Racism is a very ugly thing. In the 1950s and 60s, it was far more overt than it is today. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.
The federal government — then on-board to stop racism — played catch-up in going to court to address the many violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.
One of those glitches happened in Orangeburg, S.C.. In 1968, a loophole in the Civil Rights Act passed four years earlier led to some delay in forcing All Star Bowling Lanes to admit blacks. With two black colleges in Orangeburg and nowhere else to bowl, the bowling alley became a target for civil rights advocates. The black students at the colleges wanted to bowl there and staged a demonstration.
All this might be forgotten today if this racist act hadn’t led to the brutal massacre of several black students by white highway patrolmen. Even worse, it all led to a cover-up of the shooting that continues today — the 47th anniversary of what is known as “The Orangeburg Massacre.”
A conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto the campus of South Carolina State College — killing three black students and wounding 27 others.
All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.
Until the shooting, South Carolina was a southern state that had proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. It was all a façade. Nonviolence was equated with racial harmony in a white community with a paternalistic attitude toward its poorer black citizens. Equal rights were another thing.
To help protect its “progressive” self-image on racial issues, a web of official deceptions was created by South Carolina’s young governor — Robert McNair — and his administration to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg.
The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the college. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense in order to protect themselves from a attacking mob of students.
To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.
Time would prove none of it was true.
At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, upon outside scrutiny, it began to unravel. Then, with his legacy threatened, McNair broke nearly forty years of silence in 2006 in an attempt to put the pieces back together.
Ignoring facts proven over the years in court cases and through the first person accounts of eyewitnesses, McNair used local media and friendly “historians” as a tool to help members of his community lie to themselves about their own history. For the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.
One man who knows the truth minced no words about what happened in 1968.
“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General in 1968. “The police lost their self control. They just started shooting. It was a slaughter. Double ought buckshot is what you use for deer. It’s meant to kill. One guy emptied his service revolver. That takes a lot of shooting. The (students) are running away. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow! My God, there’s a murderous intent there. We are lucky more weren’t killed.”
Clark said the student deaths were caused by police criminal acts. “The provocation for the incident was an absurd, provocative display of force,” he said.
Gov. McNair responded to Orangeburg with excessive police power because that was the politically expedient thing to do in 1968, the former attorney general said.
“Fear, anger, a sense of self-righteousness to justify hating began to be seen as successful politics.” When the tactic backfired, Clark added, state officials fabricated stories that many South Carolinians believe to this day.
After 47 years, the story of the Orangeburg Massacre still simmers, unresolved. It is the chilling saga of the horrors of law enforcement motivated by racism and hatred — and the inability of a Southern state to admit the truth.
The central theme is “mendacity,” the web of lies a community spins in a desperate attempt to maintain it’s self-image and dignity when confronted by its own prejudice. It’s a culture where words are constantly being redefined in order that a people can more comfortably deceive themselves.
Today, that racism still exists in South Carolina, as in other places in the country. It has been dressed up and made more sophisticated by the policies of a Republican-controlled legislature that still refuses to even investigate the massacre.
The sad story is after 47 years, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.
The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting and its cover-up is the subject of my multimedia e-book, “The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre.” The price is $9.99. (ISBN-9781629218762).
The book is available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook at http://store.vook.com/ and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.
Photo by Bill Barley
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February 08, 2015
August 28, 2014
It's the 80th Anniversary of the Chiquola Mill Massacre in Honea Path, South Carolina
On the morning of September 6, 1934 — 80 years ago — in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina, friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded.
The bloody riot at the town's cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow — not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the town's history.
This September is the 80th anniversary of the murders at Chiquola Mill in Honea Path. Honea Path will not commemorate the anniversary. It would rather forget the tragedy. The story has been erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it.
An instrument of fear was so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children. It formed a lifelong social contract for the entire community's survival.
My name is Frank Beacham. I grew up in Honea Path. My mother was the town's history teacher. My father sold textile supplies. My grandfather, I later learned, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934.
In order that the murders in Honea Path not be forgotten, I have produced this 48-minute audio documentary. You can listen or download it. I hope you will listen. It will be posted during the month of September.
The 80th Anniversary of the Murders in Honea Path
My e-book, a full multimedia account of what happened in Honea Path is titled Mill Town Murder ($9.99) (ISBN-9781629218465). It’s available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook here and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.
April 11, 2014
Honoring a Long Overdue Southern Hero
April 11, 2014 was a historic day in Charleston, South Carolina. A monument was unveiled for a man whose brave actions involving civil rights 67 years ago caused him to be ostracized and run out of his home state of South Carolina.
