A t 10:33 p.m. on the night of February 8, 1968, eight to 10 seconds of police gunfire left three y o u n g b l a c k m e n d y i n g a n d 2 7 wounded on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. Exactly 33 years later, Governor Jim Hodges addressed an overflow crowd there in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium and referred directly to the “Orangeburg Massacre”—an identifying term for the event that itself had been controversial among South Carolinians. Governor Hodges called what happened “a great tragedy for our state” and expressed “deep regret.” His audience that day included eight men in their fifties—including a clergyman, a college professor, and a retired Army lieutenant colonel—who had been shot that fateful night. Some of them still had lead in their bodies from gunshot wounds. For the first time, survivors were honored at this annual memorial service for the three students who died, Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith.
Their deaths, which happened more than two years before gunfire by national guardsmen in Ohio killed four students at Kent State University, marked the first such tragedy on any American reporter for 13 years at The Atlanta Constitution where he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing conditions at a state mental institution. After serving as Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 1965 to 1970, he joined the Times’s Washington bureau where he served 31 years, 21 years as Washington bureau chief. He retired at the end of 2001. scoopnelson@aol.com Documenting the Orangeburg Massacre Campus killings of black students received little news coverage in 1968, but a book about them keeps their memory alive. college campus. Unlike Kent State, the students killed at Orangeburg were black, and the shooting occurred at night, leaving no compelling TV images.
What happened barely penetrated the nation’s consciousness. In an oral history project done during that 33rd anniversary, the eight attending survivors told their stories. Robert Lee Davis, a 260-pound football player when he was shot, was one of them. He drove from the small county seat town an hour away, where he worked with emotionally disturbed children. He told his interviewer, “One thing I can say is that I’m glad you all are letting us do the talking, the ones that were actually involved, instead of outsiders that weren’t there, to tell you exactly what happened.”
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