the Orangeburg Massacre: yet another people’s struggle against oppression

I was in my first year of a “real” job in February, 1968, working for one of the Big 8 CPA firms when the Orangeburg Massacre occurred. While I sat in my cubicle on the 17th. floor of the Bank of the Southwest building in Houston, Texas, I didn’t realize history was being made by students my age at historically black South Carolina State University in the small town of Orangeburg, South Carolina, more than a thousand miles from where I sat.

Imagine being a black student at SC State, going to a bowling alley with friends on February 05, 1968, only to be turned away by owner Harry Floyd who claimed his All-Star Bowling Triangle bowling alley was exempt from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 since his bowling alley was private property. Whites Only, the sign said.

Students from SC State and nearby Claflin University began nonviolent protests that lasted for two nights, but on the third night their nonviolence took an extremely violent turn when South Carolina highway patrolmen opened fire on about two hundred unarmed black student protestors. Three young black men were killed with another twenty-eight protestors wounded.

The three students who were shot and killed by the police were: Freshman Sammy Hammond was shot in the back; 17-year-old high school student Delano Middleton, whose mother worked at SC State was shot seven times; and 18-year-old Henry Smith was shot three times. (History.com)

Among the wounded that night was a young civil rights activist named Cleveland Sellers, Jr., who was born in neighboring Denmark, South Carolina, a town with a population under 2,000 when he was born in 1944; he had returned to his home state in 1967 to pursue a teaching career following years of activism in the Civil Rights Movement which put him on the government’s radar as a militant. On the night of the Orangeburg Massacre Cleve Sellers was shot in the arm, taken into custody at a local hospital and charged with inciting a riot on the campus. Two years later in September, 1970, a South Carolina judge allowed the state to convict him of rioting at the bowling alley. Sellers was sentenced to one year of hard labor but released after seven months. He was the only protestor prosecuted – nine police officers were charged with shooting at the protestors…all were acquitted.

Harry K. Floyd, Sr., owned and operated the All-Star Triangle Bowling Alley until his death in 2002 at which time his son Harry K. Floyd, Jr., took over. The Floyd family closed the bowling alley in 2007 due to “financial difficulties” according to wikipedia. The site remains on the National Register of Historic Places and has supposedly been bought by a nonprofit in 2020 with the goal of turning it into a memorial for the Civil Rights Movement in Orangeburg called the National Center for Justice.

February 08, 2024, marked fifty-six years since the Orangeburg Massacre, and I felt Black History month was an opportunity to remember, to honor the personal sacrifices made by ordinary citizens who refused to yield to discrimination based on their race. Cleveland Sellers, Jr., went on to serve his native South Carolina by becoming the director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina, by becoming the 8th. president of Voorhees College in Denmark, and by raising his youngest of three children, Bakari, to follow in his footsteps as an activist who honored the Orangeburg Massacre.