1965 see The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, edited by Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006). For a discussion on the role of the state in the collective memory of the civil rights movement see The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, edited by Renee C. Romano, and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). For an understanding of how collective memory construction has marginalized black women at the local and national level see Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender & History 11, no. 1 (April 1999): 113-144; Kristan Poirot, “Gendered Geographies of Memory: Place, Violence, and Exigency at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 4 (2015): 621-648; Imaobong D. Umoren, “From the Margins to the Center: African American Women’s and Gender History Since the 1970s,” History Compass 13, no. 12 (2015): 646- 658.

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15 This quote is from The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, xvii. For an understanding about how civil rights memory has been used as a political tool see Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” 16 Here I mean a larger identity of Orangeburg local. For an understanding of cultural trauma and how collectives work through it see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) 1-30. 17 For an understanding of how survivors work towards healing when they tell their stories see Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 175-195. 18 Jones stated in her interview that her son was currently a junior at SCSC in 2001, meaning she would have enrolled in the 1998-1999 school year. Jones did not expose where she taught or at what level during her career. Arleathia Jones-Wilson, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001 Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection (hereafter referred to as OMOHC), Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 19 Ibid. 20 Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, DVD-ROM, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009). 21 See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 176-179. 22 For a discussion on how reinterpreting trauma and value systems provides dignity and a sense of value to survivors see Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 178-179. 23 Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, DVD-ROM, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009). 24 Robert Lee Davis, Jr., interviewed by Frank Beacham, Feb. 8, 2001 Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 85. 25 Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. 26 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 185-221 27See “The Orangeburg Tragedy: From a Thirty-Year Perspective,” edited by Robert J. Moore, The South Carolina Historical Association no issue number, May 5, 1999. 28 For a transcript of Sellers and Simmons speeches see Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century, edited by Winfred B. Moore, Jr., and Orville Vernon Burton (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008) 359-371. 29 See Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 10-13. 30 John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 31 Isaac Williams, interviewed by William C. Hine, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 32 Governor Robert McNair used this phrase the day after the massacre in a press briefing. See Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. This memory has been perpetuated by his biographers see Philip G. Grose, South Carolina at the Brink: Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). For an understanding of how Orangeburg white locals remember the massacre see Shuler, Blood & Bone. 33 Dr. Albert Smith became the sixth president of South Carolina State College in 1986. John Stroman did not list Smith by name in his interview. He said, “after Nance’s administration, they brought another man in, I can’t remember his name now.” John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Richard Reid, “Dr. M Maceo Nance Jr.: Right Man for His Time,” Times and Democrat, Aug. 31, 2008. 34 Zaccheus White, “Orangeburg Farce,” Richmond Afro American, March 2, 1968. 35 Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. 36 See Jacques Semelin, “Toward a Vocabulary of Massacre and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 193-210.

