Something Else Occurred on SuperBowl Sunday
While many in the country had their attention diverted to music acts on Superbowl Sunday, another historical anniversary occurred. Every May 4th, some media outlets will mention the anniversary of the Kent State shootings where 4 students were shot by the Ohio National Guard during an antiwar protest. Few report the other shooting that occurred at Jackson State in Mississippi eleven days later in 1970.
And none mention the one in Orangeburg, South Carolina 27 months before the Kent State shootings, on February 8,1968 that’s known as the Orangeburg Massacre. After 58 years, it’s largely forgotten.
Consider the details of each.
Orangeburg’s a rural town with less than 14,000 population but it has two colleges, one a leading historically Black university. Two out of three town residents are Black, so it was very active during the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s with CORE and SNCC and the NAACP involved. But political offices, the police and downtown businesses were controlled by white supremacists. In a 1960 march and sit-in there a thousand students were met with teargas and full pressure fire hoses, with nearly 400 students arrested. One of the arrested was Jim Clyburn who later became the US Representative for the district and is still serving after 34 years.
But by 1968, the town was mostly desegregated except for the bowling alley, hospital and doctor offices. A Vietnam vet with 8 years in the army tried to bowl there and was turned away. That sparked outrage and a sit-in was planned at the alley’s lunch counter on February 5th. A small group was turned away again, so their numbers grew. Police used billy clubs and arrested several in the next two days. Other sporadic skirmishes occurred, some instigated by local residents. Responding to unfounded rumors that outside agitators planned to destroy the city, South Carolina’s governor sent in hundreds of state highway patrolmen and the National Guard. FBI agents also were present.
On February 8th, students started a bonfire in front of one of the colleges. When police tried to douse it, a few students threw debris at them, including a post from a wooden banister that hit one officer. A few minutes later, at least nine patrolmen and one city police officer opened fire on the crowd. In 13 seconds, 28 fleeing students were wounded and 3 were killed. Most were shot in the back while fleeing or in the soles of their feet while lying on the ground.
Sam Hammond was killed by a shot to his back. Delano Middleton had seven bullet wounds: three to his arm and one each to his hip, thigh, and heart. Henry Smith was killed by five shots from both sides. Louise Crawley would suffer a miscarriage after being arrested and beaten while she transported injured students to the hospital. More beatings and insults occurred to several students at the segregated hospital.
A SNCC leader from nearby, Cleveland Sellers, was arrested while seeking treatment. Considered the ‘outside agitator’, he was charged with inciting a riot, arson, assault & battery with intent to kill, property damage, housebreaking, and grand larceny. As the only person convicted, he spent 7 months in jail, though he was only marginally involved. 23 years passed before he was granted a full pardon. Via Wikipedia:
Reporters described it as a gun battle, a riot, and mainly reported misinformation provided by local police and Governor McNair’s office. His spokesman claimed Sellers was "the main man. He's the biggest nigger in the crowd."
Before the month was out, the US DOJ filed a lawsuit that forced the bowling alley and hospital to desegregate. They also filed a criminal charge against 9 police officers for using excessive force at a campus protest, but they claimed they shot in self defense and they were acquitted despite the fact that 36 witnesses stated they heard no gunfire from the protesters before the shooting and no students were found carrying guns. It was the deadliest single incident of the civil rights era in the Carolinas.
Civil Rights leaders and colleges around the nation reacted but subsequent news overrode public interest as MLK Jr was murdered 2 months later and RFK 4 months later.
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Compare that to Kent State 27 months later. Two of the four dead weren’t even protesting the Vietnam War. Allison Krause wasn’t aggressive in any way, having peaceful conversations with the Ohio National Guard the day before they shot her.
While protesting Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia, Kent State protesters burned the ROTC building. As with Orangeburg, mostly unfounded rumors of mass destruction prompted Ohio’s governor to say they were “worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Now I want to say this. They are not going to take over [the] campus. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”
He sent in the Ohio National Guard. After getting students moved around with tear gas, they suddenly dropped to their knees, turned around and began firing at students behind them. Initially the students thought it was pretense with blanks being fired. Without any clear provocation, on May 4, 1970, the Guard had opened fire on the students.
28 of the National Guardsmen fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds on the 300+ unarmed students, killing 4 and wounding 9. Student photographer John Filo was permanently paralyzed. The four dead were 265 to 390 feet away from the troops.
That triggered a nationwide student strike with more than 4 million participating in walkouts and rallies.
A student who later was part of the band Devo, Gerald Casale, said: “All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew.
Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running from them!
I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.”
A wide variety of explanations was provided by multiple Guardsmen that the FBI considered fabricated. A bench trial in 1974 acquitted eight guardsmen charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, though the Judge Frank J. Battisti said "It is vital that state and National Guard officials not regard this decision as authorizing or approving the use of force against demonstrators, whatever the occasion of the issue involved. Such use of force is, and was, deplorable."
