The cold bit through denim jackets. The crowd, mostly students from South Carolina State and Claflin College, had gathered again near the campus. For three nights, they had protested the stubborn segregation of the All-Star Bowling Lane downtown. The owner, Harry Floyd, refused to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. On the first night, there had been scuffles, arrests. Tension was a physical presence.
On this night, February 8, a bonfire was lit in the street. The glow flickered on young faces. Someone threw a banister through a store window. The sound of breaking glass was sharp, final. Then came the law: city police, sheriff's deputies, and officers of the South Carolina Highway Patrol. They formed a line. The air smelled of wood smoke and damp winter earth.
What happened next unfolded in seconds, witnessed but never unanimously described. A patrolman claimed he heard a shot, perhaps a piece of lumber popping in the fire. He fell, injured by what was later determined to be a ricochet from a fellow officer's gun. In the chaos, other patrolmen opened fire. They did not fire warning shots into the air. They leveled their shotguns and pistols and fired low, into the crowd of students.
The buckshot was meant to maim. It did. Twenty-eight students fell, wounded in their backs, their sides, their legs as they turned to run. Samuel Hammond, 18, and Henry Smith, 19, students at South Carolina State, died there on the cold ground. Delano Middleton, 17, a high school student visiting friends, died later in the hospital. The bowling alley would integrate quietly nine days later. The governor called it a ‘riot.’ The nation, focused on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, barely glanced. The wounds, physical and civic, never fully closed.