Historically in Charleston, it has been a special kind of hell for black people. As slaves, blacks were publicly whipped, branded and hanged. Later, they were discriminated against on so many levels one couldn’t count them. Things are still far from truly equal.
In the late 1940s, before the rest of the nation started to fight for civil rights, this man — a federal judge who was the son of a Confederate soldier and presided in the city where the Civil War began — took some extraordinarily brave actions on the bench.
U.S. District Judge Waites Waring ruled in 1947 that South Carolina’s all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional, and later, well before the U.S. Supreme Court got around to agreeing with him, that racial segregation in the schools was inherently unequal.
Waring's controversial opinions made him a pariah in the segregated South. A cross was burned in his yard, bricks were thrown through his windows and he received numerous death threats.
Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston called Judge Waring “a monster” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The judge was shunned by his own relatives, forced to resign from his clubs and even from his own church, and finally from the federal bench. He and his wife fled to New York City for their personal safety.
In South Carolina, punishment for such “sins” is silence. The white people of Charleston made Judge Waring disappear. Largely forgotten in Charleston for more than five decades, Waring is finally being remembered today for the role he played in school desegregation.
A statue of Waring will be dedicated today at the federal courthouse where he heard his cases. Also, a historical marker about the Clarendon County, South Carolina case he presided over was recently placed outside the courthouse.
Waring's 1951 dissent in the Clarendon case was largely followed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools. The Brown ruling came after the appeal of the South Carolina case was combined with similar cases from Kansas, Delaware and the District of Columbia.
Waring was the first judge since the U.S. Supreme Court 1896’s decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson establishing separate but equal in race relations as the law of the land to write an opinion challenging the doctrine.
Waring wrote that beyond unequal facilities "segregation in education can never produce equality" and called it "an evil that must be eradicated." The Clarendon County case, he wrote, demanded a "strike at the cause of the infection and not merely at the symptoms of the disease."
When Waring and two other federal judges heard the Clarendon case in Charleston in 1951 — a case in which future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued for the plaintiffs — hundreds of blacks lined up outside the courthouse hoping to get seats, although there wasn't room for all.
"They had come there on pilgrimage," Waring recalled in an interview at Columbia University some years later. "It's awfully heartening when you get poor, illiterate, ignorant people to suddenly sniff a little breath of freedom."
After Judge Waring arrived in New York City, he befriended the late CBS journalist Charles Kuralt. The judge was asked by Kuralt how he had come so far, considering his Southern background, to make such a brave ruling.
“Being a judge,” Waring told Kuralt, “I gradually became judicious.”
Kuralt, in his book “Charles Kuralt’s America,” said the next time Waring returned to Charleston was to be buried. Kuralt was at the funeral as a reporter on January 17, 1969.
“I remember no more than six or eight white faces in the crowd; white Charlestonians, including most members of his family, stayed home that day to show their contempt for him. Hundreds of black people stood there shoulder to shoulder to show their respect.”
Kuralt called Waring in his book “an unsung American hero.” And that he was.
South Carolina has changed in many ways since Judge Waring made his famous rulings. But it is far too soon to say that racism there is behind us. It has just taken on a different form in a harsh political establishment that is virtually all far rightwing Republicans.
But at least the silence has ended and Judge Waring got a public appreciation for his bravery and good works. In a political environment like the one in South Carolina, that’s a miracle in itself.
With thanks to the Associated Press and Charles Kuralt!
January 28, 2014
The Death of Pete Seeger
I knew this day would eventually come, but it’s still hard to believe that Pete Seeger is no longer with us. He has been everywhere—for so long—that he had almost become a permanent part of my life.
For about 50 years, I’ve probably seen him hundreds of times in concert and at various events. He connected to so many people and had personal values that I treasured. He was far more than just a folk singer. He was a moral force that always seemed to make the right choices in life.
Before I was even born, Pete was a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s. He had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.
Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, but Pete did the noble thing. He would not hide...or cooperate with the politicians. The government thought they had shut him up, but as a banjo teacher, he quietly helped spawn an entire generation of folk singers that actually changed the world.
In the 1960s, Pete re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture and environmental causes. He did it all.
He wrote or co-wrote so many great songs including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers) and "Turn, Turn, Turn!" These songs have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world.
Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many others) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. It happened soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.
I was so lucky that I got to see a reunion of the Weavers at Carnegie Hall. That was living history at its finest hour. I interviewed Pete, reveled in his singing through the years and attended his 90th birthday party at Madison Square Garden. Like I said, he was everywhere.
Yet, through all the adulation he received, Pete was a normal guy—truly a man of the people. All the fame never went to his head. People just aren’t made like Pete Seeger anymore. It was a privilege to be alive at the same time as this great man and to learn from his towering example.
