Even many South Carolinians barely remember the night when two unarmed black college students and a high school senior were killed, and 28 others injured, after state troopers opened fire at a civil-rights demonstration on Feb. 8, 1968. It was the first incident of its kind on an American campus, but the news was swamped by the Tet Offensive a week earlier and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. two months later.
There was no heavy news coverage like the Jackson State killings in Mississippi received in 1970, no unforgettable photograph like the image that burned the Kent State shootings into the American consciousness that same year.
Among those unaware of the incident, in spite of growing up two miles from where it happened at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, was Calhoun Cornwell, a budding student playwright there. But he was gripped by classroom lectures on the ’68 shootings that had become known as the Orangeburg Massacre, and in 2009, at the urging of classmates, he wrote a play about the event.