Frank Beacham's Journal

Orangeburg Massacre Remains Unresolved in South Carolina After 47 Years

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

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.

Audio Program

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.

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.

New Multimedia e-Books Reveal Little Known South Carolina Stories on the “Shag,” “Beach Music,” Racial Violence and Textile Labor Strife

A series of three new multimedia e-Books that focus on three little known historical events that helped define South Carolina in the last century are now available. All three were written by Frank Beacham.

The three separate eBooks, published by Vook in New York City, combine video, audio, photographs and text in a new kind of storytelling that work on a range if e-Book readers and personal computers (iPad, Kindle, Nook, Macintosh and PC). This state-of-the-art storytelling technology is available across platforms the first time this year.

The first e-Book, Charlie’s Place, examines the remarkable interracial collaboration in the segregated post-World War II years that led to the creation of South Carolina’s official state music (beach music) and dance (the shag).

The second e-Book, The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre, deals with the nearly 50-year legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre. The story centers on the killing of black college students in 1968 at South Carolina State College and the state’s continuing cover-up of the facts surrounding the shootings.

The third e-Book, Mill Town Murder, is  the author’s personal story of his grandfather’s involvement in the killing of seven mill workers in his hometown of Honea Path during the Textile Strike of 1934.

“Powerful forces have shaped and defined a sanitized version of Southern history,” said author Frank Beacham, now a New York City-based writer and media producer. “These eBooks, born of the frustration of learning more about my own history growing up in South Carolina, became an attempt to meet these distortions head-on by exploring my memories and answering some lingering questions.

“For years I have been collecting video, audio and photographs relating to these stories,” Beacham continued. “Now, for the first time, the technology exists to put all these elements together in a compelling way to tell their stories in a fuller way.”

The result of the Beacham’s work are three compelling new multimedia e-Books that destroy carefully constructed myths to reveal three extraordinary events that many influential Southerners would just as soon forget.

In addition to the three new multimedia e-Books, a new third print edition of Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder by Frank Beacham (ISBN:1591131871, Price: $15.00) has been released. The new edition of the print book contains all the updates for the three stories found in the individual multimedia e-Books without the audio, video and photographs. It can be purchased or ordered through major retail book outlets or online at: http://www.booklocker.com/books/939.html/.

In Charlie’s Place, Beacham tells 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.

He describes how a handful of adventurous young black & white dancers—with the help of a fearless black nightclub owner—risked life and limb in an era of racial segregation to create a bold new dance and an enduring Southern musical legacy. For the first time, the reader can see and hear these dance pioneers tell the story in their own words.

Included in the new multimedia edition are audio and video interviews and clips with such notables as Jerry Wexler, John R, Hoss Allen, Marion Carter, Leon Williams, George Lineberry, Harry Driver, Chicken Hicks, Bill Pinkney, Clarice Reavis, Bill Wingate, Billy Jeffers, Maurice Williams and Clifford Curry. There are also dozens of photographs included in the publication.

The new eBook and print versions also contain newly updated material from FBI records that offer far greater detail to the story than in previous editions.

The story evolved from a series of recorded interviews by the Beacham with many of the key figures credited with the creation of South Carolina’s state dance, the shag, and the state’s music, a sub-genre of rhythm and blues now called Carolina “beach music.”

In a vivid and newly detailed description, Beacham reconstructs the violent armed assault in 1950 by the Ku Klux Klan in an attempt to shut down “Charlie’s Place,” an influential Myrtle Beach night club where white and black dancers shared the dance floor and helped create what is now called the shag. The violence sprang from the aftermath of one of the state’s most openly racist political  campaigns, the 1950 U.S. Senate election between Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston.

“Young black and white South Carolinians—in a time of segregation—put their lives on the line to defy the state’s white establishment and create a genuine musical  legacy,” said Beacham. “An irony is that South Carolina’s government officials made the shag and beach music the official dance and music of the state without even understanding or noting it’s remarkable historical significance.”

Over the years, Beacham said, the state’s music and dance has almost completely been co-opted by Southern whites, leaving a new generation of blacks unaware of the cultural phenomenon they helped create. “It is sad that many young blacks in South Carolina have rejected beach music and the shag because they think the music has white-only roots. Years of racism and a lack of education have helped erase one of South Carolina’s most notable creative accomplishments,” Beacham said.

An act of racism in a small college town leads to peaceful protest by frustrated black students. The governor, elected on a platform of racial moderation, responds with a vast show of armed force.  Each side misreads the other, escalating the conflict.  Then, in a peak of emotional frenzy, nine white highway patrolmen open fire on the students. In less than ten seconds, the campus turns into a bloodbath.

