Frank Beacham's Journal

On this day — 54 years ago — the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago

Police and demonstrators clash at the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Photo by Les Sintay

On this day — 54 years ago — the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago.

I was 20 years old, a college journalism student working for WIS-TV News in Columbia, S.C. Somehow, I convinced the station to send me to Chicago to cover the convention with my boss, Jim Covington.

The coming week would change my life, not to mention get me out of college a year early. After Chicago, the University of South Carolina journalism school gave me a full year’s credit for the one week experience.

As the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, thousands of antiwar demonstrators took to Chicago's streets to protest the Vietnam War and its support by the top Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

An antiwar faction led by Senators Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota) and George McGovern (D-South Dakota) advocated unconditionally halting the bombing of North Vietnam; negotiating a mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam; encouraging the Saigon regime to open negotiations with the National Liberation Front; the acceptance of a coalition government; and the reduction of U.S. combat operations in the South.

The other faction endorsed the Johnson administration's handling of the war, applauding the president's efforts to scale down U.S. commitment and begin peace talks.

During the four-day convention — the most violent in U.S. history — police and National Guardsmen clashed with protesters outside the International Amphitheater, and hundreds of people, including innocent bystanders, were beaten by the Chicago police.

The violence even spilled into the convention hall, as guards roughed up delegates and members of the press, including CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace, who was punched in the face.

On August 29, Humphrey secured the nomination and the convention ended.

The convention opened my eyes in many ways. I was in S.C. Gov. Robert McNair's hotel suite when Humphrey selected Edmund Muskie as his running mate, overlooking McNair. The young South Carolina governor had been tainted by his deceptions involving the Orangeburg Massacre and its cover-up.

I also was later in a small room with Humphrey — always the "happy warrior" on television — cursing up a storm. I couldn't believe I was seeing this happen. It was one wild, “coming of age” week.

In the convention's aftermath, a federal commission investigating the convention described one of the confrontations as a "police riot" and blamed Chicago Mayor Richard Daley for inciting his police to violence.

Nevertheless, eight political activists, called the "Chicago Eight,” were arrested on charges of conspiring to incite the violence, and in 1969 their trial began in Chicago, sparking new waves of protests in the city.

We were using a very heavy Auricon 16mm film camera that summer to shoot footage in the streets of Chicago. One day upon going out, I saw a Japanese video crew with a small portable Sony Portapak, the first portable video system ever made. It’s light-weight made a huge impression on me. A few years later, I bought one and launched my own career in video.

Also working in the Chicago streets that summer was Haskell Wexler, the late cinematographer. He was shooting Medium Cool, which was released a year later. It starred Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill and Harold Blankenship and took place during the convention.

It was notable for Wexler's use of cinema vérité-style documentary filmmaking techniques, as well as for combining fictional and non-fictional content. That film became a vital part of my own film education.

In 2003, Medium Cool was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

The year 1968 was an amazing time to be 20 years old. I feel lucky to have experienced the 1968 convention and all the other now historical events of that remarkable year. Looking back, it was clearly the most significant year of my life. It was the time I came of age.

In the below picture, taken on the opening night of the convention 54 years ago, is (left to right), me, Jim Covington, Don Fowler (later chairman of the National Democratic Party from 1995-97) and political journalist, Lee Bandy.

My friend, Jim Covington, and I were reminiscing about attending the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He told me an interesting story that I had never heard before.

Security was almost non-existent in the 1960s. The convention credentials we were issued back then were one of the early uses of embedded data on a large scale. To get into the convention, we were issued plastic ID cards.

As we entered the convention floor, we stuck the end of the card into a reader to verify that it was valid. Obviously, the data on it didn’t include the user’s name because we traded and borrowed cards to freely enter the convention. Like, I said, security was very weak in those days.

When Jim returned home to Columbia, South Carolina, he had his convention card in his wallet. He encountered a new card-operated electronic gate at the Columbia Hospital, one of the first in the city to have such technology.

He didn’t have a card to open the gate, so he stuck the convention card into the hospital gate machine. He was surprised when it opened. Apparently, the data on those cards was very, very basic.

