The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre is a multimedia eBook that is the most comprehensive examination to date of the killing of three black students in 1968 by white Highway Patrolmen in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

Coming more than 50 years after the shooting, the multimedia production contains interviews with key figures who explain exactly what happened in the worst civil rights disaster in South Carolina’s modern history. 

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.

“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 Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre is available for free in the ePub and Mobi formats for Macs, PCs, tablets and phone. ePub and Mobi links.

Photo by Bill Barley

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, South Carolina. 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 self-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.

In the more than 50 years, the story of Orangeburg continues to simmer unresolved in a twilight zone of blame and denial. This website is dedicated to the compelling story that South Carolina's power elite still tries to hide! It is the only place to get the complete truth about what happened in 1968. The Orangeburg Massacre is a Southern epic of mendacity that continues to define the modern South.