Word: orangeburg
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...successfully as South Carolina. In contrast with Alabama and Mississippi, the old Palmetto State weathered changes with relatively little trauma. Thus, it came as a shock in February 1968 when police fired into a mob of Negro college students during a racial disturbance, killing three and wounding 27. The "Orangeburg Massacre" joined Selma and Neshoba County in the litany of racial violence...
That South Carolina was on trial, as well as the nine defendants, was made plain by Defense Counsel Frank Taylor, who told the jury: "Your duty is to back up these men." Referring to a SNCC organizer who had been in Orangeburg during the incident, Taylor told the jury to "show our disapproval of militants coming into South Carolina and inciting students." After less than an hour and a half, the jury decided that the highway patrolmen had only done what was expected of them, and found all nine innocent...
...They felt it would only cause more trouble. The police finally agreed not to enter the campus when Owens said Knoxville College would pay for any damages done to the cab. In April's Southern Patriot, Mike Friedman, an instructor at the college, said this possibly prevented "a bloodier Orangeburg...
Whatever decision those college administrators reach, the consequences of student-police confrontations will get worse before they get better. With tensions mounting on both sides, the danger of "overkill"--as Newsweek termed the Orangeburg police's reaction--becomes more and more a possibility...
Clearly the only way to avoid innumerable recurrences of the Orangeburg tragedy is for Negro college administrators to realize the support they owe to their students' political actions. The black college can be an effective force in bringing the political change and social justice so desperately needed in their neighboring communities. These colleges are producing the people that are going to make that change happen. It would be tragic if those changes occur despite the role of the black college, rather than because...