It would be another year, before the magnetic stripe credit card was invented.

In 1969, Forrest Parry, an IBM engineer, had the idea of securing a piece of magnetic tape, the predominant storage medium at the time, to a plastic card base. He became frustrated because every adhesive he tried produced unacceptable results. The tape strip either warped or its characteristics were affected by the adhesive, rendering the tape strip unreadable.

After a frustrating day in the lab trying to find the right adhesive, he came home with several pieces of magnetic tape and several plastic cards. As he walked in the door at home, his wife Dorothea was ironing clothing.

When he explained the source of his frustration: inability to get the tape to "stick" to the plastic in a way that would work, she suggested that he use the iron to melt the stripe on. He tried it and it worked.

The heat of the iron was just high enough to bond the tape to the card.

The credit card was soon invented.

Life got far more difficult after that.

Chicago 1968: The Whole World is Watching

Crosby, Still and Nash perform "Chicago"

Joe Hill was sentenced to be executed in Utah on July 18, 1914 — 108 years ago today

Convicted of murder on meager evidence, Joe Hill, the singing Wobbly, was sentenced to be executed in Utah on July 18, 1914 — 108 years ago today.

A native of Sweden who immigrated to the U.S. in 1879, Hill joined the International Workers of the World (IWW) in 1910. The IWW was an industrial union that rejected the capitalist system and dreamed one day of leading a national workers' revolution.

Members of the IWW — known as Wobblies — were especially active in the western United States, where they enjoyed considerable success in organizing mistreated and exploited workers in the mining, logging and shipping industries.

Beginning in 1908, the IWW began encouraging its membership to express their beliefs through song. The group published its Little Red Song Book, otherwise known as the I.W.W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.

A few years later, the witty and handsome Joe Hill became one of the Wobblies' leading singers and songwriters. Hill composed many of the IWW's best-loved anthems, including "The Preacher of the Slave" which introduced the phrase "pie in the sky."

By 1915, Hill was one of the most famous Wobblies in the nation. Public notoriety, however, could prove dangerous for a radical union man. In 1915, Hill was arrested and charged with murdering two Salt Lake City policemen during a grocery store robbery.

Although the evidence against Hill was tenuous, a jury of conservative Utahans convicted him on this day in 1914 and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad the following year.

Ever since, scholars have debated whether Hill was actually guilty or was railroaded because of his radical politics. Regardless of his guilt or innocence, Hill became a powerful martyr for the IWW cause by telegramming his comrades with a famous last-minute message: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."

Here, Joan Baez performs Earl Robinson’s “Joe Hill” at Woodstock, 1969

Joe Hill's body was rushed from the prison yard in Utah to Chicago, where the Industrial Workers of the World staged a funeral. More than 30,000 people attended the ceremony.

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 103 years ago today

William Kunstler and his daughter, Sarah, is shown in 1977. Sarah and her sister, Emily, wrote and directed the film about their father.

Photo by Maddy Miller

William Kunstler: A Personal Remembrance

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 103 years ago today.

Kunstler was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country."

Kunstler's defense of the "Chicago Seven" from 1969–1970 led The New York Times to label him "the country's most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer ..."

Kunstler is also well known for defending members of the Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters and the American Indian Movement.

I remember William Kunstler for another reason. He was a wonderful poet. Once I attended a poetry reading in his New York City apartment.

As a reviewer wrote of his poems, “like most things William Kunstler does, his poems rattle the foundations of venerable American institutions.”

Kunstler won a lot of major cases, but I was impressed by his creative abilities as a poet. He saw the world in a unique way and expressed it vividly in his poems.

In fact, one his clients and closest friends was the poet, Dylan Thomas, who he had met while majoring in French literature at Yale. Kunstler became an expert on Thomas’s work and was called the night the poet drank himself to death at the White Horse Tavern in New York City.

In late 1995, Kunstler died in New York City of heart failure at the age of 76.

On this day in 1964 — 58 years ago — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House

On this day in 1964 — 58 years ago — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.

In the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The ten years that followed saw great strides for the African-American civil rights movement — as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause.

Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 — sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman — and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech at a rally of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963.

