"The people searching for Noah don’t know much about the child’s parents, other than Ashley White’s history with drug addiction. For many, that was enough."

With "Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles" we're presenting notable true crime stories, as reported by journalists for the dozens of various Lee-Enterprises owned publications from around America.

For this latest season, we wanted to highlight a series from The Roanoke Times that was first reported and produced in 2018 by journalists Jacob Demmitt and Robby Korth.

A 5-year-old child went missing in Dublin, Va., in spring 2015. When his body was discovered days later in the family's septic tank, the mother was put on trial both by the court system, as well as social media, where misinformation, accusations and vengeance-fueled comments spread unchecked.

It's a heartbreaking and tragic story, but Roanoke Times reporters Jacob Demmitt and Robby Korth went to great lengths to present an honest and well-rounded narrative that explores the ways a community failed one of their own while also touching on broader implications like the effects of Facebook, the stigma of drug addiction in rural America and the distortion of facts.

Links:
Roanoke Times reporters make podcast to revisit Noah Thomas case
Photo: The Train

If you appreciate what we're doing with this program, we encourage you to invest in local journalism and support The Roanoke Times, or whichever newspaper it is that serves your community.

"The people searching for Noah don&rsquo;t know much about the child&rsquo;s parents, other than Ashley White&rsquo;s history with drug addiction. For many, that was enough."
With "Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles" we're presenting notable true crime stories, as reported by journalists for the dozens of various Lee-Enterprises owned publications from around America.
For this latest season, we wanted to highlight a series from <a href="https://roanoke.com/">The Roanoke Times</a> that was first reported and produced in 2018 by journalists Jacob Demmitt and Robby Korth.
A 5-year-old child went missing in Dublin, Va., in spring 2015. When his body was discovered days later in the family's septic tank, the mother was put on trial both by the court system, as well as social media, where misinformation, accusations and vengeance-fueled comments spread unchecked.
It's a heartbreaking and tragic story, but Roanoke Times reporters Jacob Demmitt and Robby Korth went to great lengths to present an honest and well-rounded narrative that explores the ways a community failed one of their own while also touching on broader implications like the effects of Facebook, the stigma of drug addiction in rural America and the distortion of facts.
Links: <a href="https://roanoke.com/lifestyles/roanoke-times-reporters-make-podcast-to-revisit-noah-thomas-case/article_0cff654c-10e9-5720-a9f5-cd45005bf47e.html">Roanoke Times reporters make podcast to revisit Noah Thomas case</a> <a href="https://roanoke.com/archive/the-train/collection_55eae7a6-57b3-11e8-8469-d79481016893.html#tracking-source=in-article">Photo: The Train</a>
If you appreciate what we're doing with this program, we encourage you to invest in local journalism and support <a href="https://roanoke.com/">The Roanoke Times, </a>or whichever newspaper it is that serves your community.

Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, a product of Lee Enterprises, is a collection of limited anthology style episodes exploring true stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers around America.

Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, a product of Lee Enterprises, is a collection of limited anthology style episodes exploring true stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers around America.

Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles

Chapter 2: "Pulaski's Own" - Septic (The Roanoke Times)

In 1968, a peaceful civil rights protest turned deadly in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it became known as one of the most violent events of the civil rights movement, but details aren't widely known. Host Nat Cardona is again joined by subject matter expert Dr. William Heine to discuss how peaceful protestors were met with violence, what happened to the victims, and who was- or wasn't- held responsible for the bloodshed. The two also discuss how the victims are remembered today.

Listen to Episode 1 of the Orangeburg Massacre

Read more here and here and here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. I'm your host Nat Cardona. In the last episode, we discuss the climate leading into the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre in Orangeburg, South Carolina. If you haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen. There's a link in the show notes to help make it easier for you to find. In this week's episode, I'm again joined by Dr. William Heine. He's a former history professor at South Carolina State University. We discuss in detail how the peaceful protest by students was met with violence from law enforcement. We also go into who was or wasn't held responsible for the deaths of three students and the wounding of more than 20 others. And with that, let's get to it.

So you have this pressure cooker of tensions for the handful of years nights before the actual event happens. What's the tipping point? What's the the other shoe that drops to turn from. You know, a lot of tension to violence. What were the what was the thing that happened that night? That's that's that's it. There was nothing. I mean, they were they're they're fronted each other and went back and forth or time. As I mentioned, there was a bonfire that was was put out.

People continued to throw things at one point and officer of the highway patrol, a man named Shelly, got it. Looked like he'd been shot almost literally between the eyes. He went down at least semi-conscious for a period of time, bleeding profusely, and it appeared as if he had been been shot from the direction of the students. As it turned out, he had not been shot.

He'd been hit with a heavy piece of timber. It had opened a wound on his forehead. They took him off after the hospital and at least another 10 minutes or more elapsed after Shelly was hit with the with the timber. A lot of people were at the time and sense under the mistaken impression, well surely got hit and then the highway patrolman opened fire.

It didn't happen. It did not happen that way. They opened fire with no announcement that they were going to fire. Nobody said lock and load or know you have one minute or and 80 seconds to retreat or we're going to open fire. It wasn't announced. They just simply started shooting. Not all the highway patrolman shot. There were 66 of them aligned along the embankment and kind of curled around at right angles toward an unoccupied house next next door to the campus there.

Some opened fire, some did not. Most of the students were hit in the back as they turned to run from the shotgun blast and more than 30 were were hit and three were killed and at least 28 were injured, some superficially, some very seriously. Note that there was no ready, aim, fire. It was just a spontaneous opening of a fire.

The later it was, it was determined that apparently one of the highway patrol officers had fired a warning shot into the air with his sidearm and others not realizing that opened fire. You're hearing a a weapon go off. That's been about the best determination of how the highway patrolman came to open fire that night, roughly 10:30, 10:45 on February eight.

Okay. So you have a bunch of these young people wounded. Three young men ultimately are massacred or killed. Can you talk a little bit about those three young men, if you don't mind? Well, two of them were college students. One was a high school student and they were there as much out of curiosity as a determination that they're going to be involved in protests.

Henry Smith was probably the most active of the students. He wanted to be there. He did consider himself an activist. He was upset with conditions in the community and on the campus. And there's no question of his involvement, his determination to be a part of this. And the other college student was a freshman football player named Samuel Hammond from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It was there are of interest and curiosity. He was there with several other football players and athletes as well. He was shot and died shortly after that. Then there was Delano Middleton, who was the high school student. His mother worked on the campus and he kind of came up to see what was happening on the front of the campus.

And he was ahead and fatally injured as well that night. He was he was local. He was from the Orangeburg area and Smith was from Marion, now probably 100 miles. He came from a poor family over there. And as I mentioned, Samuel Hammond was an athlete from Fort Lauderdale, although his parents, his father was from are down the road from Orangeburg and Bamberg, South Carolina.

And so but they had connections and roots to the local area as well. Okay. Unfortunately, they're killed and other people are wounded. And then what? Like what is the what does that rest of the night like what happens pretty much immediately after? Well, it was chaos initially on the campus. I mean, there was fear, one, that this was just a prelude to an invasion by law enforcement that were going to head head on and through the campus and maybe continue shooting or occupy the campus.