September 29, 2013
Possibility Junkie, a New Musical That Targets the Artistic Process
We live in an era of magnified perceptions. For many Americans not in the glorified, hyper-wealthy one percent, this is a time of diminished possibilities and loss of hope. David Ippolito and Gretchen Cryer precisely target those perceptions in a magnificent new play, Possibility Junkie. They hit a slam dunk home run!
Possibility Junkie is a timely look at how we frame our lives and our definition of success in a culture where corporate media and propaganda portrayed as “news” is bombarding us from every direction with constant lies—usually based on fear. It’s tough to create a fulfilling life in an environment where everyone around you worships money and judges every endeavor by how much of a profit it generates.
Yet, that’s what artists do, creating their work while at the same time reflecting a mirror on the foibles of the cultural condition around them. David Ippolito, the central character in this play, is an independent singer-songwriter who has gained a huge following as a troubadour in Central Park for the past 20 years. David is the real deal and this is his inspiring story. I have known David for a decade, watched his work develop and witnessed his struggles in trying to live an honest, artistic life.
There are two key lines in the play. The first is “Keep Hope Alive” and the second is the title, “Possibility Junkie.” Both came from the late Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles and many other bands to America in the 1960s. Bernstein found David singing in Central Park 15 years ago and they became friends. Sid died at age 95 last August 21.
In the play, Bernstein’s character is “Burn,” an elderly wise man played beautifully by Rob Barnes, a veteran Broadway actor and singer. Barnes was in the original Broadway casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Having known Sid as well, I can attest that Barnes carries much of Bernstein in his character.
Rob Barnes and David Ippolito
The plot of Possibility Junkie centers around a right wing commentator on FAX News (loosely based on FOX, though it’s hard me to even call it “news.”) David does a song about him in Central Park and a fan records it on video. The video is put on YouTube and goes viral. The FAX commentator, Sean Kilroy (played by Joel H. Jones), gets angry and tries to do David in.
He uses his stunningly attractive assistant, Ainsley Louis (played by Jillian Louis), to spy on David and secretly video tape him, trying to get any kind dirt possible. David falls for Ainsley, a walking, singing bombshell, only to find himself and his friend, Burn, betrayed by her ambitions to get her own TV show.
Jillian Louis and Joel H. Jones
Possibility Junkie is an inspiring musical with songs not just written for this play, but written for over 20 years from the heart by David Ippolito. It all melds together in what I don’t lightly call Ippolito’s masterpiece. His “The Last Protest Song” toward the end brought tears to my eyes. With this play, David has now transitioned from being a talented singer and songwriter to being a creator of musical theatre. This is an ideal new format for him.
The expert hand of Gretchen Cryer is also evident in this production. An earlier theatrical presentation by David was too loose and talky, with David ad-libbing each night. That’s gone in this production, no doubt the work of Cryer in co-writing the book and directing the production. Cryer, the mother of television actor Jon Cryer, co-wrote the classic, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road. She has David acting loose, but he’s far more precise in his presentation this time.
In fact, there wasn’t a weak player in this excellent cast of actors and singers—featuring in addition to Ippolito and Barnes—J.C. Hall (a terrific hip-hop artist), Joel H. Jones, Jillian Louis, Teresa Reynolds and Vanessa Theus. Music direction was by Mike Murray, with some musicians—especially mandolin player Chris Tedesco—joining the cast dancing on the main stage while playing.
Heather Wolensky’s set design was also unique, featuring actual moving image backdrops of where David plays in Central Park. The various video segments plugged into the play seamlessly. It was “virtual set” technology well used in the story. The choreography by David Eggers is also excellent.
A story that Sid Bernstein once told me came ringing back as I watched Possibility Junkie in a packed house on its opening night. Noting that he had found the Beatles in Liverpool in the 1960s, Sid said he hoped one day he could give Liverpool a gift from America. That gift, he told me, would be David Ippolito. “David’s got it,” Sid said, “and they would love him over there.”
Sid never got the chance to promote David in Liverpool, but the man—who also brought The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Moody Blues and The Kinks to the United States—had an insanely good eye for talent.
Possibility Junkie runs through Oct. 20 at the Theatre for the New City at 155 First Ave in New York City.
David Ippolito with the real Sid Bernstein
Photo by Frank Beacham
March 01, 2013
George Dean: Pioneering the S.C. National Guard
During my long quest to learn the truth about the Orangeburg Massacre, I was given many tips. Most led to dead-ends. One of vital importance to the story would take more than five years to pay off.
George Dean, a lifelong resident of Orangeburg, owned and operated a men’s clothing store at 1185 Russell Street. In 1968, he was the only black member of the South Carolina National Guard. I phoned him at his store on Sept. 8, 2000 after being told he had been called to duty during the days prior to the shooting.