As the strength of the civil rights movement grew, John F. Kennedy made passage of a new civil rights bill one of the platforms of his successful 1960 presidential campaign. As Kennedy's vice president, Johnson served as chairman of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities.

After Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, Johnson vowed to carry out his proposals for civil rights reform. The Civil Rights Act fought tough opposition in the House and a lengthy, heated debate in the Senate before being approved in July, 1964.

For the signing of the historic legislation, Johnson invited hundreds of guests to a televised ceremony in the White House's East Room. After using more than 75 pens to sign the bill, he gave them away as mementoes of the historic occasion, according to tradition.

One of the first pens went to King, leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who called it one of his most cherished possessions. Johnson gave two more to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican managers of the bill in the Senate.

The most sweeping civil rights legislation passed by Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public places such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools.

In addition, the bill laid important groundwork for a number of other pieces of legislation — including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which set strict rules for protecting the right of African Americans to vote — that have since been used to enforce equal rights for women as well as all minorities.

Sadly, the legislation would probably have never passed without the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.

Ramsey Clark, the later Attorney General who worked during the Kennedy Administration for Robert F. Kennedy, told me in an interview that the legislation was so unpopular when Kennedy was alive it never could have passed on his watch.

It was after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Clark said, that Johnson was able to push through the legislation as a tribute to the slain leader.

Thanks History.com

Just after 3 a.m. — 53 years ago today — a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street, turned violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the police

Just after 3 a.m. — 53 years ago today — a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street, turned violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the police.

New York City’s gay community had grown weary of the police department targeting gay clubs, a majority of which had already been closed. The crowd on the street watched quietly as Stonewall's employees were arrested, but when three drag queens and a lesbian were forced into the paddy wagon, the crowd began throwing bottles at the police.

The police were forced to take shelter inside the establishment, and two policemen were slightly injured before reinforcements arrived for an attempt to disperse the mob. The protest, however, spilled over into the neighboring streets. Quiet came only after New York’s riot police arrived.

The Stonewall Riot was followed by several days of demonstrations in New York and was the impetus for the formation of the Gay Liberation Front as well as other gay, lesbian and bisexual civil rights organizations. It is also regarded by many as history's first major protest on behalf of equal rights for homosexuals.

Now, gay marriage is the law of the land. A year ago, the Stonewall Inn received official landmark status from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission for its role as the catalyst of the LGBT movement.

Last year, then President Obama formally recognized that history, declaring the Greenwich Village bar and its surrounding area the Stonewall National Monument, and creating the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the gay rights movement.

The White House said the monument designation will consist of 7.7 acres, protecting the tavern, Christopher Park across the street and several other streets and sidewalks where spontaneous protests were held for equal rights in 1969.

“The Stonewall Uprising is considered by many to be the catalyst that launched the modern L.G.B.T. civil rights movement,” the president wrote in a proclamation announcing the monument’s establishment.

“From this place and time, building on the work of many before, the nation started the march — not yet finished — toward securing equality and respect for L.G.B.T. people.”

The Tragic Story of Iona Cannon

The Tragic Story of Iona Cannon

I saw Sue Cannon Hill for the first time on television. Her grief-stricken words in the documentary, The Uprising of ’34, upset me.

Teary and emotionally fragile, she told in a gripping interview how the management at the local textile mill — led by my grandfather — had nearly destroyed her family.

But when she spoke his name, she put a knife through me. I’d never heard my family name spoken that way. “Beacham,” she said, dripping with disdain.

To her, it was the name of a mass murderer, the man who killed her father, Claude Cannon, and destroyed her mother. It was a name she’d never forget...or forgive.

In late 1994, I was planning to return to South Carolina for the Christmas holidays. I wrote a letter to Sue Hill, telling her who I was. I apologized for what my grandfather had done.

I told her I had been surprised to learn what happened to her father and mother, and wanted to know more. I asked what I could do to make things right. Would she allow me to visit? Could we talk about it?

A couple of weeks went by before I heard back from her. I later learned that she, like others I had written at the time, saw the name “Beacham” in the return address of my envelope and had been unable to open the letter.