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37 See Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 4-9. “South Carolina State University,” College Factual, accessed on Jan. 28, 2018, https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/south-carolina-state-university/student- life/diversity/#chart-overall-diversity. 38 Quoted in Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. 39 Matthew Perry represented black students in most of the cases brought to court to desegregate public schools in South Carolina. He graduated from the law school at South Carolina State College in 1951. “50th Anniversary of Desegregation: Biographies of the Three,” University of South Carolina, accessed on Feb. 17, 2018, http://www.sc.edu/desegregation/bios.htm#counsel. 40 See R. Scott Baker, “The Paradoxes of Desegregation: Race, Class, and Education, 1935-1975,” American Journal of Education 109, no. 3 (May 2001): 330. 41 See Lau, Democracy Rising, 133-144. 42 Quoted in Adam Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100,” New York Times, June 27, 2003. “Strom Thurmond: A Feature Biography,” United States Senate, accessed on Feb. 17, 2018, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Featured_Bio_Thurmond.htm. 43 See Renee Romano, “Confronting the Legacies of Violence: Lessons from Kent State and Greensboro, North Carolina,” in Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, edited by Carole A. Barbato, and Laura L. Davis (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2012) 159-170. 44 See Romano, “Confronting the Legacies of Violence: Lessons from Kent State and Greensboro, North Carolina,” 159-170. 45 Cathy J. Collins, “The Role of Forgetting in Remembering: The Desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,” in Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, edited by Carole A. Barbato, and Laura L. Davis (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2012) 142-158. 46 Ibid., 142-158. 47 Douglas Robinson, “Orangeburg Calm as Guard Patrols,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1968. 48 For an understanding of how whites in the North forgot about segregation see Invisible Struggles: Stories of Northern Segregation, directed by Molly Merryman, aired on Feb. 5, 2007 (Warren, OH: Kent State University Trumbull, 2007), DVD. 49 Frank K. Meyers, “Officers Blast Rioting Negroes,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 9, 1968. 50 Dean Livingston, interviewed by Frank Beachman, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 51 Heteroglossia determines that individuals construct their language based on the perception that they have about the listeners world view. See The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 52 Quoted in Grose, South Carolina at the Brink, 122. 53 Dean Livingston, interviewed by Frank Beachman, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 54 See Jesse N. Curtis, “Remembering Racial Progress, Forgetting White Resistance: The Death of Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis and the Consolidation of the Colorblind Consensus,” History and Memory 29, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2017): 134-160. 55 Some interviews that were a part of the Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Project asked survivors if they had kept the pellets that doctors pulled from their bodies after the massacre. None of the survivors interviewed had, however some survivors still carried pellets in their bodies that doctors claimed were too dangerous to remove. These individuals felt that they were carrying around pieces of evidence that would support their interpretation of the massacre. Ernest Shuler, Interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. For a discussion about how search for truth has included an understanding of why the patrolmen’s guns were loaded with buckshot instead of birdshot see Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 185-221; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 91-111. 56 S.C. Congress, “Senate, Joint Resolution S. 22. 117th sess., [Jan.9, 2007],” accessed on March 15, 2017, http://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess117_2007-2008/bills/22.htm. 57 See Onur Bakiner, Truth Commissions: Memory, Power, and Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 58 Jay Winters, “Remembering Injustice and the Social Construction of Silence,” in Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, edited by Carole A. Barbato, and Laura L. Davis (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2012) 49-64.

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59 See Renee Romano, “Confronting the Legacies of Violence: Lessons from Kent State and Greensboro, North Carolina,” in Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, edited by Carole A. Barbato, and Laura L. Davis (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2012) 159-170. 60 The research that Jack Bass and Jack Nelson conducted determined that the agents lied about their presence at the massacre and that they delivered conflicting statements under oath. See Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 164-221; Jack Shuler’s research has examined how those lies became the evidence that some black community members pointed to when they claimed the state was involved with covering-up the massacre. Shuler, Blood & Bone, 91-125. 61 Reverend Frankie Thomas, interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small, February 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 87-88. 62 Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Program, Feb. 8, 2001, box 4, nfn, Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 63 Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Program, Feb. 8, 2001, nbn, folder Programs (33rd anniversary), Orangeburg Massacre Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 64 Jack Bass, “Documenting the Orangeburg Massacre: Campus Killings of Black Students Received Little News Coverage in 1968, But a Book About Them Keeps Their Memory Alive,” Nieman Reports (Fall 2003): 8-11; “S.C. College Marks ‘Orangeburg Massacre’ Anniversary,” CNN, Feb. 8, 2001, accessed on Dec, 28, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/02/08/orangeburg.masscre/index.html. 65 “S.C. College Marks ‘Orangeburg Massacre’ Anniversary,” CNN, Feb. 8, 2001, accessed on Dec, 28, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/02/08/orangeburg.masscre/index.html. 66 Aaron Sheinin, “Hodges: ‘We Deeply Regret…’: Governor Says State Has Made Progress Since Feb. 8, 1968, But Work’s Not Done,” Columbia State, Feb. 9, 2001. 67 Quoted in Jim Davenport, “Governor apologizes for Old Massacre,” Edwardsville Intelligencer, Feb. 9, 2003; for an understanding of how religious beliefs can influence state actors’ decisions to offer official apologies see Nicholas Travuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) 87-90. To gain a better understanding of how his Christian beliefs influenced Governor Mark Sanford see Warren Smith, Voices that Carry: Conversations with Some of the Evangelical Church’s Most Influential People (USA, Xulon Press, 2005) 42-43. 68 Jim Davenport, “Governor apologizes for Old Massacre,” Edwardsville Intelligencer, Feb. 9, 2003. 69 Shuler, Blood & Bone, xv. For examples on newspaper reports in 1968 see “Integrate Riot Site, U.S. Says,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 10, 1968; the Associated Press reported the following article that was printed throughout the country “2 Killed, 40 Hurt in Carolina Riot: Negro Students Trade Fire with Police and Troops,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1968. 70 Jim Davenport, “Governor apologizes for Old Massacre,” Edwardsville Intelligencer, Feb. 9, 2003. 71 Quoted in The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/. 72 Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 42-70. 73 For an understanding of how memory and identity are linked and can prevent healing in identity driven conflicts see Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (Winter 2000):175-192. 74 John Stroman, interviewed by Damon Fordham, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, OMOHC, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 75 See Travuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. 76 Quoted in Shuler, Blood & Bone, 168-169. 77 Ibid., 164-165. 78 See Travuchis, Mea Culpa; and Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 42-70. 79 S.C. Congress, “Senate, Joint Resolution S. 22. 117th sess., [Jan. 9, 2007],” accessed on March 15, 2017, http://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess117_2007-2008/bills/22.htm; Jemma Garcia-Godos, “Reparations,” in An Introduction to Transitional Justice, edited by Olivera Simic (New York: Routledge, 2017) 178-181; Nobles, The Politics of Official Apology, 132-135, 140-144. 80 “Orangeburg Massacre Acknowledged: 35 Years Later, Governor Offers Apology to Blacks,” Columbia Daily Tribune, March 23, 2003. 81 Craig Melvin, “Governor Mark Sanford Apologizes for Orangeburg Massacre,” Raycom Media, Feb. 8, 2003, http://www.wistv.com/story/656881/governor-mark-sanford-apologizes-for-orangeburg-massacre. 82 Shuler, Blood & Bone, 88, 132.

