 | Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town Subjects: Riots -- South Carolina -- Orangeburg; African Americans -- Civil rights -- South Carolina; Orangeburg (S.C.) -- Race relations; Orangeburg (S.C.) -- History; Shuler's well-researched but faltering historic account is centered around an evening of violence on February 8th, 1968. Two days after South Carolina State College students had protested to integrate a bowling alley in Orangeburg, SC, highway patrolmen opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators. When the smoke cleared, three young African-American men were dead. Over forty years later, native son Shuler (Calling Out Liberty) journeys back to his hometown with a list of unanswered questions to discover exactly what precipitated the Orangeburg Massacre, and how it continues to ripple through local history. The diverse cast of characters includes a repentant National Guardsman, a February 8th survivor with the long-lodged bullet to prove it, and a conspiratorial local veteran of the Civil Rights movement. "Perhaps there are no clear answers about what happened on February 8, 1968," Shuler writes, "because there are so many narratives floating around Orangeburg." Unfortunately, this is also the book's downfall. Its multiple perspectives are illuminating but don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. And attempts to place the Orangeburg Massacre into a context of September 11th and the economic development of modern day South Carolina feel clumsy. This account is far more successful in strictly dealing with the past, as it still manages to paint a vivid picture of the racially charged, tinderbox atmosphere in 1960s South Carolina. Photos. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Jack Shuler is an assistant professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and the author of Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights. Shuler's criticism, interviews, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Columbia Journal of American Studies, Southern Studies, the South Carolina Review, the Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. |
