Fifty years ago at S.C. State University, three African-American students were shot and killed, and at least 27 more wounded when state troopers fired a volley of buckshot into students protesting a segregated bowling alley.
On Thursday, 1,000 people gathered at the state’s only historically black public college to commemorate the lives lost in the Orangeburg Massacre.
Family members of the three students killed – Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton and Henry Smith – lit candles in memory of their lost loved ones.
http://www.thestate.com/news/local/education/article199184129.html
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On the night of February 8th, 1968, three students – Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton, who was still in high school – were killed by police gunfire on the South Carolina State College (now University) campus in Orangeburg. Twenty-eight others were wounded. None of the students were armed and almost all were shot in their backs, buttocks, sides, or the soles of their feet. |
Recalling the event decades later, Robert Lee Davis remembered the chaotic noise and fear that permeated the night of February 8, 1968.
“Students were hollering, yelling and running,” Davis said. “I went into a slope near the front end of the campus and I kneeled down. I got up to run, and I took one step; that’s all I can remember. I got hit in the back.” He was among the 28 students of South Carolina State College injured that day in the Orangeburg Massacre; his friend, freshman Samuel Hammond, who had also been shot in the back, died of his wounds. Later that night, Delano Middleton and Henry Smith would also die; all three killed by the police were only 18 years old.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1968-three-students-were-killed-police-today-few-remember-orangeburg-massacre-180968092/
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