Orangeburg, SC news and local guide

After the Revolution, Eli Whitney's cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable, and the county became a land of large plantations worked by enslaved African Americans, many brought from the coast or the Upper South through the domestic slave trade, who became a majority of the population. After emancipation, two colleges were founded in Orangeburg, one of them the state's land-grant college for Black students under segregation, while Jim Crow laws and the state's disfranchising constitution stripped Black citizens of the vote. In the 1950s and 1960s Orangeburg was a major center of the civil rights movement, led by students of Claflin College and South Carolina State College and by local residents. In 1960 more than 400 students were arrested in sit-ins and marches, and in 1963 demonstrations of the Orangeburg Freedom Movement led to more than 1,300 arrests. On February 8, 1968, after protests against a segregated bowling alley, police opened fire on a crowd of South Carolina State students, killing Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith and Delano Middleton and wounding 27 others, in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Sources Wikipedia: Orangeburg, South Carolina