Finally, after a few days, their curiosity won out. One of her friends told Sue that my letter to her had been harmless, and it might be okay after all to read what I had sent.

A relieved, but hesitant, Sue Hill called and invited me to her home during the Christmas holiday.

As I approached the sprawling modern ranch house where Sue now lived with her husband, I couldn’t help but be surprised at how far she had come from the days of living in poverty with her mother on Chiquola’s mill hill.

Sue had married a prosperous businessman, I was told, and this home — one of the nicest in town — fronted fifty acres of land with two private ponds.

I was ushered into a huge, rectangular living room with a panoramic rear view of the extended rural landscape. Sue’s greeting was gracious, but I sensed that she was not comfortable. Neither was I. We were both walking on egg shells.

As we seated ourselves across from each other on comfortable sofas at one end of the room, the Southern tradition of beginning a visit with small talk seemed terribly inappropriate.

I knew Sue wanted to know why I was there, and decided it was best to get to the point right away.

I never knew Dan Beacham and was not there to defend him. He was a mystery to me, I told her, and she probably knew more about him than I did. I was horrified by what he had apparently done, and wanted to learn the truth about him.

I wanted her to tell me what she knew — warts and all. I wanted to record it on a tape recorder, I told her, so that I didn’t miss a word of her story.

She agreed, I clumsily set up the recorder, and we began what was to be a wrenching afternoon.

After Claude Cannon’s death at the mill, Sue’s mother, Iona Cannon, found herself with no job, six young children to raise and an eviction notice ordering her to vacate her mill-owned home. Because Honea Path was a one employer town, there was no option of finding alternative work there.

Mrs. Cannon, who had no money to relocate, had a simple choice: either lose her home, or go back to work for the very men responsible for killing her husband.

Even more humiliating, she would be allowed to resume her job at the Chiquola Mill only after she pledged to never again utter the word “union.”

The pain in Sue's face was vivid as she recalled the extraordinary grief her mother had endured and was forced to conceal throughout most of her life.

“Can you imagine waking up one day with no husband, no job and six children staring you in the face? Not knowing where your next meal is coming from. That’s what my mom faced.”

While at least one of the Chiquola widows placed her children in an orphanage, Sue said her mother chose to keep her family together.

First, that meant taking a job at the mill — and the oath of silence that came with it. “They talked to her like they wanted to. They told her to either take the job on their terms or leave.”

I asked Sue what it was like at home in those days. Did her mother ever talk about what happened to their father at the mill? No, she responded, Iona Cannon’s grief played out not in words, but in actions — sometimes bizarre actions.

One was a morbid habit. At night, Mrs. Cannon often sat quietly for hours at home clenching the blood-soaked clothes her husband wore at the time of his death. She stopped only after Sue’s brother, Marvin — who could no longer endure the routine — took his father’s tattered garments and buried them in a nearby field.

Even then, Mrs. Cannon refused to let go. She searched the ground near her home, digging in various spots in a fruitless effort to recover the clothes.

Then Sue told me about the infamous “bleeding sidewalk.”

Sue Hill’s father, Claude Canon, was killed on a Honea Path sidewalk across the street from the Chiquola Mill’s main entrance on Sept. 6, 1934.

After being shot three times in the back and twice in the hand, he bled profusely, leaving an immense blood stain in the concrete.

Over time, Sue told me, the stain faded and was barely visible — except when the sidewalk was wet. “When it rained the blood stain would come back a dark, copper-looking color. A lot of people came to look at the ‘bleeding sidewalk’ when it rained. The neighbors complained, but the mill wouldn’t do anything.”

Then, about eight years after the shooting, the two sections of stained concrete were quietly removed. Honea Path’s legendary “bleeding sidewalk” was suddenly no more.

It didn’t matter to Iona Cannon, who, after her husband’s killing, never set foot on that sidewalk again. “We had no car and walked everywhere. Whenever we went into town, mom refused to use that sidewalk,” Sue said.

“She would take us a back way behind the mill through the weeds and we’d cross the railroad tracks to get into town. Only when I was grown did I understand that she didn’t want to walk where daddy was killed.”

