Blood and Bone

Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town

Jack Shuler

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781611170481
• eBook ISBN: 9781611174465
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A fresh perspective on the Orangeburg Massacre and its legacy

On the night of February 8, 1968, South Carolina state highway patrolmen fired on civil rights demonstrators in front of South Carolina State College, a historically black institution in the town of Orangeburg. Three young black men—Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith—were killed, and twenty-seven other protestors were injured. Preceding the infamous events at Kent State University by more than two years, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it came to be known, was one of the first violent civil rights confrontations on an American college campus. The patrolmen involved were exonerated while victims and their families were left still seeking justice. To this day the community of Orangeburg endeavors to find resolution and reconciliation.

In Blood and Bone, Orangeburg native Jack Shuler offers a multifaceted examination of the massacre and its aftermath, uncovering a richer history than the one he learned as a white youth growing up in Orangeburg. Shuler focuses on why events unfolded and escalated as they did and on the ramifications that still haunt the community.

Despite the violence of the massacre and its contentious legacy, Orangeburg is a community of people living and working together. Shuler tells their fascinating stories and pays close attention to the ways in which the region is shaping a new narrative on its own, despite the lack of any official reexamination of the massacre. He also explores his own efforts to understand the tragedy in the context of Orangeburg's history of violence. His native connections gave him access to individuals, black and white, who have previously not spoken out publicly. Blood and Bone breaks new ground as an investigation of the massacre and also as a reflection by a proud Orangeburg native on the meanings of Southern community.

Shuler concludes that the history of race and violence in Orangeburg mirrors the history of race relations in the United States—a murky and contested narrative, complicated by the emotions and motivations of those who have shaped the story and of those who have refused to close the book on it. Orangeburg, like the rest of the nation, carries the historical burdens of slavery, war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights. Blood and Bone exposes the ways in which historical memory affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Shuler explores how they remember the Orangeburg Massacre, what its meaning holds for them now, and what it means for the future of the South and the nation.

PART ONE

It is a remarkable fact that very many persons are prone to study the history of every other country while totally neglecting that of their own country and yet the study of local history is one of the most delightful studies.

A. S. Salley Jr., The History of Orangeburg County South Carolina (1898)

1 THE ARCHIVE AND THE ARCHIVIST

I wanted to start with paper, with documents, with what makes me (an English professor) comfortable. So, on a warm spring day in 2009, I began research for this book in the archives at South Carolina State University’s Miller F. Whittaker Library, located at the back of the campus, a good distance from where the shootings on February 8, 1968, happened. The library’s archives contain newspaper clippings, oral histories, and papers from the FBI investigation. As I drove into the parking lot in front of the library, I noticed to my right Sojourner Truth Hall peeking up over most of the buildings on State’s campus. The building is a student dormitory and probably the tallest building in Orangeburg. It had been a long time since I’d thought about that building. I grinned.

The summer after my first year in college, I came back to Orangeburg and got a job installing cable lines in dorms on the Claflin and State College campuses. I was part of a crew of four that alternated between working hard and slacking off. The two men who had worked for the company the longest were an unlikely pair—a white guy from the country and a Parliament Funkadelic–loving black guy from Orangeburg proper. Their personalities showed in how and what they smoked. Country smoked Marlboro Reds, and Funk always had a Kool drooping leisurely from the corner of his mouth. They were yin and yang, black and white, but they were as tight as kith and kin. As part of their shared leadership, they determined how long and how hard our crew worked. Their preferred schedule was to work hard until early afternoon, take a long lunch, and then, ever so slowly, pick back up again. These lunches could last two to three hours depending on the presence or absence of our boss.

By the second week of August, we had installed cable in more than five dormitories. Summer was dragging on as it does in South Carolina, but I didn’t care. I was a week away from taking off and going back to college. Our boss was away quite a bit that week, and we were finishing up work in Sojourner Truth Hall, within sight of Whittaker Library. We had worked all morning long, drilling holes and running cable. Tedious stuff. Lunchtime break was called, and Funk and Country made a run to the Quick Pantry at the corner of Chestnut and Magnolia. It sold two pieces of chicken and a biscuit for $1.99.