I asked his help in putting together the still missing pieces of the massacre story. Though extremely polite, Dean was cautious and hesitant. Yes, he was the only black Guardsman on duty in Orangeburg. He had driven a jeep that shuttled key personnel to the central communications facility and had protected the Guard’s main ammunition storage depot.
However, he was conflicted and told me he couldn’t reveal what he knew. The reasons: he had kids in college and a mortgage on his business. There might be a price to pay for his going public with details on the shooting, and he couldn’t jeopardize his family’s welfare in the event there was a boycott of his business.
At this stage, I asked him if we could go “off the record.” I read him a summary of the path I was taking in this project. I asked him if he would simply warn me if anything were not true. Through carefully calculated silence, Dean signaled I was on the right path.
I kept in touch with George Dean in the subsequent years. I followed the progress of his children through college. I made sure he remembered my interest and never pressured him for his story. Until early 2006, that is.
I was planning a trip to South Carolina in February to introduce Frank Military, a screenwriter researching Orangeburg, to various figures in the massacre story. A week before the visit, I called George Dean again.
“George, all your kids graduated from college?” I asked. “Yes,” he said with a chuckle, sensing what was coming. “And you finally paid off that mortgage, right?” “Sure did.” Well, my friend, the time is now. It’s time to tell your story.”
With George Dean, as I had learned over the years, there are no guarantees. When Frank and I finished our work in Orangeburg on the afternoon of February 13, 2006, I was told to call George on his mobile phone. He’d let us know then if he could do the interview.
Our schedule that day was tight. We had interviews in Columbia in the morning and then drove to the Chestnut Grill on the outskirts of Orangeburg, where we had lunch with Bill Hine, an expert on the massacre and professor at S.C. State University.
A comfortable, family-style lunch hangout, the Chestnut was clearly a community gathering place. As Hine briefed Frank Military and I on the town, we spotted Andrew Hugine, the ninth president of S.C. State University. A former S.C. State student himself, Hugine was clearly sympathetic to our mission and offered the services of his office for anything we needed. It was a warm, gracious welcome to Orangeburg.
Less than a month later, Hugine would apologize to nine former students for the actions of Dr. Benner C. Turner, S.C. State’s fourth president. The students, who were expelled or suspended from the school in the wake of peaceful protests in 1956, had returned to the campus for the first time in 50 years.
“You fought for justice, equality and dignity,” Hugine told them. “You were exercising your constitutional rights to challenge segregation. We can never ever repay you. We cannot undo the past as much as we would like to.”
We’d learn that day—more than I had previously realized—that Orangeburg had a very deep history in the American civil rights movement. These 1956 demonstrations at S.C. State came before Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery; before the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro; and before Emmett Till had been lynched.
Later in the day, after Hine had guided us on a tour of the town and walked us through the area of the shooting, I retreated to our rental car to call George Dean. I dialed his mobile number. No answer. I got voice mail. Dejected, I tried again. Bingo! This time he answered.
“Meet me in the parking lot behind the Trinity Methodist Church in exactly one hour,” he said abruptly.
No address or directions were given, and—it became immediately clear—that none were needed. A towering presence across a street from the S.C. State campus, the Trinity church, founded in 1866, is an icon of civil rights history. It was a fitting place for our meeting with Dean.
Precisely on time, George Dean drove into the nearly empty parking lot and greeted us. He led us to a small office complex next to the church, where he was well known by the staff, and waved us into a conference room.
There was little small talk. I received permission to record audio of the interview and we got started. Within minutes, it was clear that Dean, a precise and cautious man, had carefully considered what he wanted to say (and not say) about the Orangeburg Massacre. For the next hour, we’d hear an intense, spellbinding monologue. There was little opportunity for questions.
In 1965, George Dean, facing imminent draft and almost certain of duty in Vietnam, became the first black member of his state’s National Guard. He volunteered in order not to fight in what he considered an unjust war. “I perceived it then and that’s the way I perceive it now,” he said firmly.
The oldest male in a family of seven children, Dean was raised by parents who were professional educators. He was literally brought up on the campus of S.C. State. “They didn’t have enough money to send me to Canada,” Dean recalled. “I didn’t see myself going into the military. I knew the percentage of black Americans in Vietnam. I didn’t see my chances being good for survival.”
Having taken ROTC in college, Dean aced the test for admission to the Guard. He did so well, in fact, that the surprised and skeptical white test administrators put him through more hoops, asking him for credit and character references. Each time he complied and exceeded expectations. There was no denying he was an ideal candidate. Finally, in late 1965, George Dean integrated the National Guard. He’d serve as a weekend soldier for six years.