No one knew what was going on. There was a absence of communication of any time. They were taking wounded students out the back side of the campus and going to the to the hospital by a back route. The college infirmary was filled with bleeding students of was great fear, anger, trepidation about what? What, what, what's next. I hear and it took a number of hours for this to settle down in the meantime, that the accounts that were out through the media were, well, incomplete and false as it turned out as well.

Associated Press tape sent out an account that there had been an exchange of gunfire on the campus with students shooting at highway patrolman and patrolman shooting back. And that was absolutely incorrect. And it was it was never a corrected by AP either. So the headlines, such as they were that appeared the next day, was that there had been an exchange of gunfire and the governor and the local authorities were pretty well convinced that they'd saved Orangeburg from some kind of massive black nationalist uprising.

And as regrettable as it was that students got shot, that this was necessary to protect the community, protect the lives and property of people in Orangeburg. And the governor maintained that and continued to maintain that as the days and weeks and then months and even years went by. After that, he was convinced that he'd acted properly and that he had helped to preserve the security and preserve what threatened to become a much worse situation from exploding into that.

And that is, to a large extent our the conventional story that was heard in the aftermath of the massacre, except for the black press that did cover the black newspapers at the time, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier and our Defender, Jet magazine. I mean, they covered it, But as far as most people in the black community were concerned, that was just cold blooded murder by armed highway patrolman, all white who shot into a crowd of black young men protesting on their own campus unarmed at the time.

So there are two versions that prevailed for many days, weeks and months, even years to the present day about what actually happened that night in 1968. Sure. We needed to take a quick break, so don't go too far. Just so listeners understand, there were out of the 70 or so patrolmen, nine were charged with shooting at protesters, but ultimately none were convicted of anything, totally just wiped clean.

No one held accountable for the murders or the shootings. Anything, correct?

That is correct. The U.S. Department of Justice tried to indict the nine highway patrolman who did admit shooting into the crowd of students. A federal grand jury in Columbia in the fall of 1968 refused to indict them on felony charges and the Department of Justice and ended them on misdemeanor charges, criminal information.

And they went on trial the following spring of 1969 in federal court in Florence, South Carolina. And a jury of ten white people and two black people found them not guilty and that they felt their lives were in danger and therefore they were justified in shooting into this crowd of students, even if the students weren't armed with weapons.

And so the nine Howard patrolmen were indeed acquitted. And then a year after that, Cleveland Sellers was brought to the bar of justice in Orangeburg, and he was charged with an assortment of charges, including inciting a riot. There. As it turned out, most of the charges were abandoned and he was finally convicted, not for what happened on the night of February, but on the night of February six at the bowling alley of inciting the crowd down there.

And he was sentenced to a year in state prison in the Bradford River Federal Byrd River State Correctional Institution. He served nine months. He was released early on our good behavior. So he's the only one who was penalized for the events surrounding the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. And I should point out that he was one of the people shot and wounded that night as while he was hit in the upper arm by a shotgun pellets there.

So he had to face the indignity of going to jail and being shot as well. I'm really, really hoping to still hear back from him, to hear just his retelling of everything that happened. But thanks for laying out all out. So, yeah, ultimately, he's the only one who's punished for anything that had happened that night. And at the end of the day, no justice was served for the three young men that were killed.

And, you know, here we are today. It's going on. What if we're 55, 56 years later? Like, how did we get here to where this major event that actually was so integral to the civil rights movement and so violence on top of it? How did we get to the point where this is just a blip on the radar in history, especially in terms with this?

Do you have any input on that? Well, the circumstances under which it happened in in 1968 was not well covered at that time. And 1968 was a very tumultuous year in American history. At the time of the year of the massacre in early February, the Tet Offensive was breaking out in Vietnam. The Vietnam War absorbed the attention of many, many Americans and the media shortly before that, and in January, an American naval vessel, the Pueblo, had been captured by North Korea and its crew taken hostage.

And then only weeks after the massacre, the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, announced that he would not be running for reelection in 1968. And days after that, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was shot in Memphis, Tennessee. And then a couple of months after that, Robert Kennedy was shot after the Democratic primary in California, shot in Los Angeles, and he died a day or so later.

And the the the massacre got lost in this series of events. And to that, it happens in a small rural town in South Carolina. And then most importantly, there was a group of black students and it simply did not draw the attention or the coverage of most people, especially most white people. It did, as I mentioned, draw the coverage of the black press and black students at other HBCU, other historically black colleges, universities, North Carolina, and to Morehouse, Howard in Washington DC.

But it was largely overlooked and there was no story in Time magazine. There was a short story in Newsweek at the time, the media, in terms of television, I gave that very, very little attention. And what little attention it did give, it disappeared a very quickly. So most people never even heard of it. It didn't get into most of the history books.

And two years later, when the shootings occurred in at Kent State, it just exploded across the front pages of newspapers and on all of the major networks, CBS and NBC and ABC at that time. And so virtually everyone in the aftermath of Kent State knew about the shootings of the four students at Kent who were all white and hardly anyone had heard of the students who had been shot at South Carolina State who were black, which and thank you for bringing that up, because with your affiliation with the College, for my understanding, student organizations have done a pretty good job of remembering what had happened there.

I understand that there are their statues of the three young men on campus, or is that just sort now that's on campus. There's a memorial plaza there the year after the massacre in 1969, a small granite marker was placed there with the names of the three young men. And then 30 plus years after that, and there were bronze tablets established around that granite marker with the names of the 28 young men who were wounded there.

And then three years ago or so, a a brick monument was created, built there, and then two years ago, there were busts of the three young men placed within that brick and lighted monument, the bust and Smith and Delano Middleton and Samuel Hammond are there. So there is a monument on campus that has expanded over the years.

Okay. That's good to know. Thank you for clarifying all that. One of the last things here is, you know, we can't we can't change the past in how it was covered and portrayed and how no justice was done and all of that. But what would your, you know, the take away? You would hope for our listeners to get out of this or for people to learn from this?

Do you have anything that you'd like to kind of part with? Well, you would hope that people would learn that you don't have law enforcement shoot into a crowd of unarmed people. But the fact of the matter is they did it and do it again and then shot into a crowd of protesting, protesting students at Kent State in May of 1970.

And unfortunately, too often our law enforcement officers have taken it upon themselves to not only enforce the law, but apparently act as a jury and convict and punish those who they see protesting, demonstrating, are breaking the law in front of them. So that's one lesson that has regrettably not been learned very much, if at all, in the years and decades since then.

The other regret as far as I'm concerned, and many other people were involved with the massacre and those who survived it, I there was never any formal investigation of what happened and why it happened. There was a presidential commission formed after they can say, killings on campus violence. Richard Nixon appointed the former governor of Pennsylvania, William Scranton, and they did a thorough investigation of what happened at Kent State, what happened at Jackson State that pretty much ignored Orangeburg to try to get at the problems that led to the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State in May of 1970.

There's been other state investigations of of racially involved incidents everywhere from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1923 to Rosewood, Florida, in 1922. More recent developments, but there was never a state or federal investigation of what happened in Orangeburg. And our effort to try to get into the underlying factors that contributed to this to try to bring some increased clarity. I don't know that would bring closure to this.

It might it might help it might assist in that. But it has never happened. And I in terms of the foreseeable future, it doesn't look like it's going to happen, but it does.

