Frank Beacham's Journal

On producing a radio drama on The Orangeburg Massacre

Blair Underwood taping a segment of the Orangeburg Massacre on the top of a Hollywood parking garage

Photo by Frank Beacham

In 1990, the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, advertised a program where individuals could apply for a $5,000 grant to do an art project.

I applied to produce a radio drama of the Orangeburg Massacre and won.

The massacre is the 1968 story of an act of racism in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a small Southern town where two black colleges — South Carolina State and Claflin — are located.

The saga began as a peaceful protest by frustrated black college students who were denied use of the Orangeburg community’s only bowling alley.

However, 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 on the S.C. state campus — 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.

The killings occurred in a southern state that proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the predominately black South Carolina State College (now university) in Orangeburg.

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.

At first, the people of South Carolina believed it. Time, however, would unravel the state’s story. By then, the cover-up had gone on 25 years. The story is as old as the South itself — one where stubborn whites will not face up to their own racism.

Mayor Bradley, who was African-American, apparently liked the pitch. I got the grant and went straight to work on the script, which I adapted from a 1971 book by Jack Nelson and Jack Bass. I had yet to write my own book on the subject. In additional to writing the script and I would also direct the show.

Peggy Webber would produce and helped put together a terrific group of major radio, television and film actors through her California Artists Radio Theatre.

We got James Whitmore, of Harry S. Truman’s “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” fame, to play S.C. Gov. Robert McNair. Parley Baer, who was “Chester” on the radio version of Gunsmoke and the mayor of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, played S.C. SLED chief and the story’s major villain, Pete Strom.

Other actors included Ford Rainey, Royal Dano, Bill Erwin, Robert Rockwell, Lou Krugman, Vance Colvig and Ellerine Harding.

As a passenger on a flight from New York City to LA, I found myself sitting next to Blair Underwood, a then 20-something African-American actor who had a role on LA Law, a primetime television show.

Today, Underwood is 57 years old and has had an excellent career since I met him. On the flight, Underwood was friendly and we talked. I told him about The Orangeburg Massacre and how I had gotten a grant for a radio production from the city of Los Angeles. I asked if he’d consider appearing in it.

He immediately said yes, and also readily agreed to work for scale. He would play John Stroman, the man who wanted to bowl and had started the demonstration that began the entire Orangeburg dispute.

Later, Underwood’s agent tried to torpedo the deal. The money was so low that he would make nothing. But Underwood himself overruled the agent and did the show against his wishes since he had made me a promise.

I appreciated that. Blair Underwood was a man of his word, and I've always admired him because of his position with that agent.

I needed one more actor. This one would play me — the story’s narrator.

I had a friend who knew and suggested David Carradine, who had acted in the TV series, King Fu. He gave me his phone number.

I called Carradine and he agreed for a price of $400, all the beer he could drink and a ride to and from his home to the recording studio. I agreed, and our project was fully cast.

We recorded The Orangeburg Massacre documentary-style at several real locations, with only the narration recorded in a studio. Instead of a camera, we used a Neumann stereo microphone and a digital audio recorder.

For the sounds of a bowling alley, we visited a real bowling alley to get its natural sound and ambience. For the outdoor demonstrations, we got the city’s sounds by using the top of a parking garage at Sunset-Gower studios after hours. We recorded certain scenes at James Whitmore’s home over the beach in Malibu.

The talent we brought together worked very quickly. We finished the entire show in several days. Everything went flawlessly. It usually does when you work with professionals. In about a week, we finished the editing. The show was quickly picked up by public radio and aired nationally.

The Orangeburg Massacre radio drama won the Gold Medal for Best History Program and Silver Medal for Best Social Issues Program in the international radio programming competition at the 1991 New York Festivals.

The winners — selected from nearly 1800 international entries from 28 countries — were chosen by juries assembled in the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

When the show had its run, we retired it rather than have to continue to pay residuals to the actors. Everyone in the cast agreed to donate the program to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Mississippi where it could be heard, but not sold at a profit. It resides there today.

My story, The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre, is part of the fourth edition of my compilation of Southern stories in, Whitewash — A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.

Robert Redford is 85 years old today

Robert Redford is 85 years old today.

An actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Redford has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010, he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur.

At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. Redford's career — like that of almost all major stars who emerged in the 1950s — began in New York, where an actor could find work both in television and on stage.