When they returned, loaded down with boxes of fried chicken, Country told us that he’d found a way to the roof. So we followed him up the stairs to the top. He pressed hard against a fire door, and all of a sudden, nothing but sky. The last time I’d had such a view of Orangeburg was in the seventh grade riding the double Ferris wheel at the county fair. From the rooftop we could see for miles. To the west a storm was coming, but it was far enough away that we didn’t care. We all plopped down on the gravel roof and ate quietly, soaking in the view. Streaks of white lightning danced over fields in the distance. Clouds shook and shifted. Green trees bumped and swayed. The roof of the tallest building in town was probably not the safest place to be, but with the low rumble of thunder and the first drops of rain, it was an awesome spectacle. The storm rolled in, an ominous and lurching monster with a whip of thunder.

For the most part, the FBI’s investigation of February 8 focuses on the shootings, but there’s also evidence of interdepartmental bickering, letters from J. Edgar Hoover to Jack Bass and Jack Nelson criticizing their book, and pages and pages of information with most (if not all) of the names redacted. Some pages are completely blank with all the information missing, a thin black line indicating redaction—the only sign that there was once something typed on the page. Like the contents of the file itself, what is legible and what is not is haunting, the blocked-out names of people (some living, some dead) who are of another time and place.

FBI reports from the immediate aftermath of the shooting are contradictory and set the tone for what I found throughout the file. Some “facts” about the night of February 8 are consistent: there were 100 to 150 students on the front of campus; students built a bonfire; objects were thrown (some students mentioned throwing ineffective Molotov cocktails); firemen tried to put out the bonfire. Officer David Shealy was hit by some object (a piece of wood, a board, or part of a porch railing) around 10:30 P.M., and then there was the shooting proper, which lasted between eight and forty seconds. Victims of the shooting went to the Orangeburg Regional Hospital but also to hospitals in Charleston, Florence, and Summerville. Apart from these “facts,” the stories told by black and white witnesses about what happened the night of February 8 diverge so much that it’s as if they were reporting on two separate events. The students stated clearly that they were not shooting at the officers, and they noted a lag time of up to five minutes between the moment Shealy was hit and the moment when the patrolmen began shooting. From the other side, for example, one South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) agent described a scene of violent chaos claiming that as highway patrolmen escorted firemen in to douse the bonfire, the students rushed toward them as “rocks, sticks, and sniping continued from the crowd.” In other words the patrolmen believed they were in immediate danger, so they fired on an attacking crowd.

Many white law-enforcement officers, National Guardsmen, and firemen report hearing gunfire (or what sounded like gunfire) throughout the night coming from the direction of State and Claflin. But in postshooting interviews of officers from the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Department, several men claimed they heard gunfire coming from the campus precisely at the time the patrolmen fired. (The sound is described as a “Pop! Pop!”) In the same series of interviews, one man wondered if it could have been fireworks that he heard. Orangeburg policemen revealed a similar confusion and reported hearing “the sound of shots from in back of the crowd.” Another said, “I heard some noise which I thought were fireworks.” Security guards at State and Claflin also gave interpretations of what they heard. A security guard from State said he heard “small arms fire or fireworks” but didn’t see students with guns. He witnessed the patrolmen’s volley and noted that their gunfire “appeared to start all at one time and ceased at approximately the same time . . . the shots were fired as if there was a command.” It must have been extremely loud out there with students yelling, several hundred people standing around talking, and a loud pumper on a fire truck working furiously. Indeed one fireman said it was so loud that he couldn’t distinguish any of the noises he heard. Can we trust any of the witnesses’ reports on what they heard?

In a report from August of 1968, several FBI agents who were on the scene gave their own sketch of what happened. According to them, just after the fire truck moved in, Officer Shealy fell, and that’s when the patrolmen fired. One agent said he heard what sounded like “explosions made by relatively small firecrackers or the firing of small caliber arms” coming from the direction of State and Claflin. He claimed that first the fire truck went in, and later he heard a “burst of sounds” and then “a volley that followed” from the highway patrolmen. Another agent said he heard gunfire coming from the direction of Claflin and heard bullets hitting a nearby warehouse. He claimed, “I do not recall hearing any gunshots fired immediately preceding” the patrolmen’s volley. This gunfire, then, was either disorganized or, perhaps, indiscriminate.

