Conflict
That night, students on campus threw firebombs, bricks and bottles, and started a bonfire. As police attempted to put out the fire, an officer was injured by a thrown object. The police later said they believed they were under attack by small arms fire. A newspaper reported, "About 200 Negros gathered and began sniping with what sounded like ‘at least one automatic, a shotgun and other small caliber weapons’ and throwing bricks and bottles at the patrolmen." Similarly, a North Carolina newspaper reported that week that students threw firebombs at buildings and that the sound of apparent sniper fire was heard.
Protesters insisted that they did not fire at police officers, but threw objects and insulted the men. Evidence that police were being fired upon at the time of the incident was inconclusive, and no evidence was presented in court, as a result of investigations, that protesters were armed or had fired on officers. The officers fired into the crowd, killing three young men: Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, both SCSU students; and Delano Middleton, a student at the local Wilkinson High School. Twenty-eight other persons were injured during the shooting or afterward by blows from police batons or other action.
Read more about this topic: Orangeburg Massacre
Famous quotes containing the word conflict:
“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity ... it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge—if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The conflict between the men who make and the men who report the news is as old as time. News may be true, but it is not truth, and reporters and officials seldom see it the same way.... In the old days, the reporters or couriers of bad news were often put to the gallows; now they are given the Pulitzer Prize, but the conflict goes on.”
—James Reston (b. 1909)