Around the town of Orangeburg, in the Midlands of South Carolina, the days had retractable fangs, like the copperheads in the woods and the water moccasins in the river. The fangs came out at night, gleaming in the moonlight through the canopies of Spanish moss. Jaime Harrison heard the story from his grandmother Jimmie Lou, who, with his grandfather Willie, helped raise him. Jimmie Lou told him about what it was like when she was coming up in and around Orangeburg, where the family home was, and where the fangs of the night were ever present, and where nocturnal menace was as general as the still, humid air.
“It was a fear that I’d never seen in my grandma’s eyes before,” said Harrison, forty-four, a Democrat running to take Lindsey Graham’s seat in the United States Senate. “She told me about this time when she was a little girl. She was playing in the house with her sisters and brothers, and all of a sudden her mom told them all to come to the one room in the middle and to shush, be quiet. She said she had never saw her mom that serious before. “She said they sat there, and it was only probably a few minutes, but it felt like hours. And afterward she asked her, ‘Mom, what was wrong?’ And her mom said the KKK was marching down the street with their torches, and she huddled them together. It was a pain that I saw in my grandma. It’s that type of thing that is passed on from generation to generation. When I hear stories about the Orangeburg massacre—that’s a pain that Black folks have been living with for generations.”
On February 8, 1968, three Black students from South Carolina State University, one of two historically Black colleges in Orangeburg, were gunned down by state highway patrolmen for the crime of trying to desegregate a local bowling alley. The unarmed students had lit a bonfire on the edge of campus, and the police opened fire in the darkness. Twenty-eight people were wounded, including Cleveland Sellers, the father of future South Carolina state legislator and CNN pundit Bakari Sellers. Nine of the sixty-six patrolmen on the scene were brought to trial. All were acquitted. Only Cleveland Sellers went to prison, for “participating in a riot” outside the bowling alley. (He was pardoned a quarter century later.)
This is South Carolina, after all, the home office of American sedition, the place where secession was born. “Here is where treason began,” declared a Union soldier under William Tecumseh Sherman, as his Army of the Tennessee prepared to march on the state, “and by God, here is where it shall end.” Of course, the fight did not end. It just changed form. To provide for the maintenance of white supremacy, one side exchanged Confederate gray for Klan white and turned away from armed revolt and back toward working within the institutions of government. To impress upon Black citizens the iron reality of this new old order, they put up statues of their fallen leaders and ran up the bygone battle flag at the state capitol. And at night, the riders with their torches came, and people huddled in their kitchens, hushed their children, and hoped that the shadows would pass on by.