But in theory, it could still happen. That would be the. certainly. Okay. It's never too late. No, I mean, they investigated Tulsa almost 100 years after it happened. And Rosewood right, as well. Tulsa was 1921 and Rosewood was 1923. And state of Florida and state of Oklahoma did investigate those appointed people. They set aside relatively small amounts of money on this and then tried to undertake a thorough examination of the events that had occurred many decades before.

Now we're more than a half century since Orangeburg. There's still no investigation, and there seems to be little inclination on the part of the political leaders to undertake such an investigation, even though it would be of of modest cost. The attitude seems to be, well, we don't need to bring that up again. I don't don't let us put the scab on that wound again.

Let's just let it let it go. We can move on. And I will live in a better, happier future without digging into the past and stirring up the animosity and hard feelings once again. So we don't need no, we don't need an investigation like that and quit harping on it and quit suggesting that we do. And in fact, it's about time you stopped having those ceremonies in February 8th to commemorate this.

That only inflames people in the community and people get upset with this and would rather not. It happened, I should say that I helping with that has been the local newspaper, the The Times and Democrat. They have done a lot in recent years to try to bring about some some healing and some effort to recognize what happened in the community as a serious, serious tragedy and loss of life and the injuries that occurred.

And they've tried to bring people together in terms of healing with efforts to try to bring community leaders together, to agree, at least not to be so emotionally invested in this, that they that they have a hard time even speaking with each other. So The Times and Democratic Kathy Hughes and Lee Harder have have helped a lot there.

Is there anything that you would like to add before we parted ways? You know, I would I would repeat the what I've almost repeated over the years ad nauseum now about the need for an investigation. We're losing people. In the past year, two of the young men who were wounded in 1968 have have died since the fall of 1922.

And that's regrettable. But as the cliche goes, better late than never. So I would I repeat, a call for an investigation won't answer all the questions. It won't satisfy everyone. But I think it will help bring about an understanding of one of the most traumatic events that occurred in South Carolina in the 20th century. So on that note, I would would close and that's a great note to close on.

I really appreciate your time this was honestly a way more information than I actually expected. So huge. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And that's where we'll end the show for today. If you're interested in more details of how the victims of the massacre are being memorialized, please check out the articles linked in our show notes.

And don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming next on Crime Chronicles. Thanks for listening.

The Orangeburg Massacre: A peaceful protest met with violence, who was held responsible and how the victims are remembered

In 1968, a peaceful civil rights protest turned deadly in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it became known as one of the most violent events of the civil rights movement, but details aren't widely known. Host Nat Cardona is joined by subject matter expert Dr. William Heine to discuss the social, political and racial environment leading up to the February of 1968 racial massacre. 

Read more here and here and here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to the Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm Nat Cardona. On this podcast, you'll hear true crime stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers across the country. Our next set of episodes are about the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, and my guess you probably never heard of what happened there back in 1968, Orangeburg was home to two Black colleges and it had a large Black population.

However, the majority of the economic and political power was still held by the minority White population. It's February 8th, 1968. Roughly 300 protesters from South Carolina State College and Claflin University staged a nonviolent demonstration after a Black Vietnam War vet was denied access to a local bowling alley, one of the few segregated facilities left in town. The violence began with police officers beating two female students, and it ended with 28 students injured and three murdered.

We'll start with setting up social, political and economic climate at that time. Joining me on this episode is Dr. William Heine, a former professor of history at South Carolina State University for more than 40 years. He's also a published author and one of the authorities of the 1968 massacre. First things first is tell me a little bit about yourself and who you are.

Well, as you know, my name is William Heine. I taught history at South Carolina State for many years, beginning the year of the Orangeburg Massacre and retired a few years ago. In the meantime, what had been South Carolina State College became South Carolina State University in the early 1990. So there's sometimes a little bit of confusion about the label or the correct name of the institution.

But I did teach history there, and and wrote a history of the institution as well that came out a couple of years ago. I grew up in Ohio and then in 1967 came to South Carolina on what I thought would be a temporary teaching assignment for someone who was on leave that year. And I would teach there a year and then move on.

But that person did not come back after that year. So I stayed a second year and then I decided that and as much as I didn't have a page at the time that I either ought to get a degree in history or move on to something else. So I went back to graduate school at Kent State in Ohio and stayed there for three years working on a doctorate and then, with no other positions available, returned to South Carolina State in the fall of 1972 and stayed there for the remainder of my academic career.

And involved, as you might expect, on a variety of projects, some enterprises dealing with history and other subjects and our campus organizations and and the usual litany of things that college faculty members get engaged in.

Sure, sure. And the main thing we're talking about today is obviously the Orangeburg Massacre. South Carolina State has done a remarkable job. Whether it be, like you said, faculty or students in commemorating the event every single year. But, you know, the reason we reached out to you is because Lee Enterprises owns Orangeburg as a Democrat. Right. So the idea here is that you'd be able to provide context that is not available through the small amount of articles that were written throughout the years about it and, you know, hopefully provide more context than what a Google search can provide, because you Google this and it is actually pretty disheartening at how few links there are to

information about what had happened and who was killed and everything that the fallout, all of that. So ideally, I'd like you to bring me back to you know, you said you you were you were you were there in 1967. This happened in the beginning of February of 1968. Can you describe what Orangeburg was like at that time? What's going on in the community, what the demographics are, that kind of thing?

Orangeburg is the the county seat of the county that has the same name, Orangeburg County, in terms of size as the second largest Korean in South Carolina, stretching across the Midlands in terms of its history since the early 19th century. Orangeburg just consisted of a population of a Black majority are going back to the expansion of slavery in the early 19th century, and the county still has a Black majority to the present day.

In 1967. Orangeburg, with its Black majority, had not a single Black officeholder in local or state government. The State General Assembly was entirely white in 1967 68. The County Council, the City Council, the sheriff, the Chief of police. Virtually every public officeholder elected or appointed was white at that time, and most of the businesses that were white owned in town employed only white people except for their janitorial crew.

There weren't any Black retail clerks at Penney's or at the smaller stores around town. Nevertheless, it has had and continues to have two Black colleges. Claflin, a methodist Center tution founded during Reconstruction in 1869 and then South Carolina State, founded as the only Black public higher education institution in South Carolina, a four year institution founded as a land grant as a kind of counter to Clemson, which was the white land grant institution that had been founded.

And just a few years prior to that in the early 1890s. So you had this community made up of largely a Black population, but it was a white power structure in terms of politics as well as the economy.

Okay. And fair to say that there would be a lot of young Black youth as well because of the schools, correct?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And there was a fairly substantial with with the presence of two institutions, a substantial number of middle class Black people who worked in administration or faculty, as well as the public schools that were at the Times. For all intents and purposes, they were still segregated. There were still two high schools when I arrived in and Orangeburg, the Black High School, Wilkinson High School and the White High School, Orangeburg High School.

They they did merge a couple of years later into one one high school. But that was the situation all through the 1960s.

Yeah, and that's the perfect segue way there, because in 1964 we officially have the desegregation in the South. But, you know, coming up to 1968, the beginning of February, there's this bowling alley, all star lanes, right? And it is yeah, it is owned by Mr. Floyd, who says no Blacks allowed. This is my white only policy, yada, yada.

