Filmmaker to shed light on forgotten history

February 9, 2010

Award-winning documentary filmmaker and civil rights activist Judy Richardson will be on campus Thursday, February 11, to present her most recent film Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, which examines killings that took place on a college campus. The film presentation will begin at 6 p.m., in Hindle Auditorium in the Science Center, and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the filmmaker.

On Feb. 8, 1968, following a week of escalating racial tensions, police shot into a crowd gathered at South Carolina State College to protest segregation at a local bowling alley. Three young African American men were killed and 27 others were injured during the Orangeburg, South Carolina, incident that is now referred to as the “Orangeburg massacre.”

Associate Professor of Economics Russell Williams and The Marshall Center for Intercultural Learning have invited Richardson to make the presentation. The invitation is timely, as her film is scheduled to be broadcast by PBS stations across the country during February.

Williams, a native of Orangeburg, also went to high school with one of the young men killed that night in 1968—Delano Middleton.

“I will never forget his name,” says Russell Williams, who lived just a block and half from the site of the killing. “I heard the fusillade of shots and other sounds that night from my bedroom.”

Williams said he, Richardson and Marshall Center Director Raquel Ramos want to share that moment in American history with the Wheaton community because there are powerful lessons still to be learned from it and lingering questions that need to be pondered. The incident is considered by many accounts to be one of the most overlooked incidents of the Civil Rights Movement.

Scarred Justice, which was co-produced with Bestor Cram, premiered in Williams’s hometown last February and has since received a great deal of attention, including winning the Carolina Film and Video Festival award for best documentary and the Pan African Film Festival for best documentary, short.

Richardson, a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began her film career as co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated, 14-hour PBS series, Eyes on the Prize. She also co-produced the 1994 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain.

Williams first met her in 1990 while participating in an Eyes on the Prize Institute for Educators, held at Tufts University. She was one of the instructors at the institute that was aimed at teaching educators to effectively use the Eyes on the Prize documentary series in the classroom.

When Williams learned of the scheduled national broadcast of her film, he felt that it was perfect opportunity to invite her to Wheaton.  Ramos agreed, noting the unique capability that Richardson has “to share the film, as well as provide students and faculty with important, first-hand knowledge about the many aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, the SNCC, and the role of college-age students in that historic period of social change.” (It is also the 50th anniversary of the founding of the SNCC.)

Williams notes that the Orangeburg massacre is a great subject of exploration for people interested in psychology, sociology, political science and other fields. He and Ramos say they have high hopes for Richardson’s visit and the film presentation.

“I hope, first, that the film will raise questions. Why did the massacre occur? This is a question about actual events and their underlying causes,” Williams said. “But equally important is a question about social memory—what we remember and why. Why is that many adults remember the killing of students at Kent State in Ohio in 1969, but very few have even heard about the killing of students in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968? What has prevented our society from recognizing, analyzing and learning from this event?”

Also, he said, “I hope that she will add to students’ base of information and insights into the Civil Rights Movement. This was not a movement initiated by a few people with great names. There are thousands and thousands of individuals who deserve to be recognized for their work, sacrifices, and contributions in initiating, sustaining, and building the movement.”