My last post described the sit-in movement that began in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1960. Today’s post is the story of how participation in the civil rights movement grew deadly, resulting in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. It ranks among the greatest losses of life of any event in the civil rights movement.

Events Leading to the Orangeburg Massacre

By 1968, Congress had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This barred public segregation in some forms. (Although, crucially, not in housing.) But while laws upholding public segregation presumably were over, that wasn’t always true in fact.

The owner of a local bowling alley in Orangeburg continued to segregate, claiming his bowling alley was his private property. Efforts by African American leaders to get him to relent failed. On February 5 students from Claflin College and South Carolina State College (SCSC) began to protest.

Police were on the scene. Like in 1960, they threatened to use water hoses to disperse the protesters. The students wouldn’t budge. The police answered with billy clubs. Fifteen arrests followed. Eleven people (ten students, one officer) received treatment for injuries.

Response of the Power Structure

This was an echo of what happened in Orangeburg in 1960. (The tried-and-true tactics of conservative Southern racists didn’t change that much. Why should they? These tactics often worked.) South Carolina’s governor, Robert McNair, declared that Black Power leaders had caused the disturbance. (To his conservative Southern racist audience, this meant: outside agitators stirring up the normally peaceful black populace.) Local business owners armed themselves in self-defense. (Read: they were on hand to assist law enforcement to keep African Americans in their place.) Governor McNair called in the National Guard, complete with tanks, to quash a protest at a segregated bowling alley. (Read: lawless outside agitators were forming an insurrection.)

Enter Cleveland Sellers. He was from South Carolina and was a veteran of the civil rights movement. He was in South Carolina to teach local students about black history. But in conservative racist-speak, this made him a black militant.

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February 8

Sellers and several hundred students gathered on the SCSC campus on the evening of February 8. The National Guard was present, ostensibly to prevent rioting. (Lawless outside agitators forming an insurrection, in Southerner-speak.) The exact events that followed are in some dispute, but some things are clear.

It was dark, other than a bonfire the students had started. The police ordered the bonfire extinguished. A few flying objects struck police. Officers claimed later they’d heard gunshots. The police and National Guard opened fire. Three students died. Twenty-eight (possibly more) were injured, including Sellers, most shot in the back or side as they ran away. No officers suffered injuries, making the claim they’d been fired upon a shaky one, at best.

The Aftermath of the Orangeburg Massacre

What came next seems entirely predictable. The police chief and Governor McNair accused Sellers and the Black Power movement of inciting normally peaceful students to riot. Some press sources said the students had fired first. (None were, in fact, armed.)

Of the seventy officers present, only nine were charged with shooting. All were acquitted as acting in self-defense despite a lack of evidence to prove this was so. The only person to be convicted of a crime was Cleveland Sellers. Sellers received a year of hard labor for inciting a riot at the bowling alley.

Haven’t I Heard Something Similar Before?

Sure you have. This isn’t all that different from what happened at Kent State in 1970. (National Guard shooting unarmed student protestors, killing some.) But the students at Kent State were white. They protested Vietnam, not a civil rights issue like segregation that white America and the press wanted to pretend was solved. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam began shortly before the Orangeburg Massacre, distracting attention.

In the end, no one cared about the deaths of three young African American college students. The nation forgot, just like it forgot nearly every other civil rights issue I’ve blogged about over the past several years. And it will continue to ignore them without the help of people like you to share what happened.

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