1 post tagged “films revisit overlooked shootings on a black campus”
Two years before the deadly Kent State shootings, state troopers opened fire on a student protest on the campus of South Carolina State College. Three people died, and 28 were wounded. The incident, which became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” never pierced the nation’s collective memory of the 1960s, and academics and survivors say that one reason was shoddy, racially biased press coverage: those killed were black.But new media coverage may give the shootings their historical due, and some scholars and survivors hope it might also nudge South Carolina legislators to open a state investigation of the 40-year-old tragedy, which never received such scrutiny.Dan Klores, a New York filmmaker and former public relations executive, has been thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the historical memory for decades, since he was a student at the time at the nearby University of South Carolina in Columbia. He said he hoped his latest film, “Black Magic,” about basketball players at historically black colleges, will open people’s eyes to Orangeburg. (The film made its debut on ESPN on March 16.) Mr. Klores said that Orangeburg was only obliquely related to the topic of “Black Magic,” but that he was looking for any reason to delve into the incident. During his research for the film he discovered that one of the Orangeburg fatalities was a star high school basketball player who was on campus because his mother worked at the college as a maid.“That gave me the excuse,” Mr. Klores said. “That’s all it was. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I said, ‘That’s fine, it’s my film.’ ”Another film, a documentary produced by two Boston moviemakers, Bestor Cram and Judy Richardson, was in the research phase for nearly 10 years before the pair finally received financing last year. Titled “Orangeburg,” it is scheduled for broadcast this fall on PBS.
“We
were up against two problems,” said Mr. Cram, a principal at Northern
Light Productions in Boston, explaining why it took so long to finance
the film. “People actually wondered why they hadn’t heard of it. Number
two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told.” Mr. Cram and his co-producer, Ms. Richardson, were activists in the 1960s and had long wanted to tell this story.“We’re
combining our activist sensibilities with our longstanding filmmaking
sensibilities,” Mr. Cram said. “I promise you this is not a polemic.
It’s about people’s lives that were profoundly changed by a tragedy.”Ms.
Richardson said that beyond the conventional interpretation of the role
race played in Orangeburg’s not being as well known as Kent State,
other circumstances also contributed to the event’s obscurity. For one,
the shootings were at night, and there was no television coverage
because, according to Ms. Richardson, “no one anticipated the event
turning out the way it did.” SOURCE OF THIS STORY