Can you explain the context behind that? Like how that could still be because some people might not understand, even though officially 1964 is a few years before desegregation. But here we are, it's still not that much different, right, in 1968. So please go into that, if you wouldn't mind.

Well, Orangeburg still lagged behind despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the prime example became the bowling alley. And the proprietor, Harry Floyd, who had literally built the bowling alley earlier in the sixties, operated as a white only facility. And it was his contention that he could exclude Black people, that the bowling alley was not covered under the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it didn't engage in interstate commerce.

And that was a matter of legal controversy at the time. But that was his position. In the meantime, there were several other facilities in town that remained white only. There were some local laundromats that were white. Only the two drive in movie theaters that existed on the fringe of town. I would not admit Black people to those drive in facilities.

Most of the medical doctors who were white still maintained a separate waiting rooms for white and Black patients. The local hospital had not yet accepted Medicare that had been enacted in 1965. So there were a number of issues, most of them revolving around race as well as class that still divided the community. Four years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act that was supposedly brought in desegregation of public facilities.

Sure, that was quite the lag time. As you mentioned, we needed. Take a quick break, so don't go too far. So speaking of February 5th, 1968, we have the small group of students who go into the bowling alley and things ensue there. Can you talk a little bit about that? That was kind of the precursor to what happened on February 8th, ultimately.

Well, there actually it goes back before that fact. You could easily go back several years. That part of the hidden history of Orangeburg and civil rights happened back in 1960. And then in through the early 1960s, there were massive civil rights demonstrate in Orangeburg by students of the two to college. I mean, hundreds of people were marching in the spring of 19 60, and large numbers of them were arrested.

And then as the weeks and months passed, re-arrested in many cases. And on March 15, 1960, 400 students out of a thousand, roughly, who marched that day were arrested. And in Carson raided. And the fire department hose them down that chilly March day in 1968 years before the massacre. And there's a whole history of that. And I might might point out, incidentally, that one of those who was arrested, that that March day was James Clyburn, now a prominent congressman and spokesman for the Democratic Party and in Washington.

And so he's very familiar with not only those demonstrations, but up through the the massacre. So you had this history of engagement, student participation, student nonviolent protest in Orangeburg. So when you get to 1967 and 68, you've got this bowling alley just down the street from the campuses and people at least some people wanted a bowl and certainly most students were really weren't interested in bowling.

They came from rural South Carolina. There were no bowling alleys and most of the small towns in and South Carolina. But some were interested, like John Stroman, who was from Savannah. He genuinely liked to bowl and wanted to bowling and couldn't get in the bowling alley. And then there was another student, James Davis, who had been in the Air Force for a number of years and came back and started college in Orange Bowl games in his mid or late twenties.

He wanted a bowl and then was infuriated that he'd served in the Air Force, went down to the bowling alley and they wouldn't let him in to bowl. And that was a wish. Weeks prior to January and February. And there was an initial effort to to bowl. And Harry Floyd, the owner, was adamant he was not going to admit Black people.

So they they followed kind of switched trigger on Floyd. One afternoon in January, they got one of the few white students at South Carolina State, a fellow named John Blocker, and they persuaded him to go down by himself and bowl. And he went in and and got away and told Harry Floyd that several of his friends were coming along any minute.

And not long after that they showed up, but they were Black friends and Floyd threw them all out at that at that point. And that set the stage then for February 1st, when they come down again, there's a confrontation there. The students are removed from the bowling alley. They show up again the next night, Tuesday, February 6th. There's an even larger number of students and a larger employment of Black excuse me, of law enforcement officers there.

And a couple of students are arrested after a big plate glass window was shattered on that Tuesday night. And also a law enforcement officer had some sort of caustic liquid thrown in his in his eyes that caused some eye damage. And that leads to the arrest. Several dozen students are in the parking lot outside a bowling alley. And then the police wait in and began to push students around.

A fire truck shows up and some of the students, the older students from that community knew about the fire hoses from earlier and the demonstrations. And the situation escalated. It was tense, but it wasn't until the point of any physical contact, aside from the the arrests that had occurred and the city authorities meeting with a couple of college officials, Pete Butler among them, were able to get the arrested students released with the understanding that everyone would go home.

Well, at some point, the local police began to hit students as they retreated and word got back to the campuses that students were being beaten, especially young women. And at that point, then more students rushed downtown and the situation nationwide threatened to get out of hand. If not, there was some property damage to stores and businesses between the campus and the bowling alley.

But there were an aside from the students who were beaten, especially the young ladies, and there was no damage, there was no looting and nothing was taken. But there were several hundred, if not several thousand dollars worth of damage done to grass windows and to some automobiles that are new are locked down there. But it seems to me anyway, that what really set the students off as much as anything was having their their fellow students, especially the younger women beaten that night and that that galvanized the two campuses and solidified the protests and the anger directed toward law enforcement, as well as the political leaders in the in the community.

Sure. So that brings us to February 8th of 1968. We have that on campus protest of, you know, a couple of hundred students. Would you be able to paint the picture of what the protest was intended to be? Would you be able to speak on that.

Whether there were two nights, the event, the night of the confrontation down at the bowling alley with the fire trucks and the students being beaten? That was that Tuesday night. Then Wednesday night, there was an effort to keep the students on the campus and the college president, Michelle Nance, urged students don't leave the campus. Furthermore, by that time, National Guardsmen and a large contingent of state highway patrolman had arrived in Orangeburg and they weren't going to let them off the campus anyway, fearing that if students were to go back downtown, that they would emulate people who had protested at in Watts and in Newark and in Cleveland and in Detroit, the urban riots that occurred

in 1965, 66, 67. Now it looked like Orangeburg might be incinerated by these Black power advocates. These Black nationalists are led by this young man who had been involved in ethnic named Cleveland sellers, who'd been in town for several months by then. So they were confined to the basically confined to the campus that Wednesday, February 7th. And there were a series of incidents throwing things out on the highway as the campus, some two young white men drove onto the campus in spite of the fact there was supposed to be a curfew and that caused a sensation of some sort there.

But that was a relatively calm night that set the stage for Thursday, February 8th, 1968, where, again, students assembled in front of the campus and protested and threw things at the the highway patrolman that were lined up along the edge of the campus there with National Guardsmen well behind them, across the street, across the railroad tracks. On the other side of the two campuses there was it was dark, it was chilly.

I was not a well-lit area by any means. It's hard to know how many students were out there. They kind of came and went over a period of time, eight, nine, 10:00 that evening. There were some women students out there. They came and went. A bonfire was started on the little street in front of the campus there. The fire department was called to put out the fire.

It was a mixture of sort of above festival, along with anger and bitterness directed toward the highway patrol, which at the time was all white. They were just in the process of hiring their first two Black highway patrol officers in early 1968. So you had a contingent of all white law enforcement officers, well armed and Black students by ten, 1030 that night, all male, but they were unarmed except for sticks, stones and some pretty vile language directed at the even at the highway patrolman.

And that set the stage for the shooting.

Just a quick side note before we get into that. How did the National Guard get involved? Just clarification purposes here.