Starting in 1959, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including The Untouchables, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate and The Twilight Zone. He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962).

One of his last television appearances was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.

Redford's Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story (1959), followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963).

While still largely an unknown, Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), co-starring with John Saxon in a film set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the debuts of director Sydney Pollack, with whom Redford would later collaborate, and actor Tom Skerritt.

After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. He was cast alongside screen legend Alec Guinness in the war comedy, Situation Hopeless ... But Not Serious, in which he played a soldier who has to spend years of his life hiding behind enemy lines.

In Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which won him a Golden Globe for best new star, he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood, and rejoined her along with Charles Bronson for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966) — again as her lover, though this time in a film which achieved even greater success.

The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. This film marked the only time Redford would star with Marlon Brando.

Fonda and Redford were paired again in the popular big screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967) and were again co-stars much later in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).

After this initial success, Redford became concerned about his blond male stereotype image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman.

The film was a huge success and made him a major bankable star, cementing his screen image as an intelligent, reliable and sometimes sardonic good guy.

His overall career flourished with the critical and box office hit Jeremiah Johnson (1972); the political satire, The Candidate (1972); the hugely popular period drama The Way We Were (1973); and the biggest hit of his career; the blockbuster crime caper, The Sting (1973), which became one of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time when adjusted for inflation. It was also nominated for an Oscar.

Between 1974 and 1976, exhibitors voted Redford Hollywood's top box-office name. His hits included The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), and Three Days of the Condor (1975). The popular and acclaimed All the President's Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula and scripted once again by Goldman, was a landmark film for Redford.

Not only was he the executive producer and co-star, but the film's serious subject matter — the Watergate scandal — and its attempt to create a realistic portrayal of journalism also reflected the actor's offscreen concerns for political causes.

He also starred in a segment of the war film, A Bridge Too Far (1977), the prison drama, Brubaker (1980), playing a prison warden attempting to reform the system, and the fantasy baseball drama, The Natural (1984).

Redford continued his involvement in mainstream Hollywood movies, though with a newfound focus on directing. The first film he directed, Ordinary People, which followed the disintegration of an upper class American family after the death of a son, was one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed films of the decade, winning a number of Oscars, including the Academy Award for best director for Redford himself.

His follow-up directorial project, The Milagro Beanfield War (1987), failed to generate the same level of attention.

Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), with Redford in the male lead role opposite Meryl Streep, became an enormous critical and box office success and won seven Oscars including Best Picture, proving to be Redford's biggest success of the decade and Redford and Pollack's most successful of their six movies together.

Redford continued as a major star throughout the 1990s and 2000s. With the financial proceeds of his acting success, starting with his salaries from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Downhill Racer, Redford bought an entire ski area on the east side of Mount Timpanogos northeast of Provo, Utah, called "Timp Haven,” which was renamed "Sundance.”

He founded the Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute, Sundance Cinemas, Sundance Catalog and the Sundance Channel, all in and around Park City, Utah, 30 miles north of the Sundance ski area.

The Sundance Film Festival caters to independent filmmakers in the United States and has received recognition from the industry as a place to open films.

Hipsters: Real vs. Fake

Hipsters: Real vs. Fake

It makes my skin crawl whenever I hear a young person refer to his or herself as a “hipster.”

Not only do most people today not even understand what the term means, but they live in a corporate-infused world where it is now almost impossible to be truly hip.

The New York Times recently wrote about the origins of the word hipster, which might help to explain to those who don’t understand the history of the word and how it has changed over time.

Though the word has been in use for a long time, the Times credits the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem for making the term popular. In the 40s, a Bronx-born, Juilliard-trained musician, Harry Raab, helped popularize the word with his stage name: Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. His big hit was “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine.”

At the time, “hipster” was used to describe someone who saw him or herself as hip and ahead of the curve, Lewis Porter, a jazz historian at Rutgers University, told the Times.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is also thought to be a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning in jazz circles.

Porter added that the word might also have been used to describe white jazz musicians like Gibson, who played in traditionally black clubs. “That certainly was not its original meaning, but that could have become attached to it later on,” he said.

In his 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer examined beatnik culture, posing the theory that to be a hipster was to be a white American who adopted black culture, world views and music as an act of rebellion against capitalist greed, wartime violence and the ever-present specter of nuclear war.

