04/21/2026
Delano Middleton stopped by South Carolina State after basketball practice like he often did, and history still acts like his name is optional.
She was still in her work uniform when Delano Middleton asked for the 23rd Psalm. In that hospital room in Orangeburg, his mother spoke the words and her son repeated them until he could not anymore.
That detail should have made his name impossible to forget. Delano was a 17-year-old Wilkinson High senior, not a college activist, and sources describe him as having stopped by South Carolina State after basketball practice to see his mother, who worked there.
He arrived as a son at the end of a workday. He died inside a crisis he had not come to start.
The crisis had been building around All-Star Bowling Lanes, where Black residents and students were still being turned away four years after the Civil Rights Act. By February 1968, that bowling alley and Orangeburg Regional Hospital stood among the city’s remaining segregated public spaces.
So the fight was never only about bowling. It was about whether Black people in a Southern college town could be educated, employed, and still be denied the smallest public measure of dignity.
Students from South Carolina State and Claflin kept pressing the issue, and power answered with force instead of fairness. As tensions rose, the state flooded Orangeburg with officers, National Guard troops, and tanks, treating Black student protest like an enemy threat.
The days leading up to the shooting had already shown students what the state thought Black protest deserved. Henry Smith reportedly called his mother after police beat young women and described it as shameful, and within a day he would be one of the dead.
By the night of February 8, around 200 unarmed Black students were gathered on or near campus. When officers opened fire, the gunfire lasted only seconds, but those seconds remade families forever.
Some officers later said they thought they heard shots, but subsequent reporting found the early story of an armed exchange false. The students hit that night were largely wounded from behind or from the side as they ran, which tells its own hard truth about what happened in the dark.
Samuel Hammond Jr. was killed, Henry Smith was killed, and Delano arrived at the hospital with seven bullet wounds. Orangeburg took three young Black lives in one night and wounded at least 28 more.
Delano’s last moments were not grand or public. They were shaped by a Black mother’s voice, a sacred Psalm, and a son trying to hold on long enough to repeat the words back.
That tenderness should sit at the center of this history, because the public story was quickly bent away from the truth. Governor Robert McNair blamed Black Power agitators, and early national reporting falsely suggested students had exchanged gunfire with police.
Once that lie entered the bloodstream, the country had an excuse not to see Black students as children, scholars, athletes, and neighbors. Too many Americans were prepared to imagine danger whenever Black people refused humiliation.
The courts did not correct the moral injury. Nine officers were charged and all were acquitted, while Cleveland Sellers, wounded that night, was convicted on riot-related charges and served seven months before a pardon came years later.
Official regret arrived long after the funerals. State leaders eventually apologized, but those words came decades after families had already learned how alone grief could feel in South Carolina.
Orangeburg came more than two years before Kent State and marked the first such tragedy on an American college campus, yet it never settled into the nation’s memory the same way. America found it easier to canonize some student deaths than to fully mourn these Black ones.
But Black communities did not wait for the country to become honest. South Carolina State kept commemorating Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton every February 8, and the campus now holds a memorial, a legacy plaza, and an arena carrying their names.
That continuity matters. It means the state was never allowed complete control over the meaning of the dead, because Black remembrance kept doing what official records and thin textbooks would not.
When we return to Orangeburg, we should not return only to the gunfire. We should return to the students who kept demanding dignity, to the mothers who kept going, and to the sacred discipline of naming our own with care.
These are the stories we have to keep teaching, especially the ones school left at the margins. Black history is far larger than the few chapters we were handed, and places like Orangeburg still ask us to remember more, study more, and pass more truth forward.