Well, the governor, Robert, there, I was convinced that he had a seriously dangerous situation in Orangeburg because he was convinced that this young man, Cleveland Sellers, had incited these students, especially that to resign, he'd been in town, as I mentioned, for several, several months and got to know a lot of students. There was an organization on the South Carolina state campus known as Backbeat Ask the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee.

He worked with them. There were probably 30 or 40 students out of 2000 who belong to Black. But Governor McNair was convinced that that these campuses, and especially South Carolina State with Cleveland sellers in town was a hotbed of Black nationalism, radicalism, and that they were eager to virtually incinerate Orangeburg if they weren't controlled. So he dispatched additional highway patrolman from around the state and the local National Guard was called up and they were available as well.

But they were not on the campus or near the campus. Probably the closest National Guardsmen was 200 or more yards away. And I might point out that the National Guard had weapons, but they weren't loaded on the island. People had weapons, mostly shotguns, and they were load.

And that's where we'll wrap up things this week. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss the next episode where Dr. Hine details what happened that February night in 1968. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Me Chronicles. I'll see you soon.

In 1968, a peaceful civil rights protest turned deadly in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it became known as one of the most violent events of the civil rights movement, but details aren't widely known. Host Nat Cardona is joined by subject matter expert Dr. William Heine to discuss the social, political and racial environment leading up to the February of 1968 racial massacre. 
Read more <a href="https://thetandd.com/news/williams-we-must-never-forget-their-sacrifices-orangeburg-massacre-remembered/article_0ed72404-d364-5505-92a9-ed2ae9fd2bd7.html">here</a> and <a href="https://thetandd.com/news/local/scsu-students-march-in-memory-of-orangeburg-massacre/article_1c0f9f17-ea66-5887-9501-eee67c837678.html">here</a> and <a href="https://thetandd.com/news/local/state-and-regional/cold-cases-from-civil-rights-era-still-open-orangeburg-massacre-among-events-under-doj-review/article_e902bc7e-5705-513a-ac47-d83da81c6243.html">here</a>.
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Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Welcome to the Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm Nat Cardona. On this podcast, you'll hear true crime stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers across the country. Our next set of episodes are about the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, and my guess you probably never heard of what happened there back in 1968, Orangeburg was home to two Black colleges and it had a large Black population.
However, the majority of the economic and political power was still held by the minority White population. It's February 8th, 1968. Roughly 300 protesters from South Carolina State College and Claflin University staged a nonviolent demonstration after a Black Vietnam War vet was denied access to a local bowling alley, one of the few segregated facilities left in town. The violence began with police officers beating two female students, and it ended with 28 students injured and three murdered.
We'll start with setting up social, political and economic climate at that time. Joining me on this episode is Dr. William Heine, a former professor of history at South Carolina State University for more than 40 years. He's also a published author and one of the authorities of the 1968 massacre. First things first is tell me a little bit about yourself and who you are.
Well, as you know, my name is William Heine. I taught history at South Carolina State for many years, beginning the year of the Orangeburg Massacre and retired a few years ago. In the meantime, what had been South Carolina State College became South Carolina State University in the early 1990. So there's sometimes a little bit of confusion about the label or the correct name of the institution.
But I did teach history there, and and wrote a history of the institution as well that came out a couple of years ago. I grew up in Ohio and then in 1967 came to South Carolina on what I thought would be a temporary teaching assignment for someone who was on leave that year. And I would teach there a year and then move on.
But that person did not come back after that year. So I stayed a second year and then I decided that and as much as I didn't have a page at the time that I either ought to get a degree in history or move on to something else. So I went back to graduate school at Kent State in Ohio and stayed there for three years working on a doctorate and then, with no other positions available, returned to South Carolina State in the fall of 1972 and stayed there for the remainder of my academic career.
And involved, as you might expect, on a variety of projects, some enterprises dealing with history and other subjects and our campus organizations and and the usual litany of things that college faculty members get engaged in.
Sure, sure. And the main thing we're talking about today is obviously the Orangeburg Massacre. South Carolina State has done a remarkable job. Whether it be, like you said, faculty or students in commemorating the event every single year. But, you know, the reason we reached out to you is because Lee Enterprises owns Orangeburg as a Democrat. Right. So the idea here is that you'd be able to provide context that is not available through the small amount of articles that were written throughout the years about it and, you know, hopefully provide more context than what a Google search can provide, because you Google this and it is actually pretty disheartening at how few links there are to
information about what had happened and who was killed and everything that the fallout, all of that. So ideally, I'd like you to bring me back to you know, you said you you were you were you were there in 1967. This happened in the beginning of February of 1968. Can you describe what Orangeburg was like at that time? What's going on in the community, what the demographics are, that kind of thing?
Orangeburg is the the county seat of the county that has the same name, Orangeburg County, in terms of size as the second largest Korean in South Carolina, stretching across the Midlands in terms of its history since the early 19th century. Orangeburg just consisted of a population of a Black majority are going back to the expansion of slavery in the early 19th century, and the county still has a Black majority to the present day.
In 1967. Orangeburg, with its Black majority, had not a single Black officeholder in local or state government. The State General Assembly was entirely white in 1967 68. The County Council, the City Council, the sheriff, the Chief of police. Virtually every public officeholder elected or appointed was white at that time, and most of the businesses that were white owned in town employed only white people except for their janitorial crew.
There weren't any Black retail clerks at Penney's or at the smaller stores around town. Nevertheless, it has had and continues to have two Black colleges. Claflin, a methodist Center tution founded during Reconstruction in 1869 and then South Carolina State, founded as the only Black public higher education institution in South Carolina, a four year institution founded as a land grant as a kind of counter to Clemson, which was the white land grant institution that had been founded.
And just a few years prior to that in the early 1890s. So you had this community made up of largely a Black population, but it was a white power structure in terms of politics as well as the economy.
Okay. And fair to say that there would be a lot of young Black youth as well because of the schools, correct?
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And there was a fairly substantial with with the presence of two institutions, a substantial number of middle class Black people who worked in administration or faculty, as well as the public schools that were at the Times. For all intents and purposes, they were still segregated. There were still two high schools when I arrived in and Orangeburg, the Black High School, Wilkinson High School and the White High School, Orangeburg High School.
They they did merge a couple of years later into one one high school. But that was the situation all through the 1960s.
Yeah, and that's the perfect segue way there, because in 1964 we officially have the desegregation in the South. But, you know, coming up to 1968, the beginning of February, there's this bowling alley, all star lanes, right? And it is yeah, it is owned by Mr. Floyd, who says no Blacks allowed. This is my white only policy, yada, yada.
Can you explain the context behind that? Like how that could still be because some people might not understand, even though officially 1964 is a few years before desegregation. But here we are, it's still not that much different, right, in 1968. So please go into that, if you wouldn't mind.
Well, Orangeburg still lagged behind despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the prime example became the bowling alley. And the proprietor, Harry Floyd, who had literally built the bowling alley earlier in the sixties, operated as a white only facility. And it was his contention that he could exclude Black people, that the bowling alley was not covered under the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it didn't engage in interstate commerce.
And that was a matter of legal controversy at the time. But that was his position. In the meantime, there were several other facilities in town that remained white only. There were some local laundromats that were white. Only the two drive in movie theaters that existed on the fringe of town. I would not admit Black people to those drive in facilities.
