Paul associate Dan Klores on historical obscurity
kapeman
By TIM ARANGO
Published: April 16, 2008
Two years before the deadly Kent State shootings, state troopers
opened fire on a student protest on the campus of South Carolina State
College. Three people died, and 28 were wounded.
Cleveland Sellers, in a mug shot, served prison time for his role in
the event, but was later pardoned.
Delano Middleton, above, later died at a hospital.
Dan Klores, above, directed “Black Magic,” a television film touching
on a 1968 shooting at South Carolina State College in which three
blacks were killed by state troopers.
The incident, which became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” never
pierced the nation’s collective memory of the 1960s, and academics and
survivors say that one reason was shoddy, racially biased press
coverage: those killed were black.
But new media coverage may give the shootings their historical due,
and some scholars and survivors hope it might also nudge South
Carolina legislators to open a state investigation of the 40-year-old
tragedy, which never received such scrutiny.
Dan Klores, a New York filmmaker and former public relations
executive, has been thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the
historical memory for decades, since he was a student at the time at
the nearby University of South Carolina in Columbia. He said he hoped
his latest film, “Black Magic,” about basketball players at
historically black colleges, will open people’s eyes to Orangeburg.
(The film made its debut on ESPN on March 16.)
Mr. Klores said that Orangeburg was only obliquely related to the
topic of “Black Magic,” but that he was looking for any reason to
delve into the incident. During his research for the film he
discovered that one of the Orangeburg fatalities was a star high
school basketball player who was on campus because his mother worked
at the college as a maid.
“That gave me the excuse,” Mr. Klores said. “That’s all it was. It’s a
bit of a stretch, but I said, ‘That’s fine, it’s my film.’ ”
Another film, a documentary produced by two Boston moviemakers, Bestor
Cram and Judy Richardson, was in the research phase for nearly 10
years before the pair finally received financing last year. Titled
“Orangeburg,” it is scheduled for broadcast this fall on PBS.
“We were up against two problems,” said Mr. Cram, a principal at
Northern Light Productions in Boston, explaining why it took so long
to finance the film. “People actually wondered why they hadn’t heard
of it. Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been
told.”
Mr. Cram and his co-producer, Ms. Richardson, were activists in the
1960s and had long wanted to tell this story.
“We’re combining our activist sensibilities with our longstanding
filmmaking sensibilities,” Mr. Cram said. “I promise you this is not a
polemic. It’s about people’s lives that were profoundly changed by a
tragedy.”
Ms. Richardson said that beyond the conventional interpretation of the
role race played in Orangeburg’s not being as well known as Kent
State, other circumstances also contributed to the event’s obscurity.
For one, the shootings were at night, and there was no television
coverage because, according to Ms. Richardson, “no one anticipated the
event turning out the way it did.”
Second, many of the still photographs taken by a photographer for the
local paper, The Times and Democrat, were later destroyed in a fire.
“There are only a few images, like a half-dozen,” Ms. Richardson said.
The killings occurred on Feb. 8, 1968, when white state troopers fired
on a group of more than 100 students. The shootings came after three
days of rising tension following what began as a protest calling for
the integration of an all-white bowling alley in Orangeburg, home to
the predominantly black South Carolina State College. (It is now a
university.)
The state’s governor at the time, Robert E. McNair, blamed the clash
on “black power advocates.” He also incorrectly stated that the
shooting happened off campus. In 2006 Mr. McNair, who died last year,
acknowledged that as governor he bore responsibility for the
shootings, but did not say much more.
News coverage of the Orangeburg shootings was misleading. The first
dispatch from The Associated Press, which set the tone for much of the
initial coverage in the nation’s papers, described the incident as “a
heavy exchange of gunfire,” although it was later determined that
those killed were unarmed.
“Here is my assessment of why there was not better coverage,” said
Jack Bass, who covered the shootings for The Charlotte Observer in
North Carolina and is now a professor of humanities and social
sciences at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Because the
shootings occurred at night, there were no compelling television
images, as there were of the Kent State events, he said.
“It was too close to deadline on the East Coast, so papers relied on
the initial misleading story by The Associated Press,” he added. “And
the students were black.” (The New York Times, which had been
following the tensions, ran the article written by The Associated
Press and later ran other articles by wire services and staff
reporters.)
In 1970 Mr. Bass wrote a book on the tragedy with Jack Nelson, who
covered Orangeburg for The Los Angeles Times. And, coincidentally, in
1968 Mr. Bass was Mr. Klores’s journalism professor at the University
of South Carolina.
“When I see it on ESPN, suddenly I see it brought in to popular
culture,” Mr. Bass said.
A federal Justice Department investigation resulted in a trial in
which nine patrolmen were acquitted of charges stemming from the
shootings. The only person convicted in connection with the event was
Cleveland L. Sellers, who was the national program director for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Mr. Sellers, who was shot
in the shoulder, was convicted on a charge of “riot” and served seven
months of a one-year prison term.
Mr. Sellers, who was later pardoned, now directs the African-American
Studies program at the University of South Carolina, and has been
active in trying to ensure that Orangeburg will not be forgotten.
“We’ve fought the long fight,” Mr. Sellers said in a telephone
interview. “First we had to bring it in to the civil rights
literature. We’ve kept the flame lit.”
“Now Dan’s film, really for the first time ever on a national scale,
actually addresses the Orangeburg Massacre and shines some light on
what happened,” he added. “There was a veil of secrecy and silence on
it.”
The media is belatedly acknowledging the incident in other ways. In
February Tom Brokaw visited Orangeburg to participate in a 40th-
anniversary memorial service. Mr. Brokaw’s latest book, “Boom! Voices
of the Sixties,” addresses Orangeburg.
After screening “Black Magic” in Washington for the Congressional
Black Caucus, Mr. Klores met with Representative John Conyers Jr., a
Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to
discuss reopening the federal investigation of the Orangeburg
shootings. Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Representative Conyers,
said he was looking into the Orangeburg incident and was considering
holding a hearing on it.
Mr. Klores and Mr. Sellers said that a push to reopen the federal
investigation was meant partly to pressure action by the South
Carolina Legislature, where a bill was introduced last year to create
a panel to investigate Orangeburg. The former United States Attorney
in South Carolina, Reginald I. Lloyd, and former Gov. Jim Hodges
support a state investigation. But no hearing has been scheduled on
the bill, and State Representative James H. Harrison, a Republican who
is chairman of the state’s Judiciary Committee, recently told The
Greenville News in South Carolina, “My personal feeling is we don’t
need to create something that is going to create more division.”
For Mr. Klores and Mr. Sellers, a full state investigation is needed
to bring about a resolution.
“So here I am in a position where maybe I can do something,” Mr.
Klores said. “That’s all it is.”
More Articles in Arts »