Even with Iona’s mill job, the family faced years of poverty and near starvation. “I saw mom diluting a can of Carnation milk with water to make cornbread to feed six children,” Sue said, unable to hold back the tears. “It must have been hard for her knowing we were going hungry.”

At this point, Sue began to sob. Crying has always unnerved me. I felt guilt for making her tell this story. Should I leave? No, I thought, I’ll just wait.

We sat quietly. Time froze. It seemed like hours went by. When Sue recovered, I asked if she felt like going on. Yes, she said. Her mother would want this story told.

And it was only because I had apologized for the actions of my grandfather, she said, that she decided to see me at all. No one else from the side of the mill’s management had ever expressed remorse. Not in more than 60 years. She was determined to go on.

Composed for the moment, the story continued.

On rare occasions, there was unexpected help. Iona would hear a knock on the front door. When she answered, no one would be there. On the porch, however, she’d find several bags of groceries. Though the family never found out who left the food, Iona suspected it was the man witnesses said shot her husband.

“There had to be some sleepless nights for these people,” Sue said. “If there weren’t, then they didn’t have a conscience. I don’t know how these people that did the shooting — for jobs or money or whatever — lived with themselves.

“They shot people whose kids went to the same school with their kids. They shared the same benches in church with the family members of the ones they killed. They watched as the families of these workers nearly starved, living on beans and fat meat or whatever they could find. I think many of them suffered for it the rest of their lives.”

About four years after the Chiquola violence, Tom Stallcup, one of the deputized workers who shot at strikers from a mill window, visited Mrs. Cannon.

Stallcup told the widow he was ashamed of his role in the shooting and asked her for forgiveness. “He told her he couldn’t live right until he made it right with her,” Sue said.

Did Stallcup, I asked, tell Mrs. Cannon who gave the order to fire at the workers? Yes, Sue said, her mother had asked that very question.

“Dan Beacham,” Stallcup had answered. Not only did Dan Beacham give the order for the men to shoot, Stallcup said, but the mill superintendent told the deputized gunmen to kill every striker they could, no matter who it might be.

“Mr. Stallcup seemed to have a lot of trouble with this through the years,” Sue said.

Iona Cannon died at age sixty-four, never discussing the events at the mill outside of her own home.

“Some days she’d talk about it. Other days she wouldn’t. She never got over my father. Never,” Sue said. “But I never saw her show any hate…not one word against them.”

Sue Hill’s compelling story is part of my book, Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.

Sue Hill

Claude Cannon

Bleeding Sidewalk today

On this day in 1969 — 53 years ago today — students and community activists clashed with the police over a three-acre plot owned by the University of California, Berkeley

“If it takes a blood bath to silence the demonstrators,” the governor said, “let’s get it over with.”

That was Ronald Reagan, who as governor of California took a hard line on protests against the Vietnam War, which coincided with a strengthening right-wing movement in the state. As he sought re-election, a riot in Berkeley helped advance his political career.

On this day in 1969 — 53 years ago today — students and community activists clashed with the police over a three-acre plot owned by the University of California, Berkeley. What began as a disagreement over use of the land — a site known as People’s Park — resulted in the most violent confrontation in the university’s history. It was a day that became known as Bloody Thursday.

Reagan responded by sending in the National Guard.

Berkeley has long been a center of cultural disputes and civil unrest. The Free Speech Movement began there during the 1964-65 academic year, and protests erupted on its campus this year over planned appearances by the right-wing activists Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter.

Those recent controversies have shined the spotlight on a debate over freedom of expression.

Thanks, New York Times!

In the above Associated Press photo from 53 years ago in Berkeley, National Guard troops watched from behind a fence

At Kent State University on this day in 1970 — 52 years ago — 100 National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a group of students. Four were killed and eleven wounded

At Kent State University on this day in 1970 — 52 years ago — 100 National Guardsmen fired their rifles into a group of students. Four were killed and eleven wounded.

This incident occurred in the aftermath of President Richard Nixon's April 30 announcement that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had been ordered to execute an "incursion" into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases there. In protest, a wave of demonstrations and disturbances erupted on college campuses across the country.

At Kent State University in Ohio, student protesters torched the ROTC building on campus and Ohio Governor James Rhodes responded by calling on the National Guard to restore order.