Most of the medical doctors who were white still maintained a separate waiting rooms for white and Black patients. The local hospital had not yet accepted Medicare that had been enacted in 1965. So there were a number of issues, most of them revolving around race as well as class that still divided the community. Four years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act that was supposedly brought in desegregation of public facilities.
Sure, that was quite the lag time. As you mentioned, we needed. Take a quick break, so don't go too far. So speaking of February 5th, 1968, we have the small group of students who go into the bowling alley and things ensue there. Can you talk a little bit about that? That was kind of the precursor to what happened on February 8th, ultimately.
Well, there actually it goes back before that fact. You could easily go back several years. That part of the hidden history of Orangeburg and civil rights happened back in 1960. And then in through the early 1960s, there were massive civil rights demonstrate in Orangeburg by students of the two to college. I mean, hundreds of people were marching in the spring of 19 60, and large numbers of them were arrested.
And then as the weeks and months passed, re-arrested in many cases. And on March 15, 1960, 400 students out of a thousand, roughly, who marched that day were arrested. And in Carson raided. And the fire department hose them down that chilly March day in 1968 years before the massacre. And there's a whole history of that. And I might might point out, incidentally, that one of those who was arrested, that that March day was James Clyburn, now a prominent congressman and spokesman for the Democratic Party and in Washington.
And so he's very familiar with not only those demonstrations, but up through the the massacre. So you had this history of engagement, student participation, student nonviolent protest in Orangeburg. So when you get to 1967 and 68, you've got this bowling alley just down the street from the campuses and people at least some people wanted a bowl and certainly most students were really weren't interested in bowling.
They came from rural South Carolina. There were no bowling alleys and most of the small towns in and South Carolina. But some were interested, like John Stroman, who was from Savannah. He genuinely liked to bowl and wanted to bowling and couldn't get in the bowling alley. And then there was another student, James Davis, who had been in the Air Force for a number of years and came back and started college in Orange Bowl games in his mid or late twenties.
He wanted a bowl and then was infuriated that he'd served in the Air Force, went down to the bowling alley and they wouldn't let him in to bowl. And that was a wish. Weeks prior to January and February. And there was an initial effort to to bowl. And Harry Floyd, the owner, was adamant he was not going to admit Black people.
So they they followed kind of switched trigger on Floyd. One afternoon in January, they got one of the few white students at South Carolina State, a fellow named John Blocker, and they persuaded him to go down by himself and bowl. And he went in and and got away and told Harry Floyd that several of his friends were coming along any minute.
And not long after that they showed up, but they were Black friends and Floyd threw them all out at that at that point. And that set the stage then for February 1st, when they come down again, there's a confrontation there. The students are removed from the bowling alley. They show up again the next night, Tuesday, February 6th. There's an even larger number of students and a larger employment of Black excuse me, of law enforcement officers there.
And a couple of students are arrested after a big plate glass window was shattered on that Tuesday night. And also a law enforcement officer had some sort of caustic liquid thrown in his in his eyes that caused some eye damage. And that leads to the arrest. Several dozen students are in the parking lot outside a bowling alley. And then the police wait in and began to push students around.
A fire truck shows up and some of the students, the older students from that community knew about the fire hoses from earlier and the demonstrations. And the situation escalated. It was tense, but it wasn't until the point of any physical contact, aside from the the arrests that had occurred and the city authorities meeting with a couple of college officials, Pete Butler among them, were able to get the arrested students released with the understanding that everyone would go home.
Well, at some point, the local police began to hit students as they retreated and word got back to the campuses that students were being beaten, especially young women. And at that point, then more students rushed downtown and the situation nationwide threatened to get out of hand. If not, there was some property damage to stores and businesses between the campus and the bowling alley.
But there were an aside from the students who were beaten, especially the young ladies, and there was no damage, there was no looting and nothing was taken. But there were several hundred, if not several thousand dollars worth of damage done to grass windows and to some automobiles that are new are locked down there. But it seems to me anyway, that what really set the students off as much as anything was having their their fellow students, especially the younger women beaten that night and that that galvanized the two campuses and solidified the protests and the anger directed toward law enforcement, as well as the political leaders in the in the community.
Sure. So that brings us to February 8th of 1968. We have that on campus protest of, you know, a couple of hundred students. Would you be able to paint the picture of what the protest was intended to be? Would you be able to speak on that.
Whether there were two nights, the event, the night of the confrontation down at the bowling alley with the fire trucks and the students being beaten? That was that Tuesday night. Then Wednesday night, there was an effort to keep the students on the campus and the college president, Michelle Nance, urged students don't leave the campus. Furthermore, by that time, National Guardsmen and a large contingent of state highway patrolman had arrived in Orangeburg and they weren't going to let them off the campus anyway, fearing that if students were to go back downtown, that they would emulate people who had protested at in Watts and in Newark and in Cleveland and in Detroit, the urban riots that occurred
in 1965, 66, 67. Now it looked like Orangeburg might be incinerated by these Black power advocates. These Black nationalists are led by this young man who had been involved in ethnic named Cleveland sellers, who'd been in town for several months by then. So they were confined to the basically confined to the campus that Wednesday, February 7th. And there were a series of incidents throwing things out on the highway as the campus, some two young white men drove onto the campus in spite of the fact there was supposed to be a curfew and that caused a sensation of some sort there.
But that was a relatively calm night that set the stage for Thursday, February 8th, 1968, where, again, students assembled in front of the campus and protested and threw things at the the highway patrolman that were lined up along the edge of the campus there with National Guardsmen well behind them, across the street, across the railroad tracks. On the other side of the two campuses there was it was dark, it was chilly.
I was not a well-lit area by any means. It's hard to know how many students were out there. They kind of came and went over a period of time, eight, nine, 10:00 that evening. There were some women students out there. They came and went. A bonfire was started on the little street in front of the campus there. The fire department was called to put out the fire.
It was a mixture of sort of above festival, along with anger and bitterness directed toward the highway patrol, which at the time was all white. They were just in the process of hiring their first two Black highway patrol officers in early 1968. So you had a contingent of all white law enforcement officers, well armed and Black students by ten, 1030 that night, all male, but they were unarmed except for sticks, stones and some pretty vile language directed at the even at the highway patrolman.
And that set the stage for the shooting.
Just a quick side note before we get into that. How did the National Guard get involved? Just clarification purposes here.
Well, the governor, Robert, there, I was convinced that he had a seriously dangerous situation in Orangeburg because he was convinced that this young man, Cleveland Sellers, had incited these students, especially that to resign, he'd been in town, as I mentioned, for several, several months and got to know a lot of students. There was an organization on the South Carolina state campus known as Backbeat Ask the Black Awareness Coordinating Committee.
He worked with them. There were probably 30 or 40 students out of 2000 who belong to Black. But Governor McNair was convinced that that these campuses, and especially South Carolina State with Cleveland sellers in town was a hotbed of Black nationalism, radicalism, and that they were eager to virtually incinerate Orangeburg if they weren't controlled. So he dispatched additional highway patrolman from around the state and the local National Guard was called up and they were available as well.
But they were not on the campus or near the campus. Probably the closest National Guardsmen was 200 or more yards away. And I might point out that the National Guard had weapons, but they weren't loaded on the island. People had weapons, mostly shotguns, and they were load.
And that's where we'll wrap up things this week. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss the next episode where Dr. Hine details what happened that February night in 1968. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Me Chronicles. I'll see you soon.

