Orangeburg Massacre - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

This was the first incident of its kind on a United States university campus. The Orangeburg killings received relatively little media coverage. The events predated the 1970 Kent State shootings and Jackson State killings, in which protesters against the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard, and local and state highway police, respectively. The overreaction by law enforcement helped galvanize public opinion against the war as well.

The historian Jack Bass attributed the discrepancy in media coverage in part due to the Orangeburg incident occurring after large-scale urban riots, which made it seem small by comparison. It may not have been considered as newsworthy, especially as the shootings occurred at night, when media coverage, especially any television news, was less. In addition, the victims at Orangeburg were mostly young black men protesting local segregation. Linda Meggett Brown wrote that subsequent events in the spring of 1968: the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic presidential candidate; and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, overshadowed the events at Orangeburg.

At Kent State, by contrast, Bass noted that the victims were young white students protesting the U.S. war in Vietnam, which had become increasingly unpopular and a highly politicized, national issue. They were attacked by members of the National Guard, which the media may have judged as a more inflammatory aspect of the shootings. The black students at Jacksonville State were also protesting the war, and the killings there took place shortly after those at Kent State. It appeared that law enforcement and university administrations had no idea about how to handle campus unrest. There was widespread public outrage about the events.