Under harassment from the demonstrators, the Guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing four and wounding eleven. The Guardsmen were later brought to trial for the shootings, but found not guilty.

President Nixon issued a statement deploring the Kent State deaths, but said that the incident should serve as a reminder that, "When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy." The shooting sparked hundreds of protests and college shutdowns, as well as a march on Washington, D.C., by 100,000 people.

The National Student Association and former Vietnam Moratorium Committee leaders called for a national university strike of indefinite duration, beginning immediately, to protest the war. At least 100 colleges and universities pledged to strike. The presidents of 37 universities signed a letter urging President Nixon to show more clearly his determination to end the war.

Thanks History.com

Neil Young performs "Ohio," 2010

A 60 Minutes piece on the shooting at Kent State, 1977

With the Rodney King beating 31 years ago, video technology began to reveal the long and dirty history of police brutality in the United States

Rodney King is beaten by policemen

Video technology began to reveal the long and dirty history of police brutality in the United States 31 years ago today.

At 12:45 a.m. on March 3, 1991, robbery parolee Rodney G. King stopped his car after leading police on a nearly eight-mile pursuit through the streets of Los Angeles.

The chase began after King, who was intoxicated, was caught speeding on a freeway by a California Highway Patrol cruiser but refused to pull over.

Los Angeles Police Department cruisers and a police helicopter joined the pursuit, and when King was finally stopped by Hansen Dam Park, several police cars descended on his white Hyundai.

A group of LAPD officers led by Sergeant Stacey Koon ordered King and the other two occupants of the car to exit the vehicle and lie flat on the ground. King’s two friends complied, but King himself was slower to respond, getting on his hands and knees rather than lying flat.

Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Ted Briseno and Roland Solano tried to force King down, but he resisted, and the officers stepped back and shot King twice with an electric stun gun known as a Taser, which fires darts carrying a charge of 50,000 volts.

At this moment, civilian George Holliday, standing on a balcony in an apartment complex across the street, focused the lens of his new video camera on the commotion unfolding by Hansen Dam Park.

In the first few seconds of what would become a very famous 89-second video, King is seen rising after the Taser shots and running in the direction of Officer Powell.

The officers alleged that King was charging Powell, while King himself later claimed that an officer told him, “We’re going to kill you, nigger. Run!” and he tried to flee. All the arresting officers were white, along with all but one of the other two dozen or so law enforcement officers present at the scene.

Unaware that the arrest was videotaped, the officers downplayed the level of violence used to arrest King and filed official reports in which they claimed he suffered only cuts and bruises “of a minor nature.”

George Holliday sold his video of the beating to the local television station, KTLA, which broadcast the footage and sold it to CNN. The widely broadcast video caused outrage around the country and triggered a national debate on police brutality.

Rodney King was released without charges, and on March 15 Sergeant Koon and officers Powell, Wind, and Briseno were indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury in connection with the beating. All four were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force by a police officer. An all white jury found the officers not guilty.

The acquittals touched off rioting and looting in Los Angeles that grew into the most destructive U.S. civil disturbance of the 20th century. In three days of violence, more than 50 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured and nearly $1 billion in property was destroyed.

Under federal law, the officers could also be prosecuted for violating Rodney King’s constitutional rights, and on April 17, 1993, a federal jury convicted two of the officers for violating King’s rights by their unreasonable use of force under color of law.

They were sentenced to two and half years in prison and King received $3.8 million in a civil suit against the Los Angeles police department.

Since the King attack, video has been used to reveal dozens of unwarranted police attacks. With the advent of the iPhone, now it is hard not have some video of police beatings.

The Orangeburg Massacre in Orangeburg, South Carolina resulted in three black college students and 27 being wounded by white highway patrolmen in South Carolina. The state covered up the crime and to this day it has not been investigated. No doubt, had there been video, the white highway patrolmen would not have gotten away with murder.

Thanks History.com

The Orangeburg Massacre happened 54 years ago today

White highway patrolmen take aim at black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Feb. 8, 1968 — 54 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 — 54 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, knew 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 54 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