Cleveland Sellers saw plenty of civil
rights protests throughout the South as program director for the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. When he arrived at
South Carolina State College in Orangeburg in 1968, he thought it was
time to quietly work for his degree.
On Feb. 8, the quiet ended.
Sellers
joined a demonstration against a segregated bowling alley that ended
with 30 unarmed black students shot by white police, three of them
fatally. Sellers was wounded in the armpit.
It
was the most brutal response yet to student protests that would change
the nation, yet for decades it got little attention. Now, scholars and
people like Sellers with first-hand accounts are changing that.
Today,
academics, students and others meet in South Carolina for a three-day
conference at the College of Charleston. They'll discuss the black power
movement and the legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers is one of
the speakers.
The conference comes after a 2002 book, The Orangeburg Massacre, by journalists Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, and a 2010 documentary,Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968.
"South
Carolina State was the first time ever in the history of America that a
college student had been killed on their campus for doing absolutely
nothing," says Sellers, now president of Voorhees College in Denmark,
S.C.
What bothers Sellers and other scholars
is that the Orangeburg Massacre, as it is now known, happened two years
before the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings, when National Guardsmen
shot into an anti-war protest on the Ohio campus, killing four. Yet
Orangeburg never received anywhere near the attention.
"It's
still a sore spot for people here, when you talk about a massacre of
students, how it never reached the level of a Kent State," says Patricia
Lessane, executive director of the Avery Research Center, which is
hosting the conference.
"This was an example
of people who were saying, 'Enough is enough,' " she says. "We hear
about Selma and other places," referring to the March 7, 1965, attack on
voting rights protesters in the Alabama city, "but you don't hear about
Orangeburg."
Sellers, who went to prison on a
rioting conviction, says, "I think the Orangeburg Massacre goes down
besides the martyrs of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Chaney, Goodman,
and Schwerner and many others," referring to the three civil rights
workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964.
"The
legacy is that there were other martyrs just like the ones we know about
that got slid off to the side of history and weren't well recognized
because South Carolina refused for a long time to address those kinds of
issues."
Orangeburg is a city of 14,000
about 40 miles southeast of Columbia, the state capital. Its website
boasts it is where 600 Confederate soldiers temporarily blocked the
advance of the Union army. It also has two historically black schools
across the street from one another: South Carolina State and Claflin
University.
Over the years, most places in
town had been integrated, but the All Star Bowling Lanes still wouldn't
serve African Americans, says John Stroman, then a student organizer and
a junior at South Carolina State. Today, the retired teacher is 69 and
still lives in Orangeburg.
On Feb. 6, 1968,
Stroman and other students went to the bowling alley and sat down at the
counter but were ignored. One touched a salt shaker and the wife of
owner Harry Floyd, now dead,threw it away, Stroman says. Everything they
touched got tossed, he says.
"I hugged the
jukebox and I said, 'Now throw this in the trash can,' " Stroman
recalls. "Harry got peeved and said, 'I'm going to call the police.' "
On
the second night, state and local police met the students. More than a
dozen were arrested, bloodied students went to the infirmary, and other
students threw bricks and rocks at stores.
On
the third night, the weather had cooled to freezing and the students
lit a bonfire just off campus, When a firetruck was called in and state
police followed, about 100 students retreated to campus, according to
Bass. Accounts vary, but many say a banister thrown from a building hit a
state trooper in the head. A few minutes later, about 70 law
enforcement officers opened fire with carbines, pistols and riot guns
loaded with buckshot. The shooting lasted about 10 seconds.
"When
I heard the first shot go off, I looked to see if they were really
shooting," Sellers said. "The area in front of the police was all lit
up. There was smoke still billowing out from the bonfire."
He hit the ground.
"I could feel when I got hit," Sellers said. "It was a burning sensation."
Many people were shot in the back or the bottom of the feet as they scrambled away from the police gunfire.
This
was the segregation era. No ambulances came. With a gunshot wound under
his left arm , Sellers dragged injured students to the infirmary. "They
were hurt real bad and that's the only way they could have gotten back
over there," he says.
ROTC student Henry Smith
had five gunshots. He died at the hospital. Freshman football player
Sam Hammond died on the floor of the college infirmary.
High
school student Delano Middleton, shot in the chest, was a regular on
the campus because his mother was a cleaner there and because he liked
the grilled cheese sandwiches at the cafeteria, says Scarred Justice
filmmaker Judy Richardson.
Middleton's mother
appeared at his side at the hospital and he took her hand, Richardson
recounts from interviews she did for the documentary.
He
told his mother, " 'You've been a good mama but I'm going to leave you
now.' She starts saying, 'The Lord is my shepherd... ' He repeats it and
says, 'Thank you mama, I feel so much better now.' "
Then he died.
Despite news accounts of heavy gunfire, investigations later revealed that the students were not armed.
At first, Sellers was charged with five felonies, but they were whittled down to one: rioting.
"They convicted me of riot, one-man riot," he says bitterly.
He served seven months at hard labor of a one-year sentence.
In 1993, the state pardons board pardoned him, clearing his felony record.
"I
have moved on and I have forgiven those folks who perpetuated this, but
I can't forget it," he says. "You don't necessarily have to get
consumed by your bitterness and the attitudes that you might have
developed in being treated in this manner. I was obviously targeted and I
survived it, but I wanted to leave a legacy for other youngsters."
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