The Orangeburg Massacre: Atmosphere leading up to the civil rights-era crime

Marvin Gaye. Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles. John Denver. The Monkees. All successful musical acts… with FBI files. In this week’s episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, the Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbil joins show producer/editor Ambre Moton to take a look at how the city of Tulsa was central to The Monkees hitting the FBI’s radar as persons of interest.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Boy bands are pretty popular nowadays, and most people probably credit the Beatles for the creation of the phenomenon. But some people remember the Monkees, a group often referred to as the Pre-Fab Four, a U.S. pop band that was created in 1968 for a television show of the same name that originally aired for two seasons and then went on to become a legitimate pop band in its own right.

Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the show's producer and editor. Back with another story that you may not think of as a traditional true crime case.

Okay. The band, it consisted of Micky Dolanz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show played well to both fans and critics and performed well in its original run and through syndication and Saturday morning repeats.

The show is a scripted comedy, all about the four bandmates struggling to make it in the music business. And of course, the hijinks that ensued while a manufactured band. The music really did catch on, and they eventually toured to sold out crowds on a cool OC. But how did the creators of Daydream Believer and I'm a Believer, a song brought back into the lexicon by the band Smash Mouth for the Shrek soundtrack, Lend themselves the subject of a true crime podcast?

Well, would you be surprised to learn that the Monkees were the subject of an FBI investigation? The group's final surviving member, Micky Dolenz, sued the FBI in 2022 to obtain any files on him. The band and his bandmates, after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request in June of that year and failing to receive anything more than an automated response within the 20 days that federal agencies are obligated to respond.

Randy Krehbiel, you may remember from the series of episodes we did with the Tulsa World about the Osages during the Reign of Terror, joins me in this episode to explain how the pop band came to the attention of the FBI. And of course, the tie to Tulsa.

Randy, it is great to have you back on the podcast, so thank you so much for doing this.

It's with you!

You wrote an article about The Monkees, the band, and a tie to the FBI. But let's kind of start a little bit with who the Monkees were. I remember them... when I was little, I think around when I was four, MTV was airing reruns of their TV show, which was a sitcom, if I remember correctly, and I absolutely adored it. Can you just kind of talk about the history of The Monkees?

Sure. So I was kind of the Monkees target audience when they came out. But in the 1960s, when they you know, we had the British invasion then and sort of pop music and rock music was really exploding onto the scene. Some TV producers got the idea of creating a band and making a television series about the band.

And initially the band was not going to be performing their own music. I think the idea was they actually would do the singing but not play the instruments. And the show turned out to be like a lot of music in that era that the band became rapidly popular and almost as rapidly faded from the scene. But at any rate, they they became proficient enough, I guess you would say.

Basically, they just insisted that they were going to be the band, that they didn't need all these other people. So they went out on tour. They had at least a couple of them and well, actually they had more than that, I think. But they went out on tour and they were quite successful. Like I found that they they sold something like 75 million records in about a two or three year span.

So like they were pretty much a big deal. They because it was put together by these TV producers, they hired some some of the big, big name songwriters in the Brill Building in New York, which was, you know, the place where a lot of the fifties and sixties and on into the seventies. Big hits were written in the Brill Building in New York.

And so so they had and they had some very big hits. And so they and they and then you mentioned MTV. They had kind of a second life when MTV came out because they started playing those shows in reruns and they became popular again. And at least some of them started touring again. And then I guess it was in the eighties and even there's one of them still alive, Micky Dolenz And he still does some shows at 78.

Where didn't the show actually win an Emmy, I think. Yeah, I think one year the show won an Emmy for best comedy series. It beat out like Andy Griffith and some shows like that. So, I mean, it was legitimately entertaining, it sounds like, and critically acclaimed. So it was different because they as I recall, they they would come out and there were sort of plots, but it was almost kind of an absurdist comedy in that they were kind of goofy and they were just a lot of little series of scenes.

And some people have drawn a line from that show to music videos in the you know, in the MTV area, because the you know, it was set up to kind of sell this and sell the music. And and it all revolved around the music. I mean, the the plot such as they were were pretty simple and silly and really silly, I should say.

Right, Right. Okay. So let's set up the crime in air quotes here. So the Monkees were in Tulsa. You said they were touring. They were in Tulsa in 1967 to play a concert. Can you kind of set the scene with that? Yeah, they came. It was actually on January the second, 1967. They played at what was then called the Convention Center Arena.

It was a downtown venue that had not been open very long at that time. It would hold about 8500 people for a concert like this, and they sold out. It was mainly like young teens. I think you know, probably 11 or 12 to 16, 17, something like that. And their parents said mom would get roped into, bring in, you know, five or six kids from the neighborhood or whatever.

And, you know, we know there was no big controversy, I don't think, at the time, except this entertainment writer editor from the Tulsa Tribune, which was an afternoon paper here at the time. And he just he didn't like it. And and one of the criticisms in general of the Monkees was that it was a it was a back then.

Some people call them the pre-fab four because they they you know, they were created specifically for television. It wasn't a group of guys who just kind of came together and started making music together. They were they were created and some people didn't like that. And and and their music was not intended to be, for the most part, real, you know, deep and social meaning or anything like that.

And so anyway, he didn't like it. He and he wrote a letter to the FBI. Well, it's not clear to me in the in the report is not clear whether he wrote directly to the FBI. You know, apparently he maybe sent this to the television production or the television studio complaining that they were projecting subliminal messages onto a screen behind them during one of the songs, which is one of the things if you weren't around in the sixties, there was all kinds of stuff like that in the sixties and early seventies.

You know, if you play Beatles records backwards, they had some kind of acid or, you know, there was that big set, a lot of a lot of radio stations and so forth would be played. Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen, because no one could understand the lyrics, but they were pretty sure they were bad, so they didn't understand. It was just a very poor recording.

But so he anyway, he complained to the FBI. I don't know that the FBI really took it that seriously because as I wrote in the story, they had the guy, the guy who complained his name was Bill Donaldson. So they had his name wrong in their report. They had his newspaper wrong and their report and they had the date of the concert wrong and their report.

But what happened was they said someone. A few months later, I compiled all of that into a bigger report is like 80 pages long on the influence of communism and subversive groups on Hollywood. And so that that was included in there. And, you know, I don't think anything came out of it. But if I could, I mean, I this is all kind of fun.

But on the other hand, it does make people kind of stop and think it should make people kind of stop and think about, well, what does it take to get, you know, to have an FBI file? Apparently not very much writing. What was the political climate like back then? Yeah, it was it was very it was very is a lot of turmoil.

And so what? And in this particular case, what they had done, they had a song that did try and it was called I Want to Be Free. We did try and have a little bit of a social message and they were showing that there is nothing subliminal about this. They were showing images of riots and the war in Vietnam and peace marches.

And I think they had something on the maybe Well, I think there were scenes from the Selma, Alabama, march which would have actually taken place, you know, several years earlier. But at any rate, was still very much in the news. And so so it was it really subliminal? It was stuff they'd see on on the news every day.

