Not Dead...Not Even Past


Another example of how the civil rights struggle wasn't just a matter of a few marches over minor inconveniences, as the wingnuts would like you to believe, but a difficult conflict against an entrenched political and social apparatus that fought (and continues to fight) a zealous and ugly battle to maintain an unjust system.

Dan Klores, a New York filmmaker and former public relations executive, has been thinking about Orangeburg and its obscurity in the historical memory for decades, since he was a student at the time at the nearby University of South Carolina in Columbia. He said he hoped his latest film, "Black Magic," about basketball players at historically black colleges, will open people’s eyes to Orangeburg. (The film made its debut on ESPN on March 16.)

Mr. Klores said that Orangeburg was only obliquely related to the topic of "Black Magic," but that he was looking for any reason to delve into the incident. During his research for the film he discovered that one of the Orangeburg fatalities was a star high school basketball player who was on campus because his mother worked at the college as a maid.

"That gave me the excuse," Mr. Klores said. "That’s all it was. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I said, 'That’s fine, it’s my film.' "

Another film, a documentary produced by two Boston moviemakers, Bestor Cram and Judy Richardson, was in the research phase for nearly 10 years before the pair finally received financing last year. Titled "Orangeburg," it is scheduled for broadcast this fall on PBS.

"We were up against two problems," said Mr. Cram, a principal at Northern Light Productions in Boston, explaining why it took so long to finance the film. "People actually wondered why they hadn’t heard of it. Number two, everyone thinks the civil rights story has been told."

FYI, I happened to watch both parts of Black Magic (it ran on successive nights) and it's very much worth a look, even for a non-sports fan. And I can't help but think that if wingnuts were subjected to even one tenth of what they routinely expect "those people" to merely put up with as a matter of course, we'd likely be seeing ugly, violent episodes on pretty much a daily basis...