Lesson of Orangeburg

THE incident sounded reminiscent of Civil Rights' days of the early 1960's: a group of black college students from an all-Negro, Southern college attempting to integrate a segregated business establishment. But the scene was Orangeburg, South Carolina--not Greensboro or Selma--and the climax of the demonstration sounded grimly like the outcome of the summer riots: three South Carolina State students dead and more than 60 wounded by the police and National Guard.

While police officials charged the students with starting the spasm of gunfire, the fact that no fire-arms could be found among the students belied their accusation. That two of the dead and scores of the wounded were shot in the back added telling footnotes to the incident. The presence on campus of SNCC organizer Cleveland Sellers gave South Carolina Governor Robert E. McNair the excuse he needed for the police action.

Violence around Negro campuses is nothing new. Southern white police have always held a special contempt for Negro college students. As evidenced last year on many black campuses--the most notable being Fiske, Tennessee State, and Texas Southern--police have used appalling force to squelch black student activism. Even recently police have encountered little resistance from Negro college administrators who have seemed embarrassed by their students' actions. Their attitude has been more to condemn student political activity moving into the neighboring community than be outraged at subsequent police invasions of the campus.

The police's hostility toward the Negro college is linked to their resentment of the increasingly progressive--often radical--role it plays in Southern, black political activism. Governor McNair's condemnation of the violence was typical of earlier Southern white responses to the changing mood of the Negro campus. He was quick in summarily denouncing the influence of Black Power advocates.

Whether students at black colleges are Black Power advocates or not, there is increasing resentment among growing numbers of students about the compromising attitudes of Negro administrators and paternalistic white trustees. The Negro college campus has been traditionally conservative. Coupled with the growth of greater militancy in the civil rights movement, this has led many students to look beyond their campus to the black community as their primary area of concern. With black colleges often situated near or within predominantly Negro communities, this combination, at least in the eyes of Southern police, is volatile and threatening.

THE recurrence of police brutality on Southern campuses in the past two years, while laying bare police intimidation, has at the same time catalyzed increased political activity. These students recognize clearly enough that the college campus no longer enjoys a privileged status in the eyes of the Southern police force. So that now the black college student need go no further than his own campus to realize that his plight is the same as any other Negro's suffering at the hands of the Southern police establishment.

Negro college administrators must change their attitudes and actions or face a persistent no confidence vote from a majority of their student bodies. They will have to come to realize, as their students already have, that their vital yet vulnerable position in the Southern power structure can not be a neutral one. Southern black colleges will have to come to grips with this question and take a posture more in line with contemporary black student thoughts and concerns. Without this change, the schools will be torn internally, with students and administrators working at cross purposes.

Whatever decision those college administrators reach, the consequences of student-police confrontations will get worse before they get better. With tensions mounting on both sides, the danger of "overkill"--as Newsweek termed the Orangeburg police's reaction--becomes more and more a possibility.

Clearly the only way to avoid innumerable recurrences of the Orangeburg tragedy is for Negro college administrators to realize the support they owe to their students' political actions. The black college can be an effective force in bringing the political change and social justice so desperately needed in their neighboring communities. These colleges are producing the people that are going to make that change happen. It would be tragic if those changes occur despite the role of the black college, rather than because of it.