“It wasn’t long before I realized that I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire,” he recalled. It took three years for other Guard members even to recognize him as a fellow soldier. “When I joined the Guard in ’65, it was just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The South was still in an uproar. Every time there was a civil unrest, they called the Guard. Here I was, the lone black soldier in the militia.”
While Dean experienced racism within the ranks of the Guard, he was simultaneously castigated by members of his own black community. “I was really between a rock and a hard place.” He still winced at the pain of being called to Charleston in the mid ’60s, where his job was to protect electrical utilities during a civil rights disturbance.
While walking along King Street with a uniformed white colleague, an elderly black lady leaving a hotel approached them. “She looked at me and she said ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ It’s hard to explain the feelings. I didn’t blame her. She just didn’t understand. But it hurt no less. That’s the price we pay when we carry the coat in America.”
Another difficult moment came in 1966 when the Guard was called to stop a civil rights disturbance at Voorhees College in Denmark, the home town of Cleveland Sellers, a local activist that Dean knew and admired. “We went to Voorhees and I just didn’t feel right,” Dean said, recalling that he was threatened with a court martial over his reluctance.
“We entered the campus there at about five in the morning to find no unrest or students. I was a member of a unit that was supposed to quell an unrest and all they did was go into an institution of learning to destroy physical property. The Guardsmen knocked down the doors of professors’ offices and classrooms to find whatever they perceived was there.”
Over time, Dean’s skill and professionalism was recognized within the Guard’s ranks. He got along well with John Shuler, his commanding officer, a white man he worked with over the years as both a civilian and a soldier.
Then came 1968. “Orangeburg simmered for a long time before Cleve even got here,” Dean noted. “Cleve was victimized like so many others. Racism in Orangeburg was no different from any other Southern town. It had all the makings of any other Southern community—from its segregated (movie) theaters to its water fountains to everything else.”
When the Guard was activated by Gov. McNair for duty in Orangeburg in early 1968, Shuler chose to keep Dean close to him. Dean’s assignment was to drive Shuler’s jeep and, when other soldiers were away, to protect the main door of the National Guard Armory on Broughton Street, about two miles from the S.C. State campus.
“Being the jeep driver...you know drivers, chauffeurs, waiters hear and see a lot of things.” On the nights leading up to violence in Orangeburg, Dean said he heard plenty, much of it perceived by white ears in ways far out of proportion from reality.
“It’s like the three of us in this room could see something and perceive it in a totally different manner. That’s what happened.”
At the wheel of a jeep, Dean repeatedly drove his white Guard superiors to the communications center at the telephone company, where they had direct communication with Gov. McNair. Time after time, he interpreted their comments to the governor as “amplified” and over the top.
“In another setting, at another time, you would say it was blown way out of proportion. I’ve thought...these were civilian soldiers just like myself that carried a different rank. They were still Southerners. White Southerners. So many stories in the South are so parallel. In that whether it’s the police chief, the mayor, or even the solicitor—they are all in the same room with the same damn hood. Just when night came up, they wore a different hat. There’s nothing unique about the South. So I can see why they might have seen things in a different light.”
From the conversations that he overheard, Dean is convinced that if Robert McNair was not fed misinformation, he was certainly given wrongly perceived information by his men in the field.
By February 8, Dean had been on active duty about a week, mostly securing the armory door when not driving the jeep. Shuler, his commanding officer, obviously aware of his sensitive position, didn’t deploy him for other duties in Orangeburg. “He didn’t put me in harm’s way. I won’t fantasize what might have happened if he had. I just thank God that he didn’t.”
On the morning of February 8, Shuler approached Dean at the armory and gave him a welcome break to go home, get a shower, and take a short rest.
“I lived about two miles from the armory and one block below the campus on Buckley Street. The first thing I did is go home, get out of my uniform and put on my civvies. Mobility in town was really on lock down. Tanks were at every crossing....every major entry into the city and even at every exit or entrance to the campus. I got on my bicycle and I rode to the campus.”
Dean went directly to the office of Dr. Maceo Nance, S.C. State’s acting president. He asked the secretary if he could speak with Nance and was immediately shown in. Nance was meeting with two student leaders in his office at the time.
“Dr. Nance, if there’s any way humanly possible that you can keep the students off the street tonight, do so.” Dean warned him of the skewed perceptions of the white men outside and how dangerous the climate had become.
Dean and Nance each maintained an air of formality in this critical exchange. Though the young man wore civilian clothes during their brief meeting, Nance knew very well that Dean was the only black member of the National Guard. They had a long personal history in a small town. As a kid, George Dean was Maceo Nance’s paper boy!
