Play based on Orangeburg Massacre opens tonight

ORANGEBURG - Zachary Delano Middleton sprawled on his back on stage this week and gasped out the last words of his great-uncle Delano Middleton, spoken 42 years ago and a lifetime away.

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want," he bellowed, as his mother, played by Joy Vaughn, cradled his head in her lap.

Middleton struggled through Psalm 23 until he reached "thy rod and thy staff ..." and could say no more.

"Thy staff!" his mother screams. "Say it, Delano!"

But actor Zachary Middleton was silent, just as his great-uncle was silenced four decades ago.

It happened during a bloody civil rights melee at S.C. State that became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Three young men were killed - 17-year-old Delano and two 18-year-old S.C. State students, Samuel Hammond Jr. and Henry Smith. Another 28 were wounded when state troopers fired on a crowd of angry, protesting students.

The historically black university is marking the Feb. 8 anniversary with a week of remembrances, including this original production. "Taking a Stand," by senior Calhoun Cornwell, opens tonight at the school.

Cornwell's play explores the escalating confrontations between students and police during that week in February 1968, a gathering storm sparked by the continued segregation of Orangeburg's only bowling alley, All-Star Bowling Lanes.

On stage, Cornwell considers perspectives of the students, community and police, including one officer who believes the force was justified and another who laments the killings as the excesses of frightened, trigger-happy state troopers.

The late Harry Floyd, the bowling alley owner, will be played by Bo McBratnie, a member of the Orangeburg Part-Time Players community group.

He says he sees Floyd "as a 44-or 45-year-old man in Deep South America ... 15 years behind the times."

"The biggest question is what is the truth," said Cornwell, 22, as he prepared this week for a dress rehearsal. "When I say what is the truth, that was the people's biggest question around South Carolina.

"When you listen to the people talk about the Orangeburg Massacre, you hear what the newspaper articles first said, that students shot first," wounding an officer.

(Later, it was determined that an officer was struck by a banister thrown by a student, and another officer fired into the air seconds before a barrage of bullets was fired into the crowd of fleeing students.)

Others theorized it was "organized killing" on the part of the officers, planned by the troops amassed at the edge of the campus.

Then-Gov. Robert E. McNair declared it the result of outside agitators influenced by the Black Power movement, although that was later disavowed.

Cleveland Sellers, a South Carolinian on campus to raise awareness of the larger civil rights movement, was the only person arrested. He was later pardoned.

"If you listen to everyone's interviews and everyone's synopsis and people's opinions about what happened, they all tie into themselves," Cornwell said.

He hopes the play will provide redemption and understanding of an event that provokes controversy four decades later.

Cornwell spent time in the S.C. State archives researching the massacre and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. He interviewed white and black residents of Orangeburg to understand the era.

"There are always two sides to every story, and the play does a real service to that," said Zachary Middleton. "All those feelings and emotions that the community is feeling, you can get that feeling when you see this play."

Middleton, a 22-year-old business management major and president of the Student Government Association, said he leapt at the opportunity to portray his great-uncle, even though he knew the experience would be emotional.

"It's an opportunity for awareness, for the families, for the communities that felt that loss and for historians," he said. "I knew I wanted to be a part of something of this magnitude."

His father, Alonzo Middleton, believes the play will serve as a balm for a community that too long whispered about the terrible night of violence.

"Nobody really wanted to talk about it. All those years it just kind of sat there," Alonzo Middleton, who owns an Orangeburg insurance agency, said.

Alonzo Middleton was 12 when his uncle, a 17-year-old Wilkinson High football and basketball standout, was killed. They shared a room and a love of sports, and to this day, he believes Delano Middleton was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"I think he probably went up there to get something to eat," at the popular campus grill, Alonzo Middleton said, and then to glimpse the campus protest. "That's my theory, and I might be wrong. That was the only night he didn't come home."

Even though he was still in high school, Delano Middleton was familiar with the campus; he routinely walked his mother home from her job as a maid at the college and held out hopes of attending college there.

Alonzo Middleton remembers lying in his bedroom that night 42 years ago and hearing the weeping of his grandmother and other family members, but he said he will not cry when he takes his seat in the theater tonight (Thursday).

"My grandmother would probably be there every night if she was alive," he said.

S.C. State history professor William Hine said that with the passage of four decades he believes the Orangeburg Massacre "is finally finding its place in history." But he acknowledged he was "a little unnerved" to learn the students would be re-enacting the shooting.

"There is a distance, and most of the family members who will be there will be family members who did not actually know any of the three men," he said. "It's harder for people who were there to experience a re-enactment."

Alonzo Middleton said the community and the families cannot "remain stuck in 1968," but he said the Smith-Hammond-Middleton families always will be linked by the events of that long-removed February. To him, February is a time for meditation and reflection.

"There have been some times when we wondered whether people would even observe it anymore," he said. Some, he said, wanted to cease marking the date.

"This year has been the best of all," Alonzo Middleton said. "My son is really representing a legacy of 42 years of pain, and people are actually talking about it. It puts us in a different light.

"It is a healing knowing that my son who bears his name thought enough to do something."