Civil Rights Staff Riders Visit Site of the Orangeburg Massacre

Civil Rights Staff Ride Cadets Visit the Site of the Orangeburg Massacre. In 1968, four years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had prohibited segregation in public accommodations, South Carolina State University (SCSU) students undertook a protest to desegregate the All Star Triangle Bowl, a bowling alley just across the tracks from their campus. Initially disbursed by police, as many as 400 students returned the following day and were confronted by as many as 100 law enforcement officers who pushed them back to the campus. On the third day of the battle, at a bonfire lit by students on campus, police inexplicably fired into the crowd, killing three and wounding 27. No students were armed. The Orangeburg Massacre, February 8, 1968 would not receive the press coverage garnered by the shooting of students at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1970, and although there is a memorial to the students on the SCSU campus, the bowling alley, which is now unoccupied and decrepit, has no marker or plaque to identify it and the role it played in the massacre. And, it is on the National Register of Historic Places.