Dean had a gut feeling that compelled him to warn Nance. “I knew from standing at the door five days and from seeing and hearing SLED to Highway Patrol to Guardsmen. I knew the climate. I knew what I heard and I knew what I was seeing.”
When he returned to duty, Dean’s first sergeant ordered him to start clipping ammo. “Ammo comes loose. It doesn’t come clipped. It comes in a wooden box. And I was ordered to start clipping ammo.”
A clip is a small metal case that is used to store multiple rounds of 5.56 millimeter ammunition together as a unit, ready for insertion into the magazine of the M16 semiautomatic rifles—commonly called carbines—used by the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies.
In the evening, a short time before the shootings on the campus, Dean brought some clipped ammo from the armory for Pete Strom, the chief of SLED. As Strom put a load of M16 ammo on his shoulder and walked away, he uttered words that George Dean will never forget:
“We’re tired of playing with them niggers.”
Pete Strom in the streets of Orangeburg Just Before the Shooting
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In less than an hour, Dean got the word from Shuler that some students had been shot. “I didn’t know the magnitude then and I didn’t know until the next morning.”
Dean makes it clear he didn’t witness the shooting and cannot say definitely who pulled the triggers. “But I do know the record shows that the students were shot in the back while retreating from a peaceful demonstration for their civil and equal rights. They were denied (those rights) and their lives were taken. They were wounded. And justice to this day has never been served.”
At this point, Dean—increasingly emotional from telling his story—began to weep.
“I think it would be easier to talk about this if I could sit here at this time and say that I think justice was served. But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that has happened yet. Smith, Hammond and Middleton will never come back. And triggers don’t squeeze themselves.”
Dean stood and took off his microphone. He asked us to take a short walk with him. We left the building and crossed a lawn over to the massive Trinity United Methodist Church. We entered a side door and descended some steps to a large room in the basement.
It was sunset and the dimming light through the church’s stained glass windows cast an eerie, warm glow over the vast space. This very room, Dean told us, served as headquarters for the ’60s civil rights movement in Orangeburg. It pulsed with rich history—the site of key organizational meetings, as well as rallies attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins.
As we walked into the chilly evening air outside the vast sanctuary, completed in 1944, it was hard to escape the view. Just across the street, only a few yards away, was the grassy hill, where on another chilly Februrary night 38 years earlier, guns opened fire on the students at S.C. State.
“Jim Crow is not something you want to talk about every day,” Dean told us. “Jim Crow was not pretty. Any place in the South. My story is many stories of blacks in the South. Many had it worse than me. I was never lynched or hung from a tree. I was not humiliated.”
However, Dean said sadly, “I sit in my own hometown, where I was reared, educated, and raised my family. I would like to think I’ve been a pretty respectable and decent citizen. (Yet) I still see the antebellum South.” He pauses to consider his words. “Do I feel good saying that? Hell, no.”
Dean was never asked by any investigator or law enforcement agency to tell his story. “I don’t think the Southern white man is ready to correct any wrongs yet. The Southern white man still deals more with what his peers think of him than what’s right. It’s like the kid on the school grounds that wants to remain popular instead of doing what’s right. I don’t think the hearts of South Carolinians have changed to do what’s right (in order) to remain popular with their friends.”
I asked Dean: Have things improved in Orangeburg since 1968?
“Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. Has substantive change taken place in Orangeburg? No. There’s a different code of racism now. I would say that most change in the South, and most change in my town, which I love so dearly, is cosmetic. The new South ain’t so new.”
I had a final question for Dean: Will the issue of the Orangeburg shootings be resolved in our lifetime?
“I was optimistic of that. I don’t know whether I am anymore. I will never say never because, as a Christian, I believe if you ever lose hope, you’ve lost everything.”
George Dean’s historic and exclusive interview is part of “Wild History,” my Kickstarter project.
I’m pleased to say that our Kickstarter goal of $15,000 has been reached and exceeded. I wish to thank the generous contributors who made it possible.
There are three days left in the campaign and there’s still time to contribute. A donation of only one dollar would be appreciated and would put your name on a list of supporters of a new kind of journalistic storytelling.
To all that have supported this work so far, a big THANK YOU!
February 13, 2013
October 21, 2012
The Sad Loss of George McGovern
It is with great sadness that I write of the death of Senator George McGovern. He was 90 years old and his advanced age simply caught up with him. But George McGovern, as the movie line went, was some kind of man.
He was the first and only candidate I ever truly supported for president. He would have been a great one, but—up against the likes of Richard M. Nixon—he wasn’t vicious enough to get to the White House. Since he ran in 1968, we’ve had no one—and I mean no one—of his character and caliber.
It is hard not to be wistful about how far our national politics has fallen since 1968. I knew McGovern, followed his work and reported on it, listened to his speeches, had a few drinks with him and always admired him.
