The Orangeburg Massacre was a shooting of student protesters on Thursday February 8, 1968, on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, United States. Nine highway patrolmen and one city police officer opened fire on a crowd of African American students, killing three and injuring twenty-eight. The shootings were the culmination of a series of protests against de facto racial segregation at a local bowling alley, marking the first instance of police killing student protestors at an American university.
Two days before the shootings, student activists had been arrested for a sit-in at the segregated All-Star Bowling Lane. When a crowd of several hundred Claflin College and South Carolina State College (State College) students gathered outside the bowling alley to protest the arrests, police dispersed the crowd with billy clubs. Students requested permission to hold a march downtown and submitted a list of demands to city officials. The request for a march was denied, but city officials agreed to review the demands. As tensions in Orangeburg mounted over the next few days, Governor Robert McNair ordered hundreds of National Guardsmen and highway patrol officers to the city to keep the peace.
On the night of February 8, students from both colleges and Wilkinson High School started a bonfire at the front of the State College campus. When police moved to put out the fire, students threw debris at them, including a piece of a wooden banister that injured an officer. Several minutes later, at least nine patrolmen and one city police officer opened fire on the crowd of students. Dozens of fleeing students were wounded; Sam Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton were later pronounced dead at the Orangeburg Regional Hospital.
In the aftermath of the killings, the bowling alley and most remaining whites-only establishments in Orangeburg were desegregated. Federal prosecutors charged nine patrolmen with deprivation of rights under color of law by firing on the demonstrators, but they were acquitted in the subsequent trial. The state of South Carolina charged one of the protestors, Cleveland Sellers, with several riot charges. He was convicted on charges relating to events two days before the massacre. Sellers received a full pardon in 1993. In 2001, Jim Hodges became the first governor to make a formal apology for the massacre.
Background
Orangeburg had a long history of student civil rights activism leading up to the events of 1968. In March 1960, students at South Carolina State College and Claflin College marched through downtown to protest segregation. Led by Charles McDew and Thomas Gaither (later known as a member of the Friendship Nine), the approximately 1,000 marchers were assaulted by firemen and police officers with fire hoses and tear gas. Police arrested close to 400 students and confined many of them outdoors in a cattle stockade. The events prompted administrators at South Carolina State College to promise that students involved in any future demonstrations would be expelled.
The South Carolina State College (State College) underwent a major change in administration just before the 1967–1968 school year. The college had been led for the preceding decade by President Brenner Turner, a conservative on civil rights who strove to maintain good relations with the white state government. Students were bound by a strict code of conduct and forbidden to form political organizations or take part in civil rights protests. These policies provoked sporadic student protests that the Turner administration firmly shut down. However, in the spring of 1967, student frustration exploded in a prolonged walkout that paralyzed the school. Students convinced Governor McNair to mediate, leading to Turner's resignation. The new interim president lifted many of the restrictions on students, including allowing political clubs to be established on campus. The two most important of these were the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee (BACC) and a chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP chapter took a moderate stance on civil rights and had over 300 members. The BACC was much smaller—its membership hovered around twenty students—and represented students who embraced black pride and were interested in black power. To the white community and the black middle class, the creation of the BACC was ominous. They associated black power with the radical rhetoric of the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. This view was reinforced when a SNCC organizer, Cleveland Sellers, arrived in Orangeburg in October. In his autobiography, Sellers wrote that he had returned to his home state because "I believed I could develop a movement by focusing attention on the problems of the poor blacks in South Carolina." The Orangeburg elites viewed Sellers as an outside agitator who was there to stir up trouble.
There were several ongoing sources of racial tension at State College and in the surrounding city. An independent committee had been set up after Turner's resignation to investigate how conditions at the college could be improved, and they issued a list of recommendations. However, by the start of 1968 the board of trustees had still not formally accepted their findings. Despite a wide disparity in funding between State College and white colleges in South Carolina, in January, Governor McNair announced that he was rejecting State College's request for a budget increase. Orangeburg had not yet seen the same civil rights reforms as most areas in the south. Many institutions remained segregated, including doctors' offices, entertainment venues, and the Orangeburg Regional Hospital. Political offices remained beyond the reach of black citizens, in part because the city boundaries were gerrymandered to exclude blacks.