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83 Quoted in The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/.

Notes to Conclusion

1 William C. Hine, interview by author, Orangeburg, June 27, 2017. 2 Picture taken by the author. 3 Picture taken by the author. 4 Picture taken by the author. 5 Beryl Dakers, South Carolina African American History Calendar 2018, accessed on Feb. 20, 2018, http://scafricanamerican.com/2018/honorees/beryl-dakers/. 6 The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/. 7 Ibid. 8 Barry Barkan, “650 Students March, Protest” Richmond Afro American, May 11, 1968; “Black Student Sympathy March,” Lowcountry Digital Library, 2013, http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:23636; “S.C. Marches, Boycott Spread,” Richmond Afro American, Feb. 24, 1968. 9 “Call to Sanity,” Richmond Afro American, March 9, 1968. 10 Ibid. 11 Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, directed by Bestor Cram, and Judy Richardson, written by John De Laney (California Newsreel, 2009) DVD. 12 Ibid. 13 Amy Simmons, March 29, 1968, Letter to The Honorable West, nbn, folder 611, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 14 A picture of students carrying a sign that called the law enforcement officers assassins can be seen in Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 144-145. 15 Hugine was enrolled at SCSC in 1968. Andrew Hugine, Jr., March 29, 1968, Letter to Lt Governor John West, nbn, folder 611, Thomas J. Crawford Papers, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 16 Charles Hildebrand, interviewed by Marvin Dulaney, Feb. 8, 2001, Orangeburg, transcript, The Orangeburg Massacre Oral History Collection, Miller F. Whittaker Library, Orangeburg, SC. 17 Nelson, and Bass, The Orangeburg Massacre, 19; Shuler, Blood & Bone, 73 18 Richard Reid, “The Only Documented Lynching of a Woman in Orangeburg County,” Times and Democrat, Feb. 28, 2012. 19 “South Carolina’s Confederate Battle Flag is Gone, But Others Remain,” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 2015. 20 The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/. 21 “SC State to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre,” South Carolina State University, Jan. 30, 2018, http://www.scsu.edu/news_article.aspx?news_id=1971#.WoGS_HJdO60.email. 22 The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning, (South Carolina ETV, 2018), accessed Feb. 17, 2018, https://video.scetv.org/video/3009193377/.

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143 Livingston, Dean B. Interviewed by Frank Beacham. Feb. 8, 2001. Transcript. OMOHC, Miller

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Riley, Harold. Interviewed by Alada Shinault-Small. Feb. 8, 2001. Transcript. OMOHC, Miller

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Sellers, Cleveland. Interviewed by Jack Bass. Feb. 8, 2001. Transcript. OMOHC, Miller F.

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1968.

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Butler, Oscar P. “Letter to the Editor.” Times and Democrat, Feb. 8, 1968.

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