The Orangeburg Massacre

Forty years ago today America saw the first instance of violence between police and protesters in what is now referred to as The Orangeburg Massacre.

The shootings occurred two nights after an effort by students from an almost all all-black college to bowl at the city’s only bowling alley. The owner refused. Tensions rose. The students planned a bonfire to draw attention to their protest, firemen were sent to put out the bonfire and police were sent to protect the firemen, and when one started shooting at the students, they all did. Nine students and one city policeman received hospital treatment for injuries. Other students were treated at the college infirmary. College faculty and administrators at the scene witnessed at least two instances where a female student was held by one officer and clubbed by another. In total, 28 students were injured and three were dead.

There's more, a lot more, to this story. This story that I, who considered myself fairly well versed on civil rights history, I'd never heard of it. Never heard of Orangeburg, Ga. Two years later, when Kent State got all our attention, I never knew that almost the same thing had happened before. There were some differences. Kent State students were white and protesting an unpopular war. The law officials opened fire in the daytime where you can get better photos. And Kent State was also within an hour's drive of three different larger cities. Orangeburg, Ga., on the other hand, was black students protesting for equality and opportunity, in a smaller Georgia town not real close to anywhere, and the violence happened at night, making good TV images next to impossible. I think I'd better leave it at that. My cynicism is showing.

For whatever reason, I'd never heard about this shooting. 1968 turned out to be a very rough year and even though I didn't know it, this event was the first of quite a few really bad things in 1968. Hmmm maybe the Tet offensive was the first bad thing in 1968, but in my youth and naivite I hoped it was a good thing, to end the war faster and get our people home faster and safer. I still think that one is up for debate. Setting that one aside, the Orangeburg Massacre was before the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, before the violence outside of the Democratic Party Convention, before the violence on a lot of campuses. And I knew nothing about the Orangeburg Massacre, if it wasn't in the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise or the Tulsa World, it didn't exist in my world.

And of course my world view was also limited by my age. I was in eighth and ninth grade in 1968, and while I kept up with current events, partly for school and partly just because I was interested, however my two newspapers presented a story was truth, I had no way to establish a different truth or a different view of events. I had one teacher, who also held a current events sort of group after school, this was in ninth grade, who pushed us to gleen just the bare facts from newspaper articles and then establish our own truth. Mr. Morrell, I still owe you a lot for that. But basically, what was presented to me, either in the newspaper or within my family's viewpoint, this was still my truth.

And I didn't have a terribly strong opinion about the civil rights struggle at the time. I mean, I agreed with what the people were marching for, at least in theory. But in theory was as far as I was going to go, because bi-racial was also a theory to me. My middling to small town was segregated, very well segregated. I didn't see a black person my own age until junior high school when the schools were integrated by law. Now once I met Kathy Robinson, that was her name, and became friends with Kathy, and started really caring how she was treated and what her opportunities were, and caring very much if they weren't the same as mine, well, it took seeing and knowing a black person to make civil rights real to me.

I do believe that so few southern white people made the civil rights fight their own was because instances of inequality weren't where we could see them. I never saw black people, I had no contact with them. They didn't go to my school, they didn't go to my church. I don't know where they bought things like groceries because I never saw them shopping in the stores I went to with my family. Of course in retrospect, all of that is symptom of the inequality of segregation. But at the time, we just didn't see. They were invisible, and I mean really invisible. Not that we were seeing through them, we weren't seeing them at all. If I need an excuse, and I really don't think I do, this no contact is my excuse.

Of course everything changed once there were black people going to my school. Then everything was real. I remember Kathy asking me where I was going on vacation and I think we were maybe going to Padre Island to the beach? I don't remember where we were going, but I knew the answer when she asked me, and I asked her back where her family would go. And she didn't think her family was going on a vacation like mine, but they might go visit an aunt in Oklahoma City. I wondered out loud about that and she gave me such a look.

"You know that most motels won't let us stay there, don't you? And most restaurants won't sell us food, don't you?" And yes, I did know that but hadn't put it together in my head as it applied to vacations. Kathy explained straight out, impatient at my slowness to catch on. "We can't go farther than we can hold it in, because there isn't a bathroom on the road we can use."

Even limited to a bladder distance for a trip. THAT made everything real for me. I had never realized, had never thought. So many things passed under or over my youthful radar, and even more never made it within eyesight. That was probably the greatest injustice of all.

You can find more information about the Orangeburg Massacre at http://www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com