When in college—being from the still impoverished state of South Carolina—I came to Washington to report on McGovern’s hearings on hunger. In 1968, I was a very green 20-year-old reporter, but I could not help being impressed. Yes, McGovern was a liberal of the highest order—one who wanted to help poor people live a better life.
And, yes, even then he was attacked for that. Little has changed since that day, including the lack of popularity of helping the poor. But I was completely on board with McGovern and his policies.
As one facing the draft and the war in Vietnam, I also appreciated McGovern’s opposition to the war. He was unlike the racist hypocrites who served and still serve in Congress from South Carolina.
Later, when I worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Robert Byrd, I got to know McGovern and his top aide, Gary Hart (later to become a senator himself). We all became friendly. Hart offered me a job on McGovern’s presidential campaign, which I refused, deciding to leave Washington to become a reporter and writer instead.
In the era of Richard Nixon, whose reign of power turned out to be far more toxic than anyone could even imagine back in the 60s, McGovern offered an antidote of incredible decency and solid thinking.
America’s rejection of him was tough for me to swallow. But one thing is clear—the quality of our presidential candidates has gone down ever since.
I heard McGovern speak again in 2008 in New York City. Even then at his advanced age, he was dead on right with everything he said. I still wanted him to be president more than ever, but it was not to be.
McGovern remains a shining symbol of the best of this country’s political left—particularly in relation to the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s when the country was torn by U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the corruption and abuse of power of the Nixon administration.
Even he recognized the mixed results of his 1972 candidacy, saying, "I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out." McGovern had also become more forceful in recent years in drawing historical parallels between the Nixon and Bush administrations and the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
McGovern's post-political career generally enhanced his reputation. Tom Brokaw wrote in 1998 that “he remains one of the country's most decent and thoughtful public servants.”
Sadly, the nation has run out of this breed of politician. Now, in this election, we’ve hit bottom on all sides. But, for those who remember, it wasn’t always that way.
George McGovern was definitely some kind of man. I’m proud to have known him and thankful I lived in his time. May he finally rest in peace.
July 16, 2012
George Stoney: Changing a Town and the Lives of Its People Forever
George Stoney, the great documentary filmmaker, has died at age 96. Though he had made films since the early 1950s, Stoney made one in 1995 that turned my world upside down.
The Uprising of ’34, made with his former student, Judith Helfand, was about the Textile Strike of 1934. In it was a section about how, on September 6, 1934, seven workers were shot and killed and 30 others wounded at the Chiquola Mill in my home town of Honea Path, South Carolina.
It was an act that has shaped the town’s history and attitudes in ways that few could have imagined. I had a special interest in the film because my late grandfather, Dan Beacham, Honea Path’s mayor and superintendent of the mill in 1934, organized the gunmen who fired their weapons at the workers. That day became known as “Bloody Thursday.”
My grandfather died in 1936, many years before I was born. When I was growing up in Honea Path during the 1960s, the subject of the mill violence was taboo. There were hints of what happened, of course, but the topic was never discussed in the open. I learned the truth about Honea Path’s history in 1994 from a rough-cut of Stoney’s film.
Since that film essentially ended Honea Path’s six-decade long secret, I’ve learned about the history of the town and its people through many conversations and stories. I wrote about it in my book, Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.
As a writer who makes his living telling stories, I was shocked to find one of the most compelling stories I’ve ever heard connected to my own family and hometown. Even more shocking, I found, was how an event of such magnitude and importance to the lives of generations of Honea Path families could have been hidden and buried for so long. Of course the reason that I and so few of my fellow baby boomers didn’t know the story of Chiquola Mill was because it was purposely denied us.
There was a campaign of fear and intimidation after the shootings that effectively erased public discussion of what had happened. Fearful workers who wanted to keep their jobs put a self-imposed lid on their own past. Somehow, as the years went by, the violence at Chiquola evolved into a source of shame.
George Stoney, a Southerner himself, understood all this. He explained more to me about where I came from than I ever learned while living there. After the film’s release, he came to Honea Path and we did a radio talk show together. He organized a retreat at the Highlander Center in Tennessee where we discussed what happened in Honea Path for several days.
Later, we spoke, not only in his classes at New York University, but at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. We always winged it and the endless conversations were never boring.
As I learned from all this, a documentary filmmaker’s job is never done. George invited me to one of his film classes last year at NYU, still teaching well into his 90s.
George addressed the many myths that built up over the years about the workers who died in Honea Path more than 75 years ago. They were called an isolated group of troublemakers and rabble-rousers. Some, mainly the mill’s former management, claimed they deserved what happened to them.