Hipster was used to refer to members of the Beat Generation, who virtually all defied and criticized the white, capitalist establishment culture of the 1950s. All lived cheaply and outside the scope of mainstream consumerism. Virtually all true hipsters observed the counter culture ethics of the 1960s.

Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality.” Near the beginning of his poem, Howl, Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

The New York Times said it has used the word “hipster” more than 3,000 times since 1851. Yet, the newspaper said, the bulk of those references came after the year 2000, when most of the people who used the term were only wannabes.

The Times said it typically used the word to describe a class of people who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The problem with that, of course, is that if one could afford to live in Brooklyn after the boom, they were not genuine hipsters.

Today, the hipster subculture is composed of affluent or middle class youth who reside primarily in gentrifying neighborhoods. It is broadly associated with indie and alternative music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, vintage and thrift store-bought clothing, generally progressive political views, organic and artisanal foods and alternative lifestyles.

The subculture typically consists of white millennials living in urban areas. Often the world hipster is now used as a pejorative term to describe someone who is pretentious, overly trendy or effete.

In Rob Horning's April, 2009 article, The Death of the Hipster, he wrote that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics."

Of all places, Time magazine, described the modern hipster phenomenon in a July, 2009 article:

“Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.”

One of the benefits of getting older is being able to easily see through the pretensions of youth. Whenever someone living in a major city like New York tells you today he or she is a “hipster,” run for the hills. Fraud is written all over them.

Thanks New York Times!

Above, is Harry “the Hipster” Gibson

Photo by William P. Gottlieb

On being arrested by Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega

Manuel Noriega: A Personal Remembrance

Manuel Noriega died four years ago today in Panama City at the age of 83. He had been in intensive care after complications developed from surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. At the time, he was still in prison, but had been granted house arrest to prepare for the operation.

A remembrance of Noriega is permanently seared into my mind. I will never forget him.

On Panama’s Contadora Island in 1979, while covering the late Shah of Iran for NBC News, I was arrested by Noriega, then Panama’s chief of military intelligence. It was early morning, and I exited the shower to find Noriega in the bathroom pointing an Uzi submachine gun at me. He ordered me to get dressed and then drove me in a jeep to a government-owned house on the island.

He said I was using a walkie-talkie that interfered with his private frequency. The walkie-talkie, which I bought in a gift shop on the island, was being used to communicate with the rest of my crew.

I apologized, but Noriega was having none of it. He made me and the other crew members he had also arrested sit on a couch and look at his porno magazines, while hysterically laughing at us. It became clear quickly that Noriega was a real sicko.

Time dragged by as we quietly waited, having no idea of our fate with this madman. Later that day, he took us in his jeep to the island’s airstrip. Our bags, removed from our rooms and hastily packed by his forces, were waiting there for us. We were told to board the plane and were flown back to Miami.

After returning to NBC’s offices in Miami, the phone rang and it was the president of Panama, General Omar Torrijos calling. Torrijos profusely apologized for Noriega’s actions to Don Browne, NBC’s bureau chief, and invited us back to Contadora Island to complete coverage of the Shah’s vacation stay there.

He absolutely promised no more trouble. Anxious to make the money on this lucrative job, I agreed to return with my crew. (Yes, I was VERY stupid back in those days!)

But first, when we arrived back in Panama, we visited Gen. Torrijos, who warmly welcomed us back to his country. He asked if I could deliver a box of Cuban cigars to his friend, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who liked them.

Each cigar had a band that had the words General Torrijos printed on it — a personal gift from Fidel Castro. I promised to send the cigars — illegal in the United States — to Kennedy when we returned. (That was not without skimming off the top row for myself!)

The rest of our trip on Contadora Island was without incident and we returned home a week and a half later.

A footnote to this story: Gen. Torrijos died in a plane accident on July 31, 1981. Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera, a former associate of Noriega, claimed that the actual cause for the accident was a bomb and that Noriega was behind the incident.

Somehow, I was never surprised by this. Noriega became the defacto leader of the country before his arrest.

Barry Commoner was born 104 years ago today

Barry Commoner was born 104 years ago today.

A biologist, college professor and politician, Commoner was a leading ecologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement. He ran for president of the United States in the 1980 U.S. presidential election on the Citizens Party ticket. He served as editor of Science Illustrated magazine.

Born in Brooklyn, Commoner received his bachelor's degree in zoology from Columbia University in 1937 and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1938 and 1941, respectively.

