My father also recognized that the powers that be, particularly Governor Robert McNair and the FBI, were developing a narrative. They began to publicly say that “black power advocates” were responsible for riling up the students, that it wasn’t just the white police officers and politicians. “There were not a lot of people who were standing up saying the police had done anything wrong,” he tells me. “Rather, it was ‘the police are our friends.’ You even had black folk who were beginning to say that and beginning to take on a kind of anti–black power tone. They’d say, ‘We don’t want that,’ and ‘we want our students to learn,’ and ‘we don’t want anyone out there protesting.’”
This is human nature. Few people will stand up for justice. Even today, too many well-meaning people of all races, genders, and ages are at a loss for how to fight back. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Once Governor McNair started publicly saying that “outside black agitators” were stirring up the students, my father knew things were going to get very bad for him. “I was the only black advocate around campus at the time, and I had enough experience to know when something and someone is being set up,” he says, reminding me that he had been in Selma, Alabama; had attended the 1963 March on Washington; and had spent a year in Mississippi from 1964 to 1965 where the activists Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. His job had been to go out and search for the three in the middle of the night.
He knew from those days that he had to decide who he could trust. In Mississippi, the mostly black farmers had served as the eyes and ears of civil rights workers. “The farmers would go out during the day, calling themselves hunters, but they would come back and tell us where an old barn was located, and where wells were, or ravines were where hostages could be held, bodies could be put,” Daddy tells me. “We’ve seen some tough times. There were times when fear should have been the greatest, but what always stuck out in my mind was, how do we eliminate the situation? How do we get out of it with as many lives saved as possible?”
As the South Carolina governor and police continued with the rhetoric of blaming the “black power advocates” in Orangeburg, my dad knew the trap had been set. “I was almost certain that I wasn’t going to be able to get out of it,” he says, “but I was going to do my best to keep myself and the students from getting killed.”
After three days of all-night meetings in Orangeburg, he needed sleep. When a student offered his dorm room, my father accepted. Shortly after dozing off, he heard a knock at the door. A student told him he heard gunfire and thought my father should know. A veteran activist, he was worried because one thing he knew was that demonstrations should never happen at night.
At this time in the story, my father points to the open hill where a group of male students once stood. “It was dark, but no gunfire, nothing. As I got closer, I could see men in white helmets down the hill. I could see they had weapons, rifles and shotguns. I looked across the street, and there at Lowman Hall I saw a group of male students.”
They were standing in a circle trying to figure out what to do next, and seventy heavily armed law enforcement officers were watching them. The students were agitated, upset about what had happened to the female co-eds the day before. And then, my dad noticed Henry Smith, one of the men who was killed that night. “I wanted to tell him that police were right down the hill, and they were armed. It was night and you could hardly see. I wanted to tell Henry that we needed to move this group to the interior of the campus. That’s what I wanted to tell him, but I never did. I did get to him. I might have said ‘Henry.’ That’s when the darkness turned to light, when the police started shooting.”
* * *
The Orangeburg Massacre was the first deadly shootout to happen on a college campus involving police. It occurred two years before the well-known shooting at Kent State University, during which four white students were killed, and two months before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But the tragedy barely permeated the nation’s consciousness. What began as a racially inspired shooting swiftly turned into a multifarious cover-up by senior officials of the state of South Carolina. At first, the cover-up worked, but then it didn’t.
On the night of the shootings, police described the massacre to reporters as a two-way shootout between black students and highway patrol officers. Police claimed they were defending themselves, though there would never be any evidence to prove that even one student on the campus possessed a weapon that evening. To validate their story, the officers sought to pin the calamity on one man: my father.
My father still believes the patrol officers were coming up the hill that night to find him. We later learned during the trials that they knew for certain he was within the crowd. People after the shooting in Orangeburg began to say they confused Henry Smith, one of the three young men killed, for my dad. And it wasn’t just their afros; my father and Henry Smith looked so similar that five decades later my father looks like an older version of him.
“I think the police could see me going across the street under the lamp post because I had a large afro, and you could see my silhouette on the bottom of the hill where the police were. I think they knew this was the time to pull the plug on the trap.”
After the shooting, wounded students fled to the college infirmary or carried others there. It was pure mayhem: the room was packed with wounded students, scared and lying bleeding on the floor. There was only one nurse and there were no ambulances, though the campus was filled with all types of law enforcement officers, who quickly became aware of what had just happened. Teachers, coaches, and other students transported the wounded and dying from the infirmary to the all-black unit of the hospital, but my father refused to go with them, believing that if the police found him there, he’d surely be killed. But the nurse told him that if he didn’t get his wounded arm tended to, he’d be dead anyway.
