“Eyewitnesses to a Tragedy”: How the Collegian, the Student Newspaper of South Carolina State College, Covered the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre

Abstract

On the night of February 8, 1968, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a town located ninety minutes away from Charleston, state highway patrolmen were stationed at the edge of South Carolina State College, a historically black institution, hoping to gain control of a crowd of unarmed students protesting a nearby segregated bowling alley. Triggered by what they erroneously believed was gunfire aimed toward them, the patrolmen fired into the group, killing three young men and wounding twenty-eight others. Among those covering what became known as the Orangeburg massacre was the college’s student newspaper, the Collegian. Textual analysis and media framing theory guide this examination of how the campus newspaper staff used their coverage to honor their fallen peers. Collegian coverage also communicated the anger of a campus community that felt betrayed by state lawmakers and expressed frustrations over what many believed was a lack of accurate news coverage by the mainstream media.