Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

Subscribe Online

Student Masscare in South Carolina, 40 Years Later

Orangeburg, 1968

By FRED GARDNER

Forty years ago on the campus of South Carolina State College, which is in the city of Orangeburg, three students were killed and 27 wounded when police fired into a group expressing outrage over the exclusion of Black people from the only bowling alley in town. It was night, the assignment editors hadn't anticipated such violence, there was no TV coverage. The Associated Press falsely reported in a story carried by papers around the country that there had been "an exchange of gunfire," as if the students had fired at the police. The AP never ran a correction.

Two documentaries about the Orangeburg massacre are due out soon. According to a New York Times story April 18, filmmaker Dan Klores has been "thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the historical memory for decades."  Me, too.

In February '68 I was running a coffeehouse called The UFO on Main St. in Columbia, South Carolina, that was patronized by GIs from Fort Jackson (black and white) and some students from the university. One day Cleveland Sellers, an organizer from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, came to see our place and to discuss the possibility of doing something in concert -an action that would link domestic injustice and overseas intervention.  

While he was at the UFO, Sellers got word to hurry back to Orangeburg because things were getting heavy. I drove him the 40 miles and hung out at a soul food café as evening fell and the sounds of confrontation escalated -breaking glass, screeching tires, people running down the street full tilt, shouts of "Honky" and "Motherfucker." The shooting hadn't started when I decided to head back to the UFO.  Cleveland Sellers would catch a bullet in the arm, get arrested, and be castigated as the "outside agitator" who had caused all the trouble. (Sellers grew up and went to high school in Denmark, SC, which is 20 miles from Orangeburg.)  The cops who fired on unarmed students would be charged with civil rights violations and acquitted. Only Cleve did time (for inciting to riot and riot).

Although the media coverage was generally scant and misleading, two reporters -Jack Bass of the Charlotte Observer and Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times- filed thorough, accurate stories, and then wrote a book, "The Orangeburg Massacre" (World Publishing, 1970). The introduction by Thomas Pettigrew discusses why what happened in Orangeburg got downplayed in America.  It wasn't the number of casualties, Pettigrew observed: "Recall the intense interest in the triple civil rights murders near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few years before..."  Nor was it Governor Robert McNair's defense of the cops: "Was Governor George Wallace's explanation for the Selma bridge brutality in 1965 taken seriously?"

The key factor, according to Pettigrew: "Orangeburg followed a succession of race riots in major northern cities... White America was frightened and its mood shifted. The Bull Connors and Sheriff Clarks who had served as the racial villains in the early 1960s were being replaced by the Rap Browns and the Panthers." This is undoubtedly true. But 'White America' isn't monolithic, and the decision-making elites felt threatened not so much by Black Power rhetoric and inner-city looting as by the movement's internationalist tendencies and growing opposition to the war in Viet Nam. This was certainly true of the ruling elite in South Carolina, which included the head of the House Armed Services Committee, L. Mendel Rivers, and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Strom Thurmond. 

Martin Luther King was killed in April '68 after he had begun calling for an end to U.S. intervention in Viet Nam. I think something analogous was a factor in the Orangeburg massacre. There was something in the air in early '68 -the vague prospect of the civil rights movement and the peace movement merging.  Cleveland Sellers personified this possibility. He had been drafted in retaliation for his civil rights work and had refused induction.  He was under surveillance from both the FBI and the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED). He asked black GIs what they thought they were fighting for in Viet Nam. He certainly was not directing the protests in Orangeburg. The outraged students had their own leaders, including several ROTC cadets. Their confrontation with the police escalated while Sellers was out of town.

It was SLED Chief J.P. Strom, with the unwavering backing of Gov. Robert McNair (considered a "moderate" on racial matters among southern governors), who led the small army that moved in on the South Carolina State campus. "There were 66 patrolmen backed up by 45 National Guardsmen armed with M-1 rifles and fixed bayonets," according to Bass and Nelson. "In addition, some of the 25 SLED agents in the area, several members of Orangeburg's 28-man police force, and several sheriff's deputies were nearby. At the moment of ultimate confrontation there were about as many lawmen and Guardsmen as there were students. In addition, 61 other state patrolmen and 395 other National Guardsmen were on duty in Orangeburg that night."

The state patrolmen had .38 caliber pistols. Many had been issued shotguns loaded with deadly double-ought buckshot. Some had carbines. Strom's whole tactical approach -the number of troopers massed, the level of firepower, the decision to confront and push back the students (whose ultimate acting-out was to light a bonfire on campus)- virtually guaranteed that deadly mayhem would ensue.

Bass and Nelson provide a small piece of indirect, circumstantial evidence suggesting that the men responsible for the Orangeburg massacre were influenced by their obeisance to the military: "Strom had been a central figure in South Carolina's record of racial peace... In 1964 he coolly handled an explosive situation that occurred when an integrated group of college students showed up to picket George Wallace at Columbia Municipal Airport."  On that occasion Strom ordered the pro-Wallace crowd to back off when they threatened to attack the protestors.

But in May ‘67 later Strom showed "less tolerance when antiwar demonstrators protested at the University of South Carolina over the granting of an honorary degree to General William Westmoreland, a South Carolina native then in command of United States troops in Vietnam. Strom ordered pickets hustled away from the campus chapel, where the ceremony was being held... Asked later why police moved against the pickets, who had been peaceful, Strom indicated that the governor wanted no antiwar demonstrations to mar the ceremony."

The Orangeburg Massacre took place February 8, 1968. The students who lost their whole, promising lives were Samuel Hammond (shot in the back), Henry Smith (shot five times), and Delano Middleton (a high school student whose mother worked as a maid at the college, shot seven times). 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont