Jack Bass: Still need truth, reconciliation, 40 years after Orangeburg
[Dr. Bass is professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. For more information, go to www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com.]
Truth and reconciliation combine to provide the theme of this week’s 40th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre. The tragedy of Feb. 8, 1968, left three young men dying and more than two dozen wounded by police gunfire on the third night of turmoil that began when black students attempted to bowl at Orangeburg’s still-segregated only bowling alley.
The reconciliation part of the theme will take center stage Friday at the annual memorial service at South Carolina State University. Cleveland L. Sellers, who has emerged from being the scapegoat into an honored hero of the civil rights movement, will be the main speaker. But also on the program for the first time is a white official of the city of Orangeburg, Mayor Paul L. Miller.
Sellers, convicted in 1970 of riot on the flimsiest of evidence, received a pardon 23 years later by the state Probation, Parole and Pardon Board. At the trial, the presiding judge threw out other charges — “incitement” and “conspiracy” to riot — on grounds that the only evidence presented against the defendant was that he got shot “and that to my mind means very little.”
Sellers served seven months in prison, missing the birth of his first child, now a physician. His pardon in 1993 allowed him to become a valued member of the USC faculty and director of its highly rated African-American Studies program.
Sellers, as third-ranking national officer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had returned to his native South Carolina after four years on the front lines of civil rights conflict in the Deep South. In Orangeburg, however, his attention had turned to a new idea — developing consciousness and student awareness of black history and culture — a subject then unrecognized as worthy of serious academic study. He went on to earn a master’s degree in education from Harvard and a doctorate in education administration from the University of North Carolina.
In December, at a special ceremony at Brookland Baptist Church in West Columbia, he formally received the Eagle Scout award he had earned at 16 in his hometown of Denmark. After his request last spring, the Boy Scouts of America searched for and found paperwork misplaced more than four decades earlier.
The chief Boy Scout official for central South Carolina, in making the presentation, said Sellers had spent his full life living the values of the Boy Scouts....
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Truth and reconciliation combine to provide the theme of this week’s 40th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre. The tragedy of Feb. 8, 1968, left three young men dying and more than two dozen wounded by police gunfire on the third night of turmoil that began when black students attempted to bowl at Orangeburg’s still-segregated only bowling alley.
The reconciliation part of the theme will take center stage Friday at the annual memorial service at South Carolina State University. Cleveland L. Sellers, who has emerged from being the scapegoat into an honored hero of the civil rights movement, will be the main speaker. But also on the program for the first time is a white official of the city of Orangeburg, Mayor Paul L. Miller.
Sellers, convicted in 1970 of riot on the flimsiest of evidence, received a pardon 23 years later by the state Probation, Parole and Pardon Board. At the trial, the presiding judge threw out other charges — “incitement” and “conspiracy” to riot — on grounds that the only evidence presented against the defendant was that he got shot “and that to my mind means very little.”
Sellers served seven months in prison, missing the birth of his first child, now a physician. His pardon in 1993 allowed him to become a valued member of the USC faculty and director of its highly rated African-American Studies program.
Sellers, as third-ranking national officer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had returned to his native South Carolina after four years on the front lines of civil rights conflict in the Deep South. In Orangeburg, however, his attention had turned to a new idea — developing consciousness and student awareness of black history and culture — a subject then unrecognized as worthy of serious academic study. He went on to earn a master’s degree in education from Harvard and a doctorate in education administration from the University of North Carolina.
In December, at a special ceremony at Brookland Baptist Church in West Columbia, he formally received the Eagle Scout award he had earned at 16 in his hometown of Denmark. After his request last spring, the Boy Scouts of America searched for and found paperwork misplaced more than four decades earlier.
The chief Boy Scout official for central South Carolina, in making the presentation, said Sellers had spent his full life living the values of the Boy Scouts....