Over four days in early February, 1968, this scenario played out in Orangeburg. On the final day, three black students were killed and 27 others wounded when the lawmen sprayed deadly buckshot onto the campus of South Carolina State College.  Most of the students, in retreat at the time, were shot from the rear—some in the back, others in the soles of their feet. None carried weapons.

The killings occurred in a southern state heralded for its record of nonviolence during the civil rights era. In attempt to preserve its carefully-cultivated image of racial harmony, a web of official deceptions was created to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg. The state's young governor, Robert E. McNair, claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense—to protect themselves from an attacking mob of students.

At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, it unraveled. Now, after nearly 50 years, the story of Orangeburg continues to simmer unresolved in a twilight zone of blame and denial. Author Frank Beacham, a young reporter at WIS-TV in Columbia at the time of the shooting in 1968, re-examines “a story whose significance  I totally missed at the time.”

Beacham asks why, after so many years, does an aggressive effort continue in South Carolina to hide and distort the role of former Gov. McNair and his white state police in the 1968 killing of three black college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina.  He found the answers—many on video and audio in this new eBook—disturbing.

The e-Book contains interviews with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, former Gov. Robert McNair, Cleveland Sellers, Jordan Simmons, Gladys Simmons-Suddeth, Nat Abraham, Rhett Jackson, Former Gov. John West, George Dean, the first black S.C. National Guardsman, Fred Mott, Rep. Bakari Sellers and survivors of the Orangeburg shooting.

“The Orangeburg Massacre is a complex Southern epic that contains the essential elements of the best of Shakespeare’s plays,” Beacham noted. “The continuing silence in the aftermath of the killing is perhaps one of the most revealing and important historical stories of modern South Carolina and very deep dive into the basics of Southern culture.”



On the morning of September 6, 1934, 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.

For 60 years, the story of a mass killing in a small town was successfully erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it.  An instrument of fear—so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children—formed a lifelong social contract for entire community's survival.
 
Ironically, Honea Path’s secret was finally revealed in a way the architects of its original cover-up could have never imagined: a video documentary made by three socially-conscious New York City filmmakers who unraveled the secret after rummaging through old letters from townspeople to President Franklin Roosevelt.

Yet, even after the truth was exposed in 1995, the story took another strange twist. South Carolina's intensely pro-business establishment, still heavily influenced by the region's textile industry, tried to suppress the documentary, first by banning it from broadcast on its state-supported television system and then by making it difficult for people to see in public places.

Author Frank Beacham grew up in Honea Path. His mother was the town's history teacher. His grandfather, he was to learn, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934.  Yet, only in his 46th year did he finally learn the deeper secrets that haunted Honea Path and the painful truth about his own family and the destructive series of events that distorted the perceptions he held of his childhood home.

In this compelling story, we hear the last living shooting victim, Williams Andrew Smith, tell Beacham that his grandfather lied about being at the mill when the violence occurred. In fact, Smith said, Dan Beacham was standing over him as he lay bleeding on the ground. An aunt, Hazel Beacham, confronts the writer about supporting the men his grandfather fought against, and we hear Beacham’s compelling appearance on a local radio station that turned the town around to support a memorial for the workers.

Mill Town Murder introduces a song about the shooting, Honea Path, by Matthew Grimm and features other interviews with Fred Moore,Tom Johnson, Sue Cannon Hill, Lydie Pinson, Mack Duncan and Jesse Mae Holder.

In this compelling story, we hear the last living shooting victim tell Beacham that his grandfather lied about being at the mill when the violence occurred. He, in fact, the man said, was standing over him as he lay bleeding on the ground. An aunt confronts the writer in audio about supporting the men his grandfather fought against, and we hear Beacham’s appearance on a local radio station that turned the town around to support a memorial for the workers.

“Each of these stories confronted me in different stages of my life. After carefully researching each story, I came to realize that each continues to live and remain fiercely unresolved for a reason,” said Beacham. “Elaborate efforts have been made to distort and misrepresent each story and to omit it from the state’s official history. Perhaps the reason for this, I found, is because these stories share cultural attributes that go back to the antebellum South: stubbornness, pride, honor and denial.”

The e-Books, priced at $9.99 each, are 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.

The Death of the Washington Post

When the news of the sale of the Washington Post was announced yesterday, I got a knot in my stomach. It was nail in the coffin of the brand of journalism I used to work in and so admired.

In 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post. This was the period just after the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham’s new organizations supported real, hard hitting reporting. When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story.

As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history. It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time. But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone—anyone at all—not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and called every name in the book. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism—long gone today. It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.