Throughout these reports, the students are described as being hostile, shouting obscenities, and throwing objects. As noted above, some students were forthcoming with agents and admitted to throwing objects in the direction of officers and to even trying to make Molotov cocktails. A State security guard reported that, around 9:30 P.M. on February 8, he found a box of soda and beer bottles filled with gasoline and rags, materials needed to make such incendiary devices. Clearly some students were angry and afraid and wanted to protect themselves. After the shooting, a group of students went to a security guard and demanded weapons—but to no avail. What’s more, the head of ROTC at State said that he came back on campus at 11:15 P.M. and noticed a car in front of the ROTC building. He went into the arms room and noticed that a cabinet containing six .22 caliber match rifles (two Remingtons and four Winchesters) had been broken into. By 1:30 A.M. all the weapons had somehow been returned to the room. The ROTC head immediately locked the guns in the trunks of two cars for safekeeping. There were other well-documented outbreaks of violence on the part of the students, and these are included in the FBI report: some students broke shop and car windows on their way back to campus on Tuesday night after the first encounter with the police, and some threw objects at cars on Wednesday night.

A natural question is was all this violence part of an organized attack by students on the white community or simply a handful of young people letting off steam? The FBI reports indicate that they believed the students had malicious intentions, and the agents turned over every stone for evidence that at least some of the students advocated violence. Yet aside from noting that a black power organization, the Black Awareness Coordinate Committee (BACC) consisting of some twenty-odd students, existed at State, they reported little that indicates that the students had bigger plans. The FBI appears to have dug deep in search of such plans. One note in the file pertaining to the period before Cleveland Sellers’s 1970 trial in Orangeburg claims that a “confidential source” reported having observed a woman selling the Black Panther newspaper at State. Included with this note is a brief sketch of the history of SNCC. More than one observer of the demonstrations on Tuesday and Thursday nights claimed to have heard students singing protest songs, a throwback to the early days of the civil rights movement, not a tactic of black power. If the students were foolhardy enough to be itching for a fight with so many armed white men, why did they turn and run when the patrolmen aimed their guns at them? Why were so many of them shot in the back?

If the officers of the law felt they were in immediate danger, why didn’t they use tear gas? Why didn’t they try other crowd-control methods? One fourth of the National Guardsmen present had tear gas (a fact that the highway patrolmen apparently knew at the time), but they claimed they couldn’t use it because of wind conditions. They had observed the flames of the students’ bonfire blowing around. Weather records from that day reveal that the wind was blowing in a northwesterly direction in Columbia (about forty-five miles away), but there are no official records from Orangeburg. Yet a reporter from the Baltimore Afro-American claimed, “The fire became so big it looked like it was going to burn some electric wires,” indicating that the flames were rising upward and not blowing one direction or the other. Could tear gas have been used? If so, the patrolmen on the scene would have known how and when to use it; all had attended at least one of the training sessions concerning control of mobs and riots that were conducted by the FBI for South Carolina highway patrolmen in 1966 (August 9–11 and 16–18 and October 25–27). Around the same time each of South Carolina’s highway patrol districts was given several copies of a short book called Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots, published on behalf of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

The subsequent trial of the nine South Carolina highway patrolmen involved in the shooting was held in Florence, South Carolina, on May 19–27, 1969. The patrolmen were charged under a provision of the United States Constitution that prohibits authorities from imposing summary punishment. The defendants—Henry Morrell Addy, Norwood F. Bellamy, John Williams Brown, Joseph Howard Lanier, Collie Merle Metts, Edward H. Moore, Allen Jerome Russell, Jesse Alfred Spell, and Sidney C. Taylor—were, the charges claim, “acting under color of the laws of the state of South Carolina, [and] did willfully discharge and shoot firearms into a group of persons on the campus of South Carolina State College, which persons were inhabitants of the state of South Carolina, thereby killing, injuring, and intimidating persons in the said group, with the intent of imposing summary punishment upon those persons and did thereby willfully deprive those persons of the right secured and protected by the Constitution of the United States, not to be deprived of life or liberty without due process of the law. In violation of Section 242, Title 18, United States Code.” Charles Quaintance and Robert Hocutt represented the Department of Justice while J. C. Coleman (South Carolina’s assistant attorney general), Frank Taylor and Geddes P. Martin of Columbia, and Julian Wolfe of Orangeburg represented the defendants.

