Two years from now, America will mark the anniversary of the shooting of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen. It was a pivotal moment in the anti-war movement, and it marked, for many, the exact point at which it was no longer possible to pretend what kind of country they lived in. There will be a lot of nostalgia, a lot of hand-wringing, and if we're lucky, a certain degree of self-examination. What probably won't be discussed quite as much, if at all, is the fact that it wasn't the first killing of students on campus by members of the armed forces.
That dubious distinction belongs to the so-called "Orangeburg Massacre", where, in 1968, National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of 100 students at South Carolina State College. Three of the students were killed, and dozens were wounded; today, two separate films -- one, Orangeburg, by a pair of independent documentarians, set to debut on PBS this fall, and the other, Black Magic, by a more mainstream filmmaker, airing on ESPN of all places -- ask why America's memory of this outrage doesn't echo the way Kent State did. There are plenty of good reasons, of course: the SC State shooting wasn't as well documented (only a few photographs were taken at the time, and most were destroyed in a fire); it fell during an off news cycle and wasn't picked up by the major newspapers until it had largely died down; initial reports of the massacre falsely described it as an exchange of gunfire, rather than the shooting of unarmed students by soldiers; and it happened at night, when no television crews were available to cover the event.
But the biggest reason of all is that the victims were all black. The shooting was triggered by protests in reaction to white citizens who objected to the desegregation of a local bowling alley, and instead of being a response to the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre was part of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
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