Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 (review)

The February 8, 1968, killing of three black men (one 20 years old and the other two teenagers) and the wounding of dozens of others by South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) personnel on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg is one of the forgotten tragedies of both the civil rights movement and the student protests of the late 1960s. Part of the reason may be timing. The Orangeburg Massacre followed on the heels of larger and bloodier incidents in Watts, Detroit, and Newark and occurred near the first days of the Tet Offensive. Moreover, it came only months before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

But most significantly, like the May 1970 Jackson State College in Mississippi shooting two years later, the Massacre involved solely black victims. As with Orangeburg, Jackson State is hardly mentioned in history classes, notwithstanding the deaths that occurred there only ten days after the shooting of white protesters at Kent State College in Ohio. Indeed, it is both ironic and telling that the most famous murders from the civil rights era, not excepting the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham or the death of Emmett Till, were of two white (and one black) movement workers depicted in the commercially successful (if historically inaccurate) Mississippi Burning. Whether by neglect or intent, the Orangeburg Massacre somehow fell into a crevice of history, locally commemorated, but virtually unmentioned in histories of that extraordinarily tumultuous year.

The documentary film Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968 seeks to restore the Orangeburg Massacre to its rightful place in the history of the 1960s and, equally, to bring to light, if not to justice, the patently inappropriate way in which law enforcement shot multiple volleys for eight seconds at an unarmed and apparently unhostile crowd. The film relies heavily on news coverage from the period, on recent on-camera interviews with principal and tangential participants, and on the reenactments of events. Jack Bass and the late Jack Nelson are newspaper reporters who covered the incident and who have long since attained national followings for their journalism and historical writing. They cowrote a 1970 history of the Orangeburg Massacre and are featured extensively in the film. Likewise, Robert McNair, then the Governor of South Carolina, sat for multiple interviews with the film's producers prior to his 2007 death. Dr. William C. Hine, a historian at South Carolina State, assisted in the project, appears several times in the film, and maintains an extensive oral history of the era. Jack Bass also conducted a series of oral history interviews in 2001 which are referenced at the "official" Massacre Web site maintained by South Carolina State University.

The film tells a fairly complete story of Orangeburg in the 1960s and presents Governor McNair as having firmly planted a flag on the side of racial moderation. Orangeburg, we are told, was a typical Jim Crow town, different perhaps in that it had a black majority (and a middle-class one at that), but beyond that, one in which whites held all the power. Because the shooting happened after several days of increasingly public protests over the refusal of the town's sole bowling alley owner to permit blacks' use of his "privately owned facility," the press was there, and much of the film uses contemporary news reports to depict the growing tensions. Thus, we see television reports showing damage from earlier protests as well as the deployment of the South Carolina National Guard and its armored personnel carriers at the campus gates.

The documentarians illustrate the lengths to which white Orangeburg residents (then and now) considered themselves quite accommodating to the local black community and its historically black colleges (Claflin College [now University] is adjacent to South Carolina State). Local whites considered "outsiders" the problem. By the time the film reaches the events of February 8, a little less than halfway through its fifty...