COLUMBIA - Seeking truth to heal racial wounds `Orangeburg Massacre' apology sparks effort to bring closure to tragedy

Henry Eichel

COLUMBIA -- For 35 years, it has been South Carolina's official family secret, judged too painful and, perhaps for some, too shameful to examine.

The state has never investigated the chain of events on the night of Feb. 8, 1968, when the S.C. Highway Patrol, then all-white, opened fire with shotguns into a crowd of students at all-black S.C. State College in Orangeburg, killing three and wounding 27.

But now, for the first time, a governor of South Carolina has issued an official apology. That has inspired a group of black lawmakers to introduce a bill calling for a fact-finding committee to spend up to a year sifting through who did what, and then issue a public report.

"In order to ever create peace with this situation, we need to get to the facts," said Sen. Darryl Jackson, D-Richland, the bill's author.

Gov. Mark Sanford's apology and Jackson's bill come at a time when throughout the Deep South, the books are being reopened on ugly racial incidents from the 1960s, the decade when the elaborate structure of segregation and white supremacy finally crumbled.

There have been convictions of old murderers in civil rights cases, the latest coming last month in Mississippi. The University of Mississippi last year observed the 40th anniversary of the white mob violence that met James Meredith's entry by honoring the federal marshals and soldiers who restored order.

Last week in Charleston, historians from around the nation gathered at The Citadel for a scholarly conference on the civil rights movement in South Carolina.

But within the state, what has come to be called "The Orangeburg Massacre'' has received scant mention. It gets only a paragraph in history books used in middle schools, although it was South Carolina's most violent episode of the civil rights era.

The S.C. Educational Radio Network in 1993 declined to broadcast an award-winning radio play dramatizing the shootings that was being broadcast nationwide. The play, by S.C. native Frank Beacham, based on a book by fellow South Carolinian Jack Bass, painted an unflattering portrait of how top state officials, including then-Gov. Robert McNair, handled what had begun as a protest against a whites-only bowling alley.

No. S.C. official who was in a position of authority at the time has ever accepted any responsibility for the deaths or said that the tragedy was the state's fault.

Rather, state officials maintained that students whipped up by Cleveland Sellers, then a 23-year-old field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, fired on the troopers and then charged toward them. Sellers was arrested and convicted of inciting a riot. He spent seven months in state prison.

But many people, black and white, never bought the official version. William Leeke, South Carolina's prison director at the time, called Sellers "a political prisoner."

An FBI investigation led to federal civil rights charges against nine state troopers identified as the shooters. Although all nine were acquitted -- jurors found insufficient evidence that they fired out of anger rather than out of fear -- testimony at the trial raised serious questions about state officials' conduct.

The federal investigation showed that the students had no firearms, and that most were shot in the back or side. The state troopers' shotguns were loaded not with the lightweight birdshot commonly used in that era for riot control, but with deadly buckshot. No senior officer was given the responsibility of authorizing troopers to fire.

When a trooper fired two warning shots to halt a group of about of 100 students moving in the officers' direction, other troopers thought they were being fired on. The result was a 10-second fusillade.

"It was a reaction thing to the danger that the officers felt they had gotten themselves into," trooper J.L. "Red" Lanier said in a 1993 S.C. Educational Television documentary. Lanier, one of the nine shooters, later became chief of the Highway Patrol.

"I'm sorry that it ever happened," said Lanier. "I wish I had never been involved in it."

The apology

That was as much an apology as anyone ever issued until 2001, when then-Gov. Jim Hodges came to the S.C. State campus for the school's annual remembrance of the shootings. No previous governor had attended the event. "We deeply regret what happened here on the night of Feb. 8, 1968," said Hodges.This year, newly inaugurated Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who was 7 years old when the violence occurred, took Democrat Hodges' statement one step further. "I think it's appropriate to tell the African American community in South Carolina that we don't just regret what happened in Orangeburg 35 years ago -- we apologize for it."

Sen. Jackson called Sanford's statement "very courageous." He said, "It is what has led me to say that we owe it to these people who were there to find out all the facts."

He said he isn't interested in trying to bring charges against anyone, but rather in clearing the names of Sellers and the protesters. "The wound can never heal until we come to the truth about what happened," he said.

Sellers received a state pardon in 1993 and is now a professor of African American history at the University of South Carolina. He said a fact-finding committee could be "part of the process of bringing some sort of closure to this whole matter."

The deaths were due to blunders by state officials, Sellers said. "Even more damning is the fact that after this series of errors, there was an effort made by the people who were supposed to be in charge, to make the victim the culprit."

Former Gov. McNair, who said after the incident that officers had been fired on and that students were provoked by outside agitators, refused at the time to appoint a state fact-finding commission and has steadfastly refused to discuss the matter. He didn't respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.

Plan faces long odds

Early indications are that chances for establishing a commission could be slim. Although Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, said last week he is open to considering the idea, House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, said it would be bad for the state.

While the shootings represent "a sad chapter in our history," Wilkins said, "We're best served by not reliving the past; we ought to look forward and not go back and relive a difficult time."

Former Gov. John West, who succeeded McNair in 1971, said that if he were in Sanford's place today, he would not have issued an apology. "I think that it's a chapter that has passed, and revisiting it cannot help," West said.

College of Charleston political science professor Bill Moore said it's those kinds of statements that convince him Jackson's bill won't pass. "That response is no different from responses going back to McNair," he said.

Those attitudes have been linked to the state's image nationally, said Lacy Ford, a professor of Southern history at the University of South Carolina.

In the 1960s, Ford said, South Carolina worked hard to portray itself nationally as a state that, while not embracing civil rights, nevertheless accepted them with dignity and without the violence of a Mississippi or an Alabama.

"Orangeburg was the signal failure of that effort," he said.