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reprint or license thisORANGEBURG MASSACRE
McNair takes responsibility for tragedy in book
By CAROLYN CLICK
cclick@thestate.com
In a new biography, former Gov. Robert E. McNair takes responsibility for the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre.
Three black students were killed and 27 wounded at South Carolina State College on Feb. 8, 1968 following days of escalating tensions between students and police.
“The fact that I was governor at the time placed the mantle of responsibility squarely on my shoulders, and I have borne that responsibility with all the heaviness it entails for all those years,” McNair told Philip G. Grose, author of “South Carolina at the Brink: Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights” (USC Press, $39.95).
It is McNair’s strongest statement to date on a subject he has been reticent to speak about publicly.
The author and the former governor, now 83, will be recognized at a book-signing reception tonight.
Cleveland Sellers, the only person convicted of rioting in connection with the Orangeburg demonstrations, says the book is “brilliant” in chronicling the turmoil of the times. But, for him, its publication does not end what he considers a “conspiracy of secrecy and silence” about Orangeburg.
That chapter is sure to intrigue and enlighten readers. But the meticulously researched book goes well beyond that tragic week, vividly capturing the reach of one man in the evolution of a Southern state.
Historians believe the courtly Berkeley County native got many things right during six years as governor, 1965-71, as he guided the state away from an agrarian past and a discredited system of racial segregation.
Grose paints a portrait of a man under enormous pressure to improve the state’s economy and education, even as he dealt with public school desegregation, protests and the clamorous discord that accompanied social change.
“Bob McNair isn’t often given the credit he’s due,” said Walter Edgar, a USC history professor and director of USC’s Institute for Southern Studies. “I think McNair’s decision to lead South Carolina down the path of law and order instead of massive resistance, like most of the lower South states went, was really a gutsy one and is often underappreciated by South Carolinians and historians in general.”
CHARTING A DIFFERENT PATH
McNair, who grew up amid rural segregation in a place known as “Hell Hole Swamp,” understood that South Carolina had to chart a different path.
McNair welcomed newly enfranchised blacks into the Democratic Party and developed alliances with black leaders, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Matthew Perry and I. DeQuincey Newman.
Two years into his term, McNair already had moderated one crisis at S.C. State in 1967, ending a student boycott and easing out a president who was tone-deaf to the civil rights movement.
McNair “was a pivotal figure, and so much of what he did was positive in terms of race,” said William C. Hine, a S.C. State political science professor. “That was the trouble. It was sort of like history went backwards. He got it right in 1967 and then got it wrong in 1968.”
For historians like Hine, McNair’s statement acknowledging responsibility for the Orangeburg tragedy is stunning.
But Sellers believes questions remain unanswered, including why so much deadly force was aimed at unarmed students.
“I kept thinking in another day, another six months, another year, there would be some signs of contrition, some signs of apology, some signs of ‘let’s get this behind us’ by actually finding out and putting on the table what really transpired,” Sellers, who was pardoned in 1993 and now is director of USC’s African-American studies program, said Friday.
McNair told Grose the events at Orangeburg “confirmed how essential it is to develop and maintain open and responsive lines of communication.”
Grose believes that lesson helped McNair deal with striking hospital workers in Charleston a year later and with rising protests over statewide school integration and busing in 1970. It was no coincidence that McNair acted swiftly and decisively when angry parents overturned buses in Lamar and racial violence erupted at two Columbia high schools.
“You talk to people born after 1970 ... they really don’t have an understanding of what we were changing,” McNair said in an interview with The State last year. “We were changing a people’s way of life. It was a very difficult, a very delicate period.”
THE ACCIDENTAL GOVERNOR
McNair came to power as an “accidental governor,” his ascension triggered by the death of U.S. Sen. Olin Johnson on April 18, 1965. When Gov. Donald Russell decided he would go to Washington, McNair, his lieutenant governor, was sworn in for a partial term. He set out to create what he called a “we” administration and in 1966 won election in his own right as a centrist Democrat.
McNair was not alone in burying the old political order. Fritz Hollings, the former governor and U.S. senator, already had cleared the way for the peaceful integration of Clemson and USC. The late Gov. John West, who succeeded McNair, would expand opportunities for African-Americans.
But Grose, a former journalist at The State who went to work as a speech writer for McNair, suggests McNair was at the heart of the transformation.
“The South Carolina that headed into the last three decades of the 20th century was one that had gone to war with its past and had not only survived but faced its future with a new sense of purpose and direction,” Grose wrote.
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