I suspect that Graham is rolling in her grave today. It was her granddaughter that sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, a man with deep pockets and zero experience in journalism of any kind. For all the talk about maintaining journalistic ethics, that won’t happen with a ruthless businessman as the Post’s owner.

Newspapers are in trouble today not for lack of readers, but due to poor economic deals done through the years by owners more interested in the bottom line than good journalism. A lot of news organizations made a lot of bad investments.

Yes, of course, the technology and outlets have changed, but the demand for good reporting and storytelling is as powerful as ever. That never changes. Sadly, a generation now exists that doesn’t know the difference. It’s a very depressing time.

Those that believe that Bezos will save the Washington Post are wrong. The fact is we’ve lost one of the nation’s great journalistic institutions and the idea of it being revived is almost impossible. The news as we once knew it is long gone.

Telling the Truth Is No Longer the Top Priority in Journalism

I graduated debt-free from journalism school in 1968 at a time when there were plenty of jobs and some great opportunities in the news business. I was lucky enough to work at some prestigious news organizations, including United Press International, Post-Newsweek, Gannett and the Miami Herald.

In every one of those news jobs, accuracy in reporting was priority number one. At UPI, it was very simple. Make a major error in a story that’s released nationally and you were fired. There were no ifs, ands or buts. Rules like that kept you on your toes.

Yes, you also had to be quick. But not so fast that you made mistakes. You were judged on a combination of both speed and accuracy. But accuracy was always the most important part of the job.

It’s clear that’s no longer true. Just in the past week, the New York Post got the Boston Marathon bombing story so wrong on so many counts it was hard to believe. They reported that 12 people had died, when only three had. They reported that a Saudi man was a suspect being held “in custody” when that wasn’t true.

And, perhaps worst of all, they put pictures of two young men on the front page that turned out not to be the bombers. The newspaper admitted not knowing whether the men were even suspects. One of those young people was 17 years old and told other reporters that he was afraid to leave his home after the Post printed his picture.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, should have been outraged—but he was not. He argued that the picture was “instantly” withdrawn when the mistake was known. He did not explain how one instantly withdraws a printed front page from the streets.

Television news networks are equally notorious for errors. When astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died, NBC incorrectly called him Neil Young, the musician. That’s what happens when networks rely on 20-something staffers who don’t know their history.

We are all aware that few journalism jobs are left and most pay very little. In fact, I was paid far more in the early 1970s than most journalists make today. Make no mistake, it’s that downsizing of jobs and salaries and journalistic standards that leads to the mistakes and errors we see so often today.

At least most news organizations try to be accurate. Others have a different agenda, which complicates the picture further. Networks like Murdoch’s Fox News present a clearly right-wing agenda—not one based on genuine attempts at truth and accuracy. Too many people believe this is actual news.

Yet, the politicization of journalism seems to be getting worse. Charles and David Koch, the notorious supporters of far right-wing causes, are said to be exploring the purchase of the Tribune Company, which owns 23 television stations and eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

These men, who finance favored political candidates, are not journalists or even interested in objective reporting. The New York Times reported a source saying the Koch brothers often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented” in the news media. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what these financiers are up to.

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told the New York Times.

Journalism is not just in a poor financial state these days. It is in a moral crisis as well. The old standards of truth and accuracy in news reporting have been thrown out the window. The Internet, which has empowered everyone as a citizen “journalist,” has not helped. The day is quickly coming when truly independent journalists will have to work on their own.

Just as members of Congress are under the control of money, now the same has happened to journalism. It’s a sad day indeed for accurate, truthful reporting.

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

---

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!

Wild History

George Lineberry: Inventor of Shag's "Belly Roll," Introduced Black Music on the Carolina Beaches

“Big George” Lineberry (left) and Harry Driver in 1994 at Fat Harold's Beach Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Lineberry invented the “belly roll” and Driver the “smooth pivot” in the shag, the state dance of the Carolinas. Photo by Frank Beacham

                                                                      ---
Due to the unique ploy of a talented young white dancer, George Lineberry, black music found its way onto the jukeboxes in the white dance halls and pavilions along the Carolina beaches after World War II.

“Big George,” as he was nicknamed, was hired to install records on the coin-operated jukeboxes, then called “piccolos,” for a local amusements company in Myrtle Beach.

Lineberry was told which records to place on specific jukeboxes. Playlists were strict in this time of segregation. Black music in the day was forbidden from the jukeboxes in white establishments and was designated for black clubs only.

