Blood & Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town

Shuler's well-researched but faltering historic account is centered around an evening of violence on February 8th, 1968. Two days after South Carolina State College students had protested to integrate a bowling alley in Orangeburg, SC, highway patrolmen opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators. When the smoke cleared, three young African-American men were dead. Over forty years later, native son Shuler (Calling Out Liberty) journeys back to his hometown with a list of unanswered questions to discover exactly what precipitated the Orangeburg Massacre, and how it continues to ripple through local history. The diverse cast of characters includes a repentant National Guardsman, a February 8th survivor with the long-lodged bullet to prove it, and a conspiratorial local veteran of the Civil Rights movement. "Perhaps there are no clear answers about what happened on February 8, 1968," Shuler writes, "because there are so many narratives floating around Orangeburg." Unfortunately, this is also the book's downfall. Its multiple perspectives are illuminating but don't add up to more than the sum of their parts. And attempts to place the Orangeburg Massacre into a context of September 11th and the economic development of modern day South Carolina feel clumsy. This account is far more successful in strictly dealing with the past, as it still manages to paint a vivid picture of the racially charged, tinderbox atmosphere in 1960s South Carolina. Photos. (Feb.)