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Summary
Summary
A fresh perspective on the Orangeburg Massacre and its legacy
On the night of February 8, 1968, South Carolina state highway patrolmen fired on civil rights demonstrators in front of South Carolina State College, a historically black institution in the town of Orangeburg. Three young black men--Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith--were killed, and twenty-seven other protestors were injured. Preceding the infamous events at Kent State University by more than two years, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it came to be known, was one of the first violent civil rights confrontations on an American college campus. The patrolmen involved were exonerated while victims and their families were left still seeking justice. To this day the community of Orangeburg endeavors to find resolution and reconciliation.
In Blood and Bone, Orangeburg native Jack Shuler offers a multifaceted examination of the massacre and its aftermath, uncovering a richer history than the one he learned as a white youth growing up in Orangeburg. Shuler focuses on why events unfolded and escalated as they did and on the ramifications that still haunt the community.
Despite the violence of the massacre and its contentious legacy, Orangeburg is a community of people living and working together. Shuler tells their fascinating stories and pays close attention to the ways in which the region is shaping a new narrative on its own, despite the lack of any official reexamination of the massacre. He also explores his own efforts to understand the tragedy in the context of Orangeburg's history of violence. His native connections gave him access to individuals, black and white, who have previously not spoken out publicly. Blood and Bone breaks new ground as an investigation of the massacre and also as a reflection by a proud Orangeburg native on the meanings of Southern community.
Shuler concludes that the history of race and violence in Orangeburg mirrors the history of race relations in the United States--a murky and contested narrative, complicated by the emotions and motivations of those who have shaped the story and of those who have refused to close the book on it. Orangeburg, like the rest of the nation, carries the historical burdens of slavery, war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and civil rights. Blood and Bone exposes the ways in which historical memory affects the lives of ordinary Americans. Shuler explores how they remember the Orangeburg Massacre, what its meaning holds for them now, and what it means for the future of the South and the nation.
Author Notes
Jack Shuler is an assistant professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and the author of Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights. Shuler's criticism, interviews, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, Southern Studies, the South Carolina Review, the Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shuler's well-researched but faltering historic account is centered around an evening of violence on February 8th, 1968. Two days after South Carolina State College students had protested to integrate a bowling alley in Orangeburg, SC, highway patrolmen opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators. When the smoke cleared, three young African-American men were dead. Over forty years later, native son Shuler (Calling Out Liberty) journeys back to his hometown with a list of unanswered questions to discover exactly what precipitated the Orangeburg Massacre, and how it continues to ripple through local history. The diverse cast of characters includes a repentant National Guardsman, a February 8th survivor with the long-lodged bullet to prove it, and a conspiratorial local veteran of the Civil Rights movement. "Perhaps there are no clear answers about what happened on February 8, 1968," Shuler writes, "because there are so many narratives floating around Orangeburg." Unfortunately, this is also the book's downfall. Its multiple perspectives are illuminating but don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. And attempts to place the Orangeburg Massacre into a context of September 11th and the economic development of modern day South Carolina feel clumsy. This account is far more successful in strictly dealing with the past, as it still manages to paint a vivid picture of the racially charged, tinderbox atmosphere in 1960s South Carolina. Photos. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.