He saw it another way. He thought these mill workers risked everything—their jobs, their freedom and ultimately their lives—for a cause they believed in. They made a decision to exert some control over their changing place in an increasingly industrialized world. Their method was to attempt to organize their fellow workers into a labor union.
The amazing chain of events that caused friends and neighbors in Honea Path to turn on one another with weapons has to be viewed in the context of the time. In 1934 the cork finally blew and labor protests erupted all over the United States. There were 1,856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers.
Honea Path represented a microcosm in a whirlwind of worker unrest. The shooting of the Honea Path mill workers was a pivotal moment in the General Textile Strike that was sweeping the South. Though the efforts of the workers ended in defeat and much suffering followed, the deaths of the seven Honea Path men was not in vain.
The disillusionment of the workers and the outrageous conduct by the mill owners made a strong impression on the Roosevelt Administration. This helped spur passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Out of these laws came reforms that vastly improved the lives of all American workers. One example was child labor. Before 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act outlawed employment of children under sixteen, the concept of “helping” was used in the mills.
Very young children were taught factory skills by their parents and soon “helped” by working in the mill to increase the family's piecemeal earnings. “Helping” became a form of apprenticeship and a major part of the mill’s labor system. Because this practice is now illegal, children have a better chance at a quality life by getting to stay in school rather than be exploited as cheap labor.
Other major reforms that came out of the labor unrest was the establishment of the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week. These are reforms—a direct result of what happened in Honea Path—have permeated modern life in the United States and have extended far beyond the textile industry. That’s why these workers were heroes and why their history should be honored.
The corrosive division that poisoned Honea Path after the shootings and the sense of shame that followed the shooting was concocted by those responsible for the violence. Fortunately that has mostly ended now, if for no other reason than fewer and fewer remain with us who can give a first person account of what happened.
Now, we have lost George Stoney, too. The Honea Path story is just one of many that George told. What a life! What a wonderful ability to change people's lives through storytelling. That’s what George Stoney did so well.
RIP, George!
December 18, 2011
Reuniting with the Urb Brothers
It was the late 1980s and I was living in Los Angeles. From time to time, I worked on projects with the late Paul Rothchild, producer of The Doors, Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and many others. He introduced me to the Urb Brothers, a duo who had won notoriety in Estonia during the Soviet era there and had defected to the United States.
The Urbs had an amazing story. Tarmo Urb once spent five years in and out of Soviet jails in an effort by the government to silence his voice. It was only when younger brother Thomas (who, during Tarmo's incarceration, had made his mark as an actor in the Soviet film industry) wrote a pleading letter to then President Gorbachev that Tarmo was finally released...only to face an assassination attempt by the KGB, an attempt that failed when the operation's chief officer became a fan of the Urb's music and message, allowing the brothers to defect by the skin of their teeth.
Urbs in 1971
I visited with the Urbs on Venice Beach and actually pitched one of them to act in a movie I was then trying to get made at the time, “Cradle Will Rock.” I remember them as being really nice guys and sounding a bit like Simon and Garfunkel. But I was soon to move to New York City and—for whatever reason—Paul passed on producing the Urbs. Stuff and life happened and I’m sorry to say I forgot about the Urbs.
That is until the Sunday before Christmas. I was invited to a Ann Ruckert’s home to hear an “amazing” duo from Estonia produced by Geoff Gillette, an LA producer who has moved to New York City. At first I didn’t recognize the brothers or really get the name “Urb.” But as I listened to their story, a got a strange sense of deja vu. Finally, I blurted out “do I know you guys from LA?” “Yes, I think you do,” answered Thomas Urb, who had the same slow recognition.
Then, the pieces fell together. What are the odds we’d meet again after more than 21 years in a city on the other coast of the country? I can only say it happened. The brothers now have six albums and have recorded a lot of music since I first met them. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Tarmo Urb told me the story of meeting his “personal” KGB agent and being warned of his pending death. Here’s Tarmo on video with the story...
Here the Urbs sing “Nightingale,” a song they wrote after seeing a small nightingale in some tattered bushes near where they lived. Tarmo said I kept asking myself why is this little bird singing in such an ugly place—it has wings, it could fly anywhere. “Then it dawned on me, you could be a nightingale wherever you find yourself,” Tarmo said. “We musicians are what we are, wherever we find ourselves.”
Charlie's Place: Photo Essay
- The true story of the Ku Klux Klan’s violent attempt in South Carolina in the post World War II years to stop dirty dancing and kill the emerging black music behind it—rhythm & blues. E-book in all platforms.
Mill Town Murder: Photo Essay
- On the morning of Sept. 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, S.C., friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded. The bloody riot at the town’s cotton mill shaped the lives of two generations to follow—not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. E-book available on all platforms.
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