In the late 1950s, he became well known for his opposition to nuclear weapons testing, becoming part of the team which conducted the Baby Tooth Survey. It demonstrated the presence of Strontium 90 in children's teeth as a direct result of nuclear fallout.

Commoner went on to write several books about the negative ecological effects of atmospheric (i.e., above-ground) nuclear testing. In 1970, he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

In Poverty and Population, he wrote that rapid population growth of the developing world was the result of standards not being met. He argued that it is poverty that “initiates the rise in population” before leveling off — not the other way around.

Developing countries, he wrote, were introduced to the standards, but were never able to fully adopt them, thus not advancing and limiting their population growth. He described the reason why developing countries were still “forgotten” was due to colonialism. Developed countries were, and economically remain, “colonies of more developed countries.”

Because Western Nations introduced innovations such as roads, communications, engineering and agricultural and medical services as a part of using and exploiting the developing nation’s labor force and natural resources, the first step towards a “demographic transition” was met, but other stages were not, he wrote.

This did not happen, Commoner wrote, because the wealth that these developing countries created did not stay. It was “shipped out,” so to speak, and enabled the wealthier nations to achieve the different "levels of demographic transition,” while the colonies continued on without achieving the second stage, which is population balancing.

In his 1971 bestselling book, The Closing Circle, Commoner suggested that the American economy should be restructured to conform to the unbending laws of ecology. For example, he argued that polluting products (like detergents or synthetic textiles) should be replaced with natural products like soap, cotton and wool. This book was one of the first to bring the idea of sustainability to a mass audience.

Commoner suggested a left-wing, eco-socialist response to the limits to growth thesis, postulating that capitalist technologies were chiefly responsible for environmental degradation, as opposed to population pressures.

One of Commoner's lasting legacies is his four laws of ecology, as written in The Closing Circle in 1971. The four laws are:

1. Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, wrote Commoner, "likely to be detrimental to that system"

4. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.

Commoner died on September 30, 2012 in New York City.

Above, Commoner is shown in a classroom at Washington University, St. Louis, 1971

Photo by Jack Fahland

When the clock struck eight on the morning of April 6, 1921 — 100 years ago today — word went out across New York City for people to put down their drinks, or at least to finish them very quickly. Prohibition had begun

When the clock struck eight on the morning of April 6, 1921 — 100 years ago today — word went out across New York City for people to put down their drinks, or at least to finish them very quickly.

Prohibition had gone into effect nationwide in January, 1920, but to further persuade New Yorkers, Gov. Nathan L. Miller had pushed through a state law that made the city police responsible for enforcing the ban on alcohol.

Police officers were given orders to use all the force behind their uniforms to "put on the lid," The Times wrote that day.

The New York Times did not sound too eager to see the city wrung dry, writing, "There would be a dearth of alcoholic refreshment all over town."

McSorley's Ale House, the oldest saloon in the city, never had any real problems staying open and serving beer.

Joseph Mitchell wrote in The New Yorker in 1943: "McSorley's was never raided; the fact that it was patronized by a number of Tammany politicians and minor police officials probably gave it immunity."

Thanks New York Times!

Above photo of McSorley’s Ale House by Bernice Abbott

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Some observers, such as the late Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans has decreased as modern technology — especially the internet and television — has increased in volume.

Internet users, especially young ones, can move from web page to web page at astounding speed. Most now spend only seconds on the average website. So today, a major issue for modern media is how to capture and maintain a user’s attention.

Studies have shown that the neural pathways of seasoned internet users are altered as they experience heightened activity in their pre-frontal cortexes (the area of the brain that is mostly responsible for processing complex thoughts, personality expressions, decision making and social behavior).

However, this fundamental “re-wiring” of the human brain as a result of heightened internet use means that “we read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online,” said Nicholas Carr in his seminal Wired article from 2010.

Carr reported that it is not only the span and scope of information that is detrimental to our ability to focus, but the speed and simultaneity at which we are exposed to it.

Hyperlinks, advertisements, share buttons and cues to related content are just some of the distracting influences that drive users away from the seemingly simple act of reading and exploring, not to mention the constant pressure of open chat windows, email updates and social media connectivity.

The bottom line, Carr found, is that attention is a limited resource that must be used wisely on the internet to avoid superfluous visual pathways and exits.

