“Eyewitnesses to a Tragedy”: How the Collegian, the Student Newspaper of South Carolina State College, Covered the Orangeburg Massacre (Volume 38, No. 1, 2021)
By Dante E. Mozie, South Carolina State University
The first week of February in 1968 was filled with high racial tension. It was the culmination of nearly 15 years of consternation between the students of South Carolina State College, the state’s only public, historically black institution, and the whites who strongly held to the traditions of “Jim Crow.”
Efforts to desegregate a bowling alley by student—from South Carolina State, Claflin College, a private black institution located next door, and the city’s all-black Wilkinson High School—had escalated into a series of confrontations between students and local and state authorities. Some of those authorities resorted to violence against the students. It came to a head on the night of February 8, when students protested at the edge of South Carolina State’s campus following another evening of clashes between protestors and the police. After a banister hit one of the state patrolmen standing guard at the campus’s edge, causing him to fall, the other officers believed he had been shot. This prompted the officers to fire back with guns loaded with buckshot at the unarmed students.
In all, three students were killed and 28 were wounded in what became known as the Orangeburg massacre. Two of the dead were South Carolina State students: Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond. The third student, Delano Middleton, was a student at Orangeburg’s all-Black high school.
The dominate, but false, narrative that most of South Carolina’s mainstream media accepted was that protestors associated with the Black Power movement were to blame for the tragedy. But the staff of the Collegian, South Carolina State’s student newspaper, felt this narrative was disturbing enough to focus its March 1968 issue, the only one devoted to the Orangeburg massacre, on offering a counternarrative to the mainstream news coverage. The staff also sought to use its paper to reflect the mood of the campus community and reframe the conversation over why the tragedy happened.
None of the existing research on the Orangeburg massacre focuses on the college’s student newspaper as the voice of the students. This article aims to both fill that gap and add to the existing body of research on the Black collegiate press. The study focuses on the March 1968 issue, and a close reading was applied to all parts of the Collegian’s coverage of the events, from the editorials and news stories to the editorial cartoons and the photo spreads. Oral interviews with two members of the Collegian’s staff at the time of the massacre and a survivor of the tragedy were also conducted.
The research findings reveal that the Collegian’s coverage is divided into three frames. The first frame focuses on a frustration over the mainstream media’s failure to accurately cover the tragedy. The paper not only featured eyewitness accounts prominently on the issue’s front page, but many editorial columns were focused on criticizing mainstream media outlets for reporting what the staff called distorted and prejudiced accounts of the Orangeburg massacre. The blunt criticisms mirrored the frustrations of their peers on campus.
The Collegian’s second frame focused on criticisms of South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair’s failure to prevent the tragedy from happening. The student newspaper saved its strongest admonishments for the governor. The editorials and editorial cartoons reflected not only a feeling that the governor neglected South Carolina State’s students during the massacre, but also a general feeling that McNair and other white leaders were failing to provide South Carolina State students with a quality education.
The third frame was one that reflected a sense of sorrow and mourning, as well as the notion among the students on campus that the three deceased students, Smith, Hammond, and Middleton, gave their lives for the cause of equity and justice. The Collegian staff also had a personal reason to mourn: Henry Smith was a staff cartoonist for the campus newspaper, and the staff paid tribute to him, in particular.
After your students have read the article, you could ask the following discussion questions:
- How did the Collegian use humor to make its arguments?
- Why do you think the Collegian wasn’t censored by South Carolina State College’s administration, especially given the newspaper’s heavy criticism of state Gov. Robert McNair?
- As mentioned in the article, there were occasions in which editorializing by the student journalists also made its way into some of the stories and headlines. Was this a good move? In other words, should there have been an expanded editorial section to clearly separate the commentary from the reporting?
- How does this issue of the Collegian help illustrate the role and the importance of the student press during the 1960s, and even today?
Exercise 1
Collegian staffers used photography as a way to criticize state leaders for allowing the Orangeburg massacre to happen. The newspaper’s front page features a below-the-fold photo of Henry Smith after he was shot by South Carolina highway patrolmen. The grainy image, borrowed from the Charlotte Observer, shows a dying Smith looking toward the camera as he’s lying at the feet of the patrolmen. (You may find an image of this photo here.)
As your students review this image, ask them whether this was an appropriate move by the Collegian to run this photo. Or you could place them in the shoes of the Collegian’s editor-in-chief and ask them whether they would run the photo and, if so, where they would place it. Have them defend their answer either way.
Exercise 2
Split your class into groups and ask them to examine archival material of a mainstream newspaper covering a major protest from the civil rights movement. Then, ask them how that publication framed the event through editorials and stories, as well as the placement of content.
Or perhaps you may want to find multiple newspapers from various cities and have them examine how each covered the same event. For example, how did newspapers across North Carolina cover the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins? Or how did newspapers in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area cover the 1968 Howard University administration building takeover when compared to Baltimore’s newspapers?
Give them a few days to examine the papers, and have them answer the following questions:
- What frames did the newspaper present?
- Was this paper supportive or unsupportive of the protest? Why?
- If the paper didn’t include stories of the protest, what does that say about the paper from an editorial perspective?
Exercise 3
Look for archived mainstream media coverage of the 2020 social justice protests. Perhaps your local newspaper will suffice, or you may use a national newspaper, such as tedithe New York Times or USA Today.
Then, look for archived stories from collegiate student media that may have covered the same protests.
Have your students examine the content and ask the following questions:
- How did these newspapers frame the 2020 protests?
- How do the frames presented by the mainstream newspaper compare with the college paper?
- In what ways does the college newspaper’s coverage of the protests compare or contrast with the methods that the Collegian staff used to cover the Orangeburg massacre?
Additional Readings and Resources
Bass, Jack, and Jack Nelson. The Orangeburg Massacre. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1996.
DuBose, Sonny, and Cecil Williams. Orangeburg 1968: A Place and Time Remembered.
Orangeburg: Cecil Williams Photography/Publishing, 2008.
Felder, James. Civil Rights in South Carolina: From Peaceful Protests to Groundbreaking Rulings.
Charleston: The History Press, 2012.
Grose, Philip G. South Carolina at the Brink: Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
Hine, William C. “Civil Rights and Campus Wrongs: South Carolina State College Students Protest, 1955-1968.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 97, no. 4 (Oct. 1996): 310-331.
Hine, William C. South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow
America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018.