tear Gas, fire Hoses, Arrests
Orangeburg, March 15, 1960
Despite the force used Against them, including tear gas and fire-hose spray, Claflin University and South Carolina State College Students peacefully accepted arrest, walked with law enforcement Officers to the courthouse, and waited in Line for bookings. Photo by Richard taylor, Courtesy of The State newspaper Photograph Archive, Richland Library, Columbia, SC.
See WIS-TV Outtakes on the Orangeburg March’s beginning. Student Leader Chuck McDew, 32-56 seconds, provides Identification to Law Enforcement Officers, including Joseph Preston '“Pete” Strom, chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. At 1:25, a plainclothesman and police tackle an armed white man. Footage courtesy of Moving Images Research Collection, University of South Carolina.
“March 15, 1960, in Orangeburg, SC: Denied a parade permit, Claflin and South Carolina State students marched anyway, more than one thousand strong on March 15. ‘Part of the nonviolence philosophy is you always reveal what you’re going to do,’ explained [Thomas] Gaither, regarding the useless parade application. ‘It became a battle between us and the leadership of the city and the city’s cops,’ said [Charles Frederick ‘Chuck’] McDew. The students—well-dressed and instructed not to bring so much as a fingernail file—intended to walk again to Memorial Square, there to pray for equal rights and sing patriotic songs, then return to campus and class. That’s not what happened, and consequently the nation discovered Orangeburg, South Carolina.”
“Lloyd Williams’s group walked just a few blocks past campus, to the local Piggly Wiggly, before firefighters and police told the students to turn around. ‘I was walking at the head of the line with a young lady,’ he told the New York Post. ‘The police chief insisted I was the leader. I told him I was not the leader and that I had no right to ask them to turn around.’ Students behind him shouted, ‘We are all leaders. If one is arrested, we will all be arrested.’
Police arrested Williams, then the police chief instructed, ‘All right, get them n———,’ and firefighters turned fire hoses on the group, according to the Post. ‘One student had water hit his ear with such force it began to bleed, and he stood there and took it,’ Williams said. ‘No one ran away. The students stood their ground and kept pressing forward. They began to sing, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’”
authorities confined a majority of the arrested students, many soaked by fire hoses or suffering from tear gas, outside the Orangeburg jail in an area enclosed by Chain Link Fencing. THis photo, published nationally with newspaper commentary on students penned up outside in freezing temperatures, “like animals,” caused outrage. Photo published in the Orangeburg Times and Democrat.
“More than 500 students were arrested, 388 charged with breach of peace, and fifty demonstrators needed medical care. When men trained a fire hose on one young woman, knocking her down and holding the water on her, the force broke her kneecap. Another female student, hit in the face by the water, lost three teeth. Still another needed her eyes treated after exposure to tear gas. Several students soon came down with colds, even pneumonia; some were hospitalized.”
“Rev. H. P. Sharper, president of the NAACP state conference, called the violence used against the peaceful demonstrators ‘strong-arm, Facist-like tactics.’ He said student demonstrations, ‘executed in an orderly and peaceful manner, designed to appeal to the good judgment and Christian conscience of the white people of South Carolina,’ illustrated young adults’ determination ‘to live in South Carolina under the Constitution, minus the indecencies traditionally imposed upon us by Southern tradition.’”