But but the bigger picture was that, yes, there was a lot of turmoil. There's a lot of opposition to the war in Vietnam. There was you know, it was the sixties. It was approaching a protest era. There were quite a few violent demonstrations and there was a lot of concern about the communists taking over. So a lot of a lot of this file was there was a radio station in Los Angeles that would from time to time have members of the American Communist Party on the job and they would mention that so-and-so so-and-so, who is now a very well known personality or producer at dinner with so-and-so, and back in 1938, they attended a dinner and known communists, you know, things like that. And for some reason that this it mentioned Robert Vaughn quite a bit. And people may not remember Robert Vaughn, but he was a popular actor in the sixties. He was in he was one of the Magnificent Seven in the movie The Magnificent Seven. And then later he starred in a TV show called The Man from Uncle, which kind of had a cold following.

And, you know, he was always popping up at some kind of demonstration or something like that. So it was a very tumultuous time. Also, the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, who liked to get as much dirt as he could on as many people as he could. So that may have had something to do with it. I don't know.

And we have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. You said that Donaldson had accused the band of a deliberate manipulation or a preconditioned, immature audience for propaganda dissemination. And you mentioned that it wasn't in any way subliminal like the message they were getting across in their one potentially political song was was pretty obvious. But do you think he was just reading into things because he didn't like the music or…

Well, so Bill Donaldson and I didn't know him. He well, he was still at that. So the Tribune closed in 1992 and I started a year before that. And I, I was at the World when he was at the Tribune, but I don't think our paths ever crossed. He was an older he was part of that older generation.

He was a World War Two veteran. You know, patriotism was very big. He also he had an English literature degree from Swarthmore. He just you know, he yeah, I think I think first of all, I don't think he cared that he didn't like the music that much. But second of all, he didn't like the idea of this sort of manufactured he called it manufactured hysteria or manufactured emotion.

He didn't like that. So I felt I think he he felt like, you know, these young people were being manipulated and, you know, probably to a certain extent they were. I'm not. But nobody after the concert was over, went out and started trying to burn the city down or anything like that. It was it was mostly just fun.

And so I think to a large extent it was I can remember my own dad when I was a kid and that show was on. We we were not supposed to watch it. It just because it didn't it wasn't that he was it made him mad or anything. He just it's a stupid show within the category of television program.

It's just a stupid show. And so we were we didn't watch it. And I think, you know, so there's that there's that category category. I wonder what Donaldson would think about, you know, like the Swifties and, you know, of course, the boy band fans, you know, like in I think maybe he'd be appalled. He had a background in the theater.

He had performed in the theater here in Run a theater in Tulsa for a while. And, you know, I mean, I just think there would be something, although, you know, I mean, he would have gone through the period when he would have gone through the Elvis Presley period, he would have gone through the Frank Sinatra period when, you know, for even someone my age, Frank Sinatra was always kind of the older guy.

But there was a period in the fifties and sixties when, you know, girls would swoon over Frank Sinatra. So anyway, you know, he he knew a little bit about that, and that got it. But he just thought this was too too fake, too phony, that these guys had. No they had done nothing to deserve the adoration and attention they were getting and that whoever had, you know, whoever had created this group was using this group to to warp the minds of Americans.

You bear enough may not be entirely wrong, but I think it was probably more to sell albums and TV shows and tickets as a party. It was. It was to make money. That's all I care about, you know. And and I have to say that, you know, there maybe was a little bit of anti anti-Semitism involved. The Monkees weren't the Jewish, but the producer.

So the one of the producers was the son of the head of one of the studios in in Los Angeles. And they and they seem to have been Jewish. And so, you know, I don't know. But there could have been some anti-Semitism involved in that, too. I mean, you saw that these guys were all all white, but, you know, with some of the black performers of the time, it was it was really evident, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, this is getting a little far afield, but some people think that President Nixon pushed for the criminalization of marijuana because he believed he associated it with black performers and music genres that he didn't understand or didn't approve of. And so he you know, he he wanted to put those guys in jail. Okay. So you said you didn't think that the FBI really gave it much attention. You mentioned like the misspellings and inaccuracies in the report. Did it give you any indication that they actually followed up and looked into it? Well, so I didn't see this report.

But the lawyer, Mr. Zaid, is a lawyer for Mickey Bones, said that there was another report where an FBI agent went to one of the concerts, and it's not clear whether he went because of this report or he went because he had a 12 year old daughter. But anyway, she he went in and said more or less the same thing that Bill Donaldson and I fully admit I really wanted to do this because any time I can talk about Daydream Believer, it makes me happy.

My mom said I would run around screaming the lyrics to that song when I was little. So that was always fun. But I mean, is the general consensus does not seem to be that the Monkees were some sort of big, subversive group, is that right? Correct. But but I will say and I, you know, I that again, it shows you how, you know, it's easy to get on some on someone's not on the FBI or whoever's list you know you think about we have these terrorism watch lists now where if your name is close enough to somebody else, you can be in trouble.

I mean, so the attorney is also representing the actor from Two and a Half Men, John McCain, I think compared with John. Yeah. Yeah. So he he man him and John Pryor and and Jon Cryer said, well, I don't think I've got anything. But my uncle was an anti-war activist and we kind of like to know if he has anything.

So the lawyer put in a request for, you know, this man's file. Well, it turned out it was like 3000 pages long. Holy cow. And I don't know that he was a particularly prominent. I mean, it's not like he was Abbie Hoffman or something, but. Right. Yeah. They've got 3000 pages on it. So and it can be kind of a long, protracted thing to get these because according to the lawyer, they will only process 500 pages a month on any one request.

Yeah, right. And so and then and then when you get it, it may be all redacted and you've got to go to court to have the redactions removed. So, I mean, I don't want people in a panic or anything like that, but I think they ought to be aware that, you know, there there is a lot of information out there.

And, you know, some people don't like that. Yeah, I don't have good answers. But obviously in this you know, in this case, it's it's difficult. It really is. And, you know, this didn't help the average person, but if they are interested in some of these, better known FBI files, they are they are available online. You can go look up.

I mentioned Abbie Hoffman. You can go read every file online if you want. That's pretty much everything I had. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you really want to make sure we get in there? You know, this is kind of one of those deals where we got the email from the lawyer and when we first looked at it was, you know, what the heck is this?

And then the more we thought about it and the more we got into it, it was, you know, it's one of those things it's that's fun and people seem to be interested in it. But at the same time, it does sort of illustrate a bigger issue. Mm hmm. You could be on a list and you don't know it's or, you know, like, how easy is it to just suggest something and have it make it on to some FBI agents desk and then and now, with the digitization of everything, once you're in there, there's no telling where it's over.

Maybe it's it's not quite as bad as Twitter, but yeah, you know, I completely agree. Well, thank you. That's. That's all I've got. I was just talking to you. It should be noted that there were multiple musical artists in that era who were known to be tracked by the FBI artists that the group interacted with, including the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.

So the Monkees are far from the only musical act to catch the attention of the federal government. But this was still a pretty interesting story. That'll do it for this week's episode of Crime Beat Chronicles. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what we have coming up next. Thanks for listening.

Marvin Gaye. Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles. John Denver. The Monkees. All successful musical acts… with FBI files. In this week’s episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, the