At the hospital, my father noticed a black security guard he had seen on campus. They locked eyes. Minutes later, the sheriff was charging toward my father, asking whether he was Cleveland Sellers. My father was arrested at the hospital as he waited to get his wounds looked at.
There is a famous black-and-white photograph of my father taken at about this time in his story, shortly after he had entered the all-black unit of the hospital. He is tall, slim, and handsome. His afro, skinny jeans, and Converse shoes give him a hip modern-day look. Interestingly enough, he looks more like a taller Childish Gambino, the rapper and actor, than a Martin Luther King Jr.
Dad is smiling in the picture, which belies the horror he found himself in. His stature and picture of unruffled cool makes him appear as if he were merely superimposed into a vintage photograph, totally detached from the wild-eyed white patrolmen surrounding him. The truth is, he was somewhere in between “unruffled” and “horror.” The photograph is real, even though he had to pretend to himself, just for a moment, that none of that was happening to him.
“I know what happens to you when you get caught like Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney got caught by the sheriff’s deputies and eventually ended up dead,” he says. “So, I called out to the many students who were in the hospital: ‘I am with the sheriff. If anything happens to me, I want you all to remember I am with the sheriff.’ Then I said it again: ‘I’m with the sheriff.’”
But instead of taking my father on a long deadly drive, the officers took him to court where he was charged with arson, inciting a riot, battery with intent to kill, property damage, breaking and entering, and grand larceny. The charges—indeed, the entire situation—were so absurd, my father explains, all he could do was laugh when he was taken out of the courtroom before a gaggle of reporters and photographers. That’s when the photograph was taken. “The lies. It was like a fantasy,” he says now. “I smiled because what else could I do? I sure wasn’t going to cry.”
When the Torch Has Been Passed
In 20
14, Julian Bond, one of my legendary “uncles,” requested to interview me for the Explorations in Black Leadership video collection. He asked me to reflect on the legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. I was a young state representative and tried my best to answer in the most straightforward way I knew how.
At the time, Uncle Julian was professor of history at the University of Virginia. Many influential people had been interviewed, from the New York politician Charles Rangel to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The interview would be the last time I talked to Uncle Julian, because he died in 2015 of an aneurism. His death hit my father hard. They were contemporaries and true friends for fifty years.
During that interview Julian and I discussed how hard it is to believe that one of the most vicious incidents in the civil rights era happens to be one of the least known. “Everyone knows about Kent State,” I said, “and I truly believe that if the lessons had been learned from Orangeburg, then we could have saved a number of lives at Kent State.”
Julian wanted to know my feelings about the student protesters at South Carolina State who disagreed with my father and, come hell or high water, wanted to shut down any semblance of segregation, even at a bowling alley. “I think of that gumption or that courage, that audacity, for them to believe they could break down the last barrier of segregation in South Carolina,” I said, “it just showed the strength of that generation, that young generation.”
The protesters in Orangeburg, I believe, did not protest in vain. Governor McNair’s 2007 obituary in the New York Times says that his insistence that “black power” influences had fueled the unrest severely hurt his standing in the black community and foiled any chances he had to join Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
That day with Julian, I discussed my thoughts about how the deaths of the three young men during the Orangeburg Massacre created a chip on my shoulder—one I carried as I went about my legislative duties. As a political servant, I explained, I try to do things that I feel will help continue their mission, even though the goals might have changed.
Although my father’s generation, the Emmett Till generation, speaks through us and lives among us, I believe we still have to carry their torch. There are so many parallels. Just as my father lived for Emmett Till, my task is to live for the people who have died at the hands of the law in my generation—Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, and so many more. I see them all as martyrs. Their alleged crimes were not death penalty crimes, but still they died. Similar to Emmett Till, these victims were not given the benefit of their humanity; instead, they were treated as something less than human.
It all became crystal clear to me when I heard and saw what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. After his death, we now know that the words “hands up and don’t shoot” don’t protect anyone. Although there really was a tussle, that doesn’t matter. Brown did not have a gun, and he should not have been killed. The image of Brown lying dead under a sheet for hours upon hours in the sweltering sun, while in the distance you can hear the aching bellows of his mother, made me realize that in Ferguson, they didn’t care about Michael Brown, they didn’t care that he was a human being, and they certainly didn’t care that he was a black man.
Born to Do This
I can recall with great clarity the day my father’s story was burnished in my psyche. I was in third grade and got called to the principal’s office. My father was picking me up to attend the twenty-fourth annual memorial service of the Orangeburg Massacre. There’s a picture of him at the service with his hands wrapped around me. The president of South Carolina State University is standing right beside us. I’m wearing my school uniform and a blue jacket. My father is wearing a long coat. I recall his grip. That’s when it dawned on me that the moment was larger than myself.