Lineberry ignored his bosses and took it upon himself to switch records, placing the most popular black records from the jukeboxes in the black clubs, including Charlie’s Place, to the jukeboxes in the white dance halls. It was this switcharoo by a single young worker that changed music along the coast for generations to come.

Big George, who died in 1999 at age 76, was an immensely popular fixture at the beach at the time and was often slipped a few bucks by concerned parents to dance with a daughter who needed a boost in self-esteem.

With great ceremony, he made it a point to “test” each new record installation with a personal spin on the dance floor. He often single handedly introduced new black records.

Soon after Lineberry serviced the jukeboxes along the Carolina coast, the “forbidden” R&B that could be heard only at the beach joints became known as “beach music.”

As a dancer, Lineberry was also a major contributor to what today is known as the “shag,” the state dance of the Carolinas.

“I first heard the term shag at Charlie’s Place,” Lineberry, who left the beach in 1948, told me in an interview. “They called it the shag on the Hill (Charlie’s Place). I think the shag and dirty shag came out of Charlie’s nightclub.”

Lineberry, who was a first generation member of the Shaggers Hall of Fame, had warm memories of his nights at Charlie’s Place—many ending at daylight.

“Charlie once told me, ‘George, you got a little black in you.’ I knew the black music had a better beat. It would turn me on a little more. I was the best at the belly roll and the dirty shag. I could lay it on them.”

In fact, Lineberry is credited with inventing the belly roll as used in today’s shag.

For young Dino Thompson, the belly roll—or “vertical sex” as it was also called—was the ultimate shag step, a move that was perfected by Lineberry at Charlie’s Place.

In his personal memoir, Greek Boy, Thompson offers a description of the belly roll: “Boy pulls girl close enough to touch belly buttons. Then, in rhythm, they throw one leg out together, then the other. Slick and sexy.”

The belly roll and a 10-cent song on the jukebox, recalled Thompson, was “your license for romance. Pick out the girl of your dreams, lead her out to the dance floor, ease her out of a fast sweaty pivot into a tight belly roll and bruise your excited private parts all up against hers. Then, right as the lyrics get down and dirty, burn her down with your Tyrone Power eyes.”

Lineberry later turned his love of music and dance into a career. He owned and operated Southern Amusement Corp. in Virginia Beach, Virginia. An avid shagger until he died, Lineberry later gave his fellow dancers their own jukeboxes loaded with their favorite music as a gift.

Lineberry’s story is in “Wild History,” Frank Beacham’s current Kickstarter project.

The Sad 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.” Contempt dripped from the word. 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 fish 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 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 Stalcup, one of the deputized workers who shot at strikers from a mill window, visited Mrs. Cannon. Stalcup 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 Stalcup, 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,” Stalcup had answered. Not only did Dan Beacham give the order for the men to shoot, Stalcup said, but the mill superintendent told the deputized gunmen to kill every striker they could, no matter who it might be.

“Mr. Stalcup 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 “Wild History” project now on Kickstarter.

                                                      Wild History

Lois McClain Keeps a Deadly 60-Year Secret

While working on “Small Town Secret,” this photo of young Lois McClain, made by an unknown photographer, was identified for me by McClain’s daughter, Jessie Mae Holder. 

The bullet from McClain’s bleeding left hand, after being shot at Chiquola Mill in my hometown of Honea Path, South Carolina on Sept. 6, 1934 was never removed and was still intact when she died at age 91 in 1993.

Eventually, mother of five children, “Granny Lois” McClain, as she was called, worked in the mill in Honea Path through her mid 70s, while also serving as a volunteer midwife, seamstress and cook for local townspeople nearly all of her life.

Some years after the shooting, Tom Stalcup, a Chiquola millworker, revealed that he had shot McClain and asked for her forgiveness, which she granted.

Stalcup, who said my grandfather, Dan Beacham, ordered the mill shooting as superintendent, later became Sunday School teacher for McClain’s daughter at the Church of God in Honea Path. His son, Virgil Stalcup, went on to play shortstop for the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.

Never in her life did McClain, or her husband, Cowan, also a millworker, discuss the shooting or the mill violence with any of their children. For that reason, the circumstances of McClain’s shooting or her role in the labor dispute remain unknown even to her own family.

However, words were not needed. Lois McClain’s story is written on her face in this powerful photograph.

The small town secret in Honea Path, S.C. was kept for 60 years. Though my grandfather was complicit in the shooting, my own family never discussed it. Yet, in the mid 90s, before many of the mill workers had died, the lid came off after a documentary film was produced revealing the town’s secret.

I wanted to know the truth and sought it out. The results are part of my Kickstarter project, Wild History.

                                               Wild History Kickstarter Project