According to the prosecution, on Thursday night, February 8, 1968, there were about 150 students gathered near a bonfire on the front of the State campus and about an equal number of lawmen: sixty-six patrolmen and forty-five National Guard. The guard had fixed bayonets but no ammunition. The patrolmen were armed. At 10:30 P.M. they decided to bring in a fire truck to put out the bonfire. A patrolman (Shealy) was hit (by some sort of wooden object). Students moved back to the campus. “About five minutes passed.” The prosecutor continued, “The students came back toward the front of campus. As they came, they got within about seventy-five or 100 feet of the front of the campus, some members of the Highway Patrol began to fire their weapons. Some fired into the air; some fired carbines; some fired shotguns; some fired revolvers. Eight men, defendants, fired shotguns in the direction of the group. One man, Edward H. Moore, fired his revolver six times into the group. The shooting lasted approximately ten, fifteen seconds.” Three were killed and more than twenty-five were injured. Most victims were shot from behind. Finally—and the prosecution was clear on this—there was no shooting from the campus in the direction of the patrolmen immediately before they fired. In other words there was no immediate danger or provocation for the shooting.

Then J. C. Coleman spoke for the defense. The defense admitted the deaths and injuries were caused by gunfire coming from the patrolmen, but the defense focused on the things happening in Orangeburg throughout that week. They argued that a “state of extreme emergency” in Orangeburg had warranted the calling in of the National Guard as well as many police and sheriff’s deputies—it was “a highly dangerous, explosive, a riotous situation.” Coleman said that “this situation built up, and built up and built up until on Thursday night between 10:30 and 11:00 a line of squads of state highway patrolmen were faced with several hundred persons thundering at them, coming at them, charging, hurling brickbats, hurling pieces of concrete. Our evidence will show that there was shooting at the time from that group; and that there was nothing else that these state highway patrolmen, who did fire these arms, whoever they were, in defense of their own lives and the defense of other persons immediately in the vicinity; and more important than that even, in the defense of the entire population of Orangeburg.” These two opening statements not only reveal the concerns of that historical and cultural moment—the fear of outsiders in small-town America, the South in the midst of a transformation—but they also represent two different worldviews bumping into each other in a southern courtroom.

Warren Koon, a reporter for the Charleston Evening Post, was the first on the witness stand. He noted that the patrolmen fired four or five minutes after Shealy got hit but also claimed that he heard small-arms fire coming from the campus earlier in the evening. Koon says he saw two “fire brands,” objects that burned in the street. (Others have said the students were lighting toilet paper and throwing it.) But the most revealing part of Quaintance’s questioning of this witness has to do with photographs that the prosecution had entered into evidence. The photographs depict patrolmen at the corner of Highway 601 and Russell Street, National Guardsmen standing around, firemen putting out the bonfire, and Koon standing near a patrol car that was preparing to take Officer Shealy to the hospital. Quaintance asked Koon if he felt he was in danger standing out there in the open with the protesting students close by. The witness replied that he did not.

This line of questioning gets to the heart of the issue: were the patrolmen faced with any clear and present danger? Were the highway patrolmen, government officials, firemen, National Guardsmen, and reporters—all hanging out opposite the students—in any danger? Koon, a man who served as a marine in World War II at Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and Guam—who had been shot at and, he said, hit on occasion—did not believe there was gunfire coming from the direction of the college prior to the patrolmen’s shooting. But on cross-examination Koon noted that there was a lot of noise and that he couldn’t be absolutely sure. In all about thirty-six witnesses said they didn’t hear gunfire coming from campus right before the shooting, including several highway patrolmen, two soldiers, and FBI agent Charles DeFord.

Indeed much of the testimony focused on whether or not gunfire was coming from the campus and when it was or was not heard by witnesses...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Epilogue
• Who’s Who
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index