And the Presidential Commission criticized both the students and National Guard but concluded: "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."
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Eleven days after Kent State came the murders at Jackson State in Mississippi.
Lynch Street, which bisected the Jackson State College campus, was a regular source of racial division. White drivers shouted racial epithets at students and hit at least one student with a car. Black students and non-students sometimes threw rocks at the drivers.
After another bout of rock-throwing on May 13, 1970, police closed the street. The next night, the rock-throwing started up again. Then a non-student took a dump truck up near Stewart Hall and lit it on fire. After firefighters put out the fire about 75 policemen and National Guard troops Moved in and opened fire on students in front of the girls’ dorm, and also shot out every window on that side of the dorm. They used "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets."
Two young guys died.
Gibbs was married and had an 11 month old child. Two months after his wife was widowed, she learned she was pregnant with his second child and faced the prospect of raising two babies alone.
Green was a month from graduation. His father died when he was very young so he started clerking at a grocery store after school at a very young age, helping his mom support their family. He was a month away from his high school graduation and planned to enroll at UCLA and test his speed in Olympic trials. He wasn’t a protester, he always crossed the campus on his way home from work.
Unlike Kent State, oppressive racism was part of the law enforcement response long before this shooting. And the local media rarely reported anything about Black issues, so the shooting and its precedents didn’t resound across the country like Kent State had.
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These old events bear mention as a direct comparison of the events unfolding around us in recent months and years. Our Supreme Court granted the Department of Homeland Security permission to do random stops of non-white people in pursuit of undocumented immigrants they intend to deport. Legalizing racial profiling (now nicknamed Kavanaugh stops) has even caused our oldest inhabitants of this land - Native American Indians - to be arrested and detained. Black and brown people have been shipped to prisons in other states even if they’re citizens or have legal rights to be here and have broken no laws.
Nearly three dozen have died in DHS custody and reports continually describe some as dirty, crowded places with insufficient food and water, where medical care and necessary medicines are denied, and some with outbreaks of diseases like measles, covid and even tuberculosis. And just as occurred in Orangeburg and Jackson, a lot of the DHS agent and supervisory reports are rife with lies.
And, like Kent State, a significant turning point in recent news coverage and rising public outrage has occurred when the victims of lawless enforcement actions just happened to be white.
ICE agents are masked for reasons that make no sense. Anonymity only frees them from being held accountable. Hey, it worked for the KKK so why not? In 24 years since ICE was created, not a single agent has been killed in the line of duty, none of their family members have been harmed and most ‘wounds’ have come from bruises and cuts gained from struggling arrestees, not from anyone targeting them.
Backtracking to 2020 when covid lockdowns were common and decades of police brutality caused the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, we first saw the use of masked unidentifiable federal agents kidnapping people off the streets of Portland Oregon. Was that a deliberate trial run of how ICE and Border Patrol agents are acting today?
In the 1960s and 1970s, law enforcement often made claims that a sniper or snipers provoked a violent police response, though almost all were never substantiated. Today, the common excuse is that civilians tried to hit them with their vehicles, which - thanks to cell phone cameras - have usually been disproven. Lies and rumors are an essential part of institutional or any racism whatsoever.
During those thousands of BLM events, 94% were completely peaceful with no arson, assaults, or vandalism, but a few notable exceptions were magnified to spread fear and incite more racism. And to the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ many white people responded with ‘All Lives Matter’. Was that out of insecurity like we hear now from White Supremacists concerned about White Replacement Theory? Or was it just the refusal of racists to believe Black lives should matter at all?
At the federal level, we see clear efforts to cover up US history at monuments and museums when the subject is slavery, segregation, genocide, massacres caused by whites or displacement efforts like moving Native Americans to reservations and the treatment of Japanese Americans during WW2.
It often seems we’ve reversed every human rights advance of the past 75 years. And unless we openly discuss these past events and do a better job of educating people about the real history and the perils of repetition, it’s a pretty safe bet that the worst is yet to come.
Lately, I’m hearing a lot more from Second Amendment advocates after the murder of Pretti in Minneapolis. I’ve seen some showing up at an anti-ICE rally fully armed with rifles, handguns, military vests, microphones. And identity masks. They claimed they weren’t there to intimidate or threaten the crowd of protesters.
I’m pretty skeptical. And I’m tempted to say “ALL amendments matter” so why aren’t you showing up to protest the deliberate targeting of reporters, peaceful assemblers, free speech users protesting ICE brutalities, the right to be secure in our homes, the right to speedy trials and due process, access to phones and lawyers, equal rights for all including women, etc.?
We do have the right to refuse searches and the right to remain silent. And no level of government has any right to tell us to STFU, other than a judge in a courtroom.
I choose not to be silenced. I choose to fight against federal agents targeting journalists and legal observers. I choose to practice good citizenry. And if I’ve neglected any important rights or choices, feel free to describe them to me. Important civic discussions can’t be done alone.