NBC Connecticut: “College is supposed to be a “safe haven,” Carolyn Snell says: no one expects a tragedy — a massacre — to happen there. But on Feb. 8, 1968, that sense of safety was shattered when police fired into a crowd of students who were peacefully protesting on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C.
Snell and her older brother, Harold C. Riley, are two of six siblings from Orangeburg. Riley was a sophomore student at the college in 1968. He would be shot later during the massacre, and survive.
Orangeburg, then, as it does today, had two historically Black colleges and universities: South Carolina State College (today, South Carolina State University) and Claflin University.
“The climate was — very much so — unrest as it relates to African Americans,” Snell said of Orangeburg in 1968, four years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation nationwide
In early February 1968, students from both HBCUs organized a sit-in at the snack bar of All Star Bowling Lane, the town’s sole bowling alley and a segregated establishment. The students were turned away and left peacefully.
The following night, a larger group of students returned to the bowling alley, according to an article in The Charlotte Observer. A historian recounts that a window was shattered, near the bowling alley entrance. Police beat students with wooden batons.
South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair called in the National Guard to patrol Orangeburg.
On the third evening of protests, Feb. 8, 1968, approximately 200 unarmed, mostly Black students joined together on the South Carolina State College campus to protest segregation.”