Sadly, this trend subverts the very core idea that Tim Berners-Lee conceived in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

The genius of the WWW's hyperlinks was the ability for ordinary computer users to easily discover new places and ideas with a simple click of a computer mouse. The very randomness of discovery through hit and miss surfing is one of the endearing strengths of the web.

Like the best of travel — the kind where there's no preset agenda — open-minded people make personal discoveries through accident and sagacity. It's a modern version of serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

The issue of serendipity on the internet unexpectedly evolved into a major topic of discussion a few years ago at symposium at the Media Laboratory on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Sellars, a noted director of theater, opera and film, offered memorable insight on the subject.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars, "we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage, the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Thinking, creative people, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

We are only a few years into the science and art of web site design. Are most new web sites simply not complex, divided and multilayered enough to sustain a demanding audience?

Or, perhaps, is it that modern audiences are not as adventurous as they'd like to believe they are — quietly preferring the comfort of simplified, shorthand information delivery over a more demanding, thoughtful exchange of ideas?

These fundamental Internet questions are still on the table and have yet to be answered.

On February 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today — white highway patrolmen killed three black college students and wounded 27 others at South Carolina State College. A state-sanctioned murder, the cover-up still continues

White highway patrolmen take aim at black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Feb. 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today

Racism is a very ugly thing. It escalated in the era of Trump, usually disguised as a public safety issue against immigrants or open prejudice against countries that the president deemed inferior. It will take a long time to undo the damage.

In the 1950s and 60s, racism took another form. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.

Today, the only difference is that police and racial beatings are often caught on video made by bystanders with iPhones. Law enforcement can’t deny the video, and more and more policemen are brought to justice.

The federal government — though on-board to stop racism in the late 1960s — still played catch-up in going to court to address the many civil rights violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.

One of those glitches — this time over a segregated bowling alley — happened in 1968 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a town founded on slavery 400 years ago. The Ku Klux Klan and lynchings prevailed there during the Jim Crow years. But in 1968, before Kent State, there was the Orangeburg Massacre, the first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus.

On February 8, 1968 — 53 years ago today — white highway patrolmen killed three black college students and wounded 27 others at South Carolina State College. It was state-sanctioned murder and the cover-up still continues.

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.

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.

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 really a charade. Nonviolence in South Carolina 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.

In the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.

Ramsey Clark, who was U.S. Attorney General in 1968, knows the truth and minced no words in an interview with me about what happened there.

“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Clark. “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 told me 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.

So, after 53 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, racism 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 a half a century, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.

The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting is in my book, “Whitewash: A Southern Journey Through Music, Mayhem and Murder.”

Photo by Bill Barley

Ever wondered about the origins of the word “Cocktail?”

Ever wondered about the origins of the word “Cocktail?”

Apparently prospective horse sellers in England would give old or droopy specimens a rectal dose of ginger to make them cock their tails for a younger, zippier appearance.

From there it was just a short jump to alcoholic drinks that made humans perk up. The name stuck.

Thanks Dave Wondrich, a drinks historian, from the second edition of his reconstruction of mixed drinks, “Imbibe!,” and the New York Times.

Benjamin Franklin was born 315 years ago today.

Benjamin Franklin was born 315 years ago today.

One of the founding fathers of the United States and in many ways was "the First American," Franklin was a renowned polymath. He was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman and diplomat.

As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.

As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals and the Franklin stove, among other inventions.

Franklin facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia's fire department and a university. He earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity. He was an author and spokesman in London for several colonies and the first United States Ambassador to France.

Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment.

In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat."

To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."

Franklin, always proud of his working class roots, became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies. With two partners, he published the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies.

He became wealthy publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was also the printer of books for the Moravians of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1742 on).

Franklin's printed Moravian books (printed in German) are preserved, and can be viewed, at the Moravian Archives located in Bethlehem. Franklin visited Bethlehem many times and stayed at the Moravian Sun Inn. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society.

Franklin became a national hero in America when as agent for several colonies he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament in London repeal the unpopular Stamp Act.

An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. His efforts to secure support for the American Revolution by shipments of crucial munitions proved vital for the American war effort.

For many years, he was the British postmaster for the colonies, which enabled him to set up the first national communications network. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he freed his own slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential founding fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and the $100 bill; warships; the names of many towns; counties; educational institutions; corporations and countless cultural references.

In the above painting by Jason Heuser, Franklin battles Zeus for lightning