THE ISSUE: Focus on 1968 shootings

OUR OPINION: Nation should know what happened – and what is happening now

Films are calling national attention to the 1968 killings in Orangeburg of three students at the South Carolina State University campus, a tragedy that scholars and survivors say has never gotten proper attention in the national conscience.

The work of Dan Klores, a New York filmmaker, has been profiled by The New York Times. In a report by Tim Arango in 2008, Klores said he has considered Orangeburg and its place in history – or lack thereof – since he was a student in 1968 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Klores said he hopes his latest film, “Black Magic,” about basketball players at historically black colleges, opens people’s eyes to what is today known as the Orangeburg Massacre. The film made its debut on ESPN in 2008.

Klores told The Times that the Orangeburg shootings were not directly related to the topic of “Black Magic,” but that he was looking for any reason to delve into the incident. During his research for the film he discovered that one of the Orangeburg fatalities, Delano Middleton, was a star high school basketball player who was on campus because his mother worked at the college as a maid.

The Orangeburg Massacre is also the subject of a documentary 10 years in the making and produced by two Boston moviemakers, Bestor Cram and Judy Richardson of Northern Light Productions. The world premiere of “Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968” will be at the annual Orangeburg Massacre commemoration ceremony today at 3 p.m. at Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium at S.C. State.

Richardson says the documentary will highlight a massive amount of misinformation that surrounded the Feb. 8, 1968, incident in which three students lost their lives and 28 others were wounded when state troopers opened fire during their protest over segregation of an Orangeburg bowling alley.

“We were up against two problems,” Cram, a principal at Northern Light Productions in Boston, told The Times in explaining the time it took to finance the film. “People actually wondered why they hadn’t heard of it. Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told.”

The same report by The Times delves into why there is the perception the story is not known nationally. Blamed are a racially biased press of the times and factors such as the shootings occurring at night. There was no TV coverage at that hour.

Cited also is the absence of photographs taken by The Times and Democrat. Images from the incident were destroyed in the 1972 fire that gutted the newspaper building. Thus there is comparatively little imagery from the events of Feb. 8, 1968, and before and after.

Also, there is the initial report of the incident by The Associated Press, which Arango writes “set the tone for much of the initial coverage in the nation’s papers.” The incident was described as “a heavy exchange of gunfire,” although it has never been determined that those killed, the 28 others injured or others in the protest were armed.

The co-author of a book about the incident, North native Jack Bass, was a journalist covering the Orangeburg Massacre, which is the title of his book. He concurs with theories about why so little is known nationally about what happened here.

If the new focus of films serves to put the events of 1968 into the national conscience, that is positive. People do not deserve to be killed as they stand up for equal rights and privileges, in Orangeburg or anywhere in America.

And while the coverage undoubtedly will cast a negative light on Orangeburg, the state and the South for the racial mores of 1968, it also should serve to remind people here and around the nation that much has changed since the tragedy. While Orangeburg may be no panacea of race relations, it is a community in which progress in building a unity is widely acknowledged.

After the 2007 Democratic presidential debate, Congressman James Clyburn went so far as to say the university and the community in which it plays such a vital part have been transformed by positive national attention. He said S.C. State could now come out from the shadow of the 1968 events.

What happened here in 1968 will not be forgotten. Orangeburg has pledged itself to remembering and memorializing. And that is something the nation should know, too.

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