After 50 years, SC white supremacist school bus riot still haunts survivors

Fifty years have passed since the day when 200 howling S.C. white supremacists attacked school buses of African American children in Lamar, a small Darlington County town.

The whites were from the Lamar area and they were carrying ax handles, bricks, stones, bottles and lengths of chains — weapons they hoped would stop black children from going to an all-white school under order to integrate.

“They took those ax handles and knocked out every window in the bus and — bricks and everything flying — we hit the floor,” said David Lunn, a pastor and one of three survivors who spoke at a symposium at the Capstone building last week sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research.

“I kept calling everybody’s name to see if they was alive,” said Lunn, adding there were plenty of state troopers and national guard on the scene. “The thing that sticks with me is nobody lifted a finger to help us.”

For more than an hour at the symposium, Lunn and two other survivors, now in their 60s, told told an audience of some 100 what happened that morning of March 3, 1970 when they rode to school on the bus and how they remain traumatized by it. One other survivor has died, and two other survivors were invited but they remain too upset to speak publicly.

It was the first time they had spoken publicly about what happened to them.

“These guys have waited 50 years to bear witness to what happened, and the details they conveyed were far more riveting, far more disturbing, than anything that I’ve read,” said Bobby Donaldson, director of the University of South Carolina’s Center on Civil Rights History and Research, which sponsored the symposium.

The Lamar riot not only made front page news across South Carolina in that pre-Internet era, it also made the front page of the next day’s New York Times, which featured a photo of an overturned school bus with its windows smashed out, guarded by state troopers wearing tear gas masks.

“Gas Routs Whites Who Upset Buses at Carolina School,” the Times’ headline read.

What the story didn’t say was that in the mob were white women, just as angry as the white men were about blacks seeking equal rights, and that the black children on the bus recognized many in the crowd as whites they had grown up with.

“Some of these people we knew, as sharecroppers, we had worked right alongside them,” said Clarence Brunson, who became a welder. As a youth, he had even worked for the father of one white girl in the mob, Brunson said.

Lunn added, “The FBI showed us pictures. These people were our next door neighbors ... We knew all of them.”

Brunson said, “Where were you going to go when you had 200 people on the right, I counted 15 state troopers on the left, and two stalled buses in front. Where were we going to go? I didn’t know they had that many ax handles in Darlington County.”

Ronald Bacote said, “When we pulled up, the hood of the bus flew up, and the engine died. And the rocks and the bricks started. So I got down and started crawling, trying to get out.“ The bus back door opened, and a state trooper wearing a gas mask gestured for the teens to get out. On exiting, they ran toward the school and, looking back, they saw one school bus on its side.

Although terrorism, threats and pressures by whites against blacks who tried to assert equal rights was a well-known phenomenon during the segregation era — from the 1890s to the early 1970s — the Lamar riot represents one of the best documented incidents of white-on-black violence in South Carolina.

It also was one of the state’s last violent racial flare-ups, and it happened at a historic turning point in South Carolina.

By February and March 1970, many white South Carolinians had fought for 16 years the historic decision Brown vs. Board of Education by the U.S. Supreme Court that ordered an end to segregation. But some school districts, such as in Darlington County, still had segregated schools.

Just before the Lamar riot, the 4th U.S. Court of Appeals ordered that Darlington schools desegregate. To the surprise of many staunch South Carolina segregationists, such as the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, then Gov-Robert McNair told white South Carolinians they must finally obey the law. Other southern governors at the time were still advocating resisting federal orders.

“When we run out of courts and circumstances, we must obey the law,” McNair said, as quoted in Walter Edgar’s South Carolina: A History.”

But the Darlington County mob that attacked the school bus that day ignored McNair.

Bacote said that as long as Darlington County blacks stayed at the black high school, “There was not a race relationship problem. But when the federal government decided the schools had to be integrated, this was where the problem started. We were not good enough to attend the white school.”

After the initial press accounts of the riot and coverage of some trials and convictions of some of the rioting whites, the incident has not received as much attention over the years as other events in the state’s Jim Crow era.

“I knew about the Lamar school bus incident, but in the history books it’s just a paragraph,” said the Civil Rights Center’s Donaldson. “But what we have heard is that it’s not just a paragraph, it’s about people who were profoundly affected and impacted. We saw the picture of the bus turned over, but we never saw who was on the bus.”

State Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, whose wife Davita Malloy began researching the event and helped find the survivors, said he was glad the survivors got a chance to tell their stories.

It’s inspiring that all three went on to live productive lives and they were able to tell their story to younger generations who have no idea what segregation was like and what happened that day, said Malloy, who was eight years old in 1970.

“You’ve got to confront things,” said Malloy. “This needs to be discussed.”

The three survivors said they have healed enough from the trauma of that day to finally talk about it. But they are still recovering.

“It’s a situation that’s never going to heal completely because I feel like my life flashed right in front of me. And I thank the Good Lord that I’m sitting right here and I can tell you what happened,” said Brunson, who told the audience it took him 20 years to process what happened.