Every year I returned to another anniversary ceremony at South Carolina State University to hear the memories of those wounded students. When I was a child, I was always ready to go wherever my dad went. “Bakari loved riding with me,” he often recalls. “So, when I was ready to go, he’d get his coat.”
My mother says that besides looking exactly alike, my father and I share a similar temperament. She says, “They are sensitive, not soft. They are both easy to cry to this day.” She respects how deeply I feel about the Orangeburg Massacre but wonders whether it has taken too much out of me.
I think this is a fair assessment. Like I’ve said many times, I’m angrier about what happened back then than my own father is today.
Why did my father pick me to teach these lessons to? I believe he saw something in me. I could be a serious child, and he recognized I was responsive to what he was showing me. Deep down, was he preparing me to pass the torch to? I think he’d agree that he was.
During the many memorials we have attended together, I talked to the family members of people killed and to those wounded back in 1968. I heard their stories and learned to recognize when they were revealing emotional scars. My father to this day tells people, “When Bakari was a little boy, he’d ask everyone a hundred questions.”
I realize now my father was doing more than just allowing me to see history up close. He was helping me to learn the importance of empathy as a balm against suffering.
I learned that Delano Middleton, the youngest of the three young men killed that day, was a high school student whose mother worked as a maid at the college. He asked her from his hospital bed to read Psalm 23 to him. Then, after repeating it himself, he died. I also heard from people who still live with the bullets inside of them, and those who still live with nightmares.
Some might say the things I heard were too horrid for a child to know, but my father thought it was important, just like he thought it was important for me to join him during his visits with prison inmates and conversations with gang members.
In retrospect, maybe I asked “a hundred questions” of the survivors of the massacre because I needed to understand their scars to better understand ours. The injustices that occurred that night left mothers without their sons. It left the pages of my beloved state’s history stained in blood, and it left my sister to be born when her father was in prison. My sister’s middle name is Abidemi, which means “born while father is away.” I believe it’s one of my father’s biggest regrets that she met him for the first time in a room in the Columbia Correctional Institute.
From the time my father was arrested until he was pardoned in 1990, he was like a leper, and we were like refugees. My father’s loving parents worried about him, warning him not to return to South Carolina, which is why me and my siblings were born in North Carolina rather than in Denmark, where he was born and where I was later raised. Before the pardon, my father struggled with getting jobs and endured visits from the FBI at the jobs he was able to get.
Despite that pardon and the fact that books have been written clearing my father’s name, some people in South Carolina still put the blood and tragedy on his shoulders.
There is another thing that still haunts us: the eerie resemblance between Henry Smith, who died on February 8, and my father, and the widely believed theory that police may have murdered the wrong man. By no means were we the only ones who struggled after the tragedy. Indeed, it took my father many years to convince some of the wounded students to tell their stories. Some are still suffering from emotional stress. They will never return to Orangeburg or the campus. They can’t even look toward the direction of the campus when they drive on I-26.
My father’s wounds have never healed completely—the lingering blame, the memory of bloodshed, the fact that still so few people know about the massacre. And there’s never been any reconciliation with any of the victims’ families. While still a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, I unsuccessfully called for a state-convened blue-ribbon panel in 2009 to launch a formal investigation. The fact that the government still refuses to further investigate the tragedy angers many African America
ns, especially my father, but for others it’s a relief.
There are folks in South Carolina who believe the students were merely unmatched. That would suggest there was a battle, but there’s no battle in a slaughter. The students were unarmed, shot in the back. In South Carolina, people say you “slaughter” a chicken or pig, but they never say you do battle with them. Several investigative journalists dubbed the tragedy a “massacre,” but in Orangeburg, especially among white people, what to call this event has always been controversial.
A year after the tragedy, nine patrolmen were put on trial, but a jury took only two hours to clear their names. Two and a half years after the massacre, my father was convicted of a riot that was never part of the original investigation. In 1973, he spent seven months in prison. However, important information was unearthed during the trials. On the day of the massacre, 450 members of the National Guard and 127 patrolmen were in town, many of them on the college campus. What my father suspected was also true: federal agents and the police knew of him, they knew of his affiliation with the SNCC and his friendship and work with Stokely Carmichael. They also wanted to believe my father was the cause of everything that happened in Orangeburg, but they could show no evidence to prove that.
Today, some white folks near and around Orangeburg agree that something horrible happened—but it happened long ago. They say that continuing to bring it up all the time is just stirring up a hornet’s nest. They often point out that the students weren’t angels. Because of original misinformation, some people to this day still believe that a black student shot first in the direction of law enforcement officers that night, even though there’s never been any evidence that that ever happened.
My Vanishing Country Page 3