Integration campaign at All-Star Bowling Lane
In the summer and fall of 1967, a whites-only bowling alley near campus, All-Star Bowling Lane, became a focus of student protests. Owner Harry K. Floyd repeatedly refused students' requests to desegregate. Instead, he followed the trend of replacing his "Whites Only" sign with one saying "Privately Owned" (and saying that only "club members" would be allowed in). In October, the college's NAACP chapter invited a lawyer to discuss how they could mount a legal challenge. The lawyer explained that while the legal status of de facto segregated bowling alleys was unclear, the fact that All-Star had a lunch counter meant that it was required to de jure desegregate under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Student activist John Stroman devised a plan to prove that Floyd's club-members-only strategy was a cover for refusing black patrons: he would ask a white student without a club membership to try bowling at the alley. On Monday, February 5, 1968, the white student arrived and was able to start bowling without being asked to prove his club membership. A little while later, Stroman and a group of black students arrived and asked to bowl. When the staff refused to let them, the students tried sitting at the lunch counter and were refused service there as well. The staff threw away anything they touched. Stroman pointed out to Floyd that the white student had been allowed to bowl without ever showing that he was a member, but Floyd just called the police. City Police Chief Roger Poston arrived and ordered the alley closed for the night. Chief Poston then met with Stroman and told him that he would have to arrest him for trespassing if he returned to the bowling alley. Stroman responded that getting arrested was his plan so that he could challenge the policy in court.
Stroman and a group of about 40 students returned to the bowling alley on Tuesday evening. They were met by 20 officers led by Chief Poston and South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) Chief J. P. Strom. Chief Poston told Stroman that 40 was probably more than needed to start the court case, so Stroman asked the women and any men who did not want to be arrested to leave. The fifteen remaining staged a brief sit-in and were arrested for trespassing. To this point, everything had proceeded as planned. But as the police were leading the arrestees outside, another student was arrested for cursing at an officer. One student later recalled that this was a turning point, saying "[e]verything was cool until the cops rushed into the crowd of students outside in the parking lot and arrested some cat." As the arrestees were driven downtown, one student returned to campus and shared news of the arrests with a crowd leaving a movie theater. The crowd, without knowing the arrests were planned, arrived at the bowling alley to make sure the arrestees were not being mistreated. When the police saw the new crowd gathering, they offered to release Stroman and his classmates on the condition that they help defuse the situation at the bowling alley. This worked at first; Stroman and the others returned and were able to explain that the arrests were planned. Students began to return to campus.
The mood of the crowd changed when a fire truck arrived. Fire hoses had been used in Orangeburg as a form of crowd control and had a reputation for brutality. Chief Poston was unaware of this and had called the truck as backup. The students interpreted the move as an act of aggression, and they began to shout insults at the firefighters. The police moved away from the alley to protect the fire truck from the students. A student then broke one of the alley's windows. The police arrested the suspect, but the crowd blocked them from leaving. Police and students began yelling abuse at each other. Although it is not clear which happened first, police began beating students with billy clubs and one student sprayed something in an officer's eyes. The beatings continued for several minutes. Witnesses described seeing an officer grab and restrain a female student while another beat her with his club. Others reported seeing "a young woman begging not to be hit again, even as a policeman swung his club". Cecil Williams recalled seeing two officers beating a female student who fell while fleeing. Eight students and one officer were sent to the hospital. The rest of the students fled back to campus, some smashing the windows of cars and businesses on their way. Although the Associated Press ran a story the following day claiming that cars had been overturned; in fact, the students had not overturned any cars and had caused less than $5000 in damages.
As soon as students arrived back on campus, they held an impromptu mass meeting. Sellers was present at the meeting, and, when asked for his advice, suggested that the students immediately occupy the intersections in front of campus and demand to speak to the chamber of commerce about the bowling alley issue. This proposal was rejected. Eventually, the students agreed to ask permission to hold a protest march the following day and drew up a list of ten demands. The demands included desegregating the bowling alley, the hospital, and doctors' offices as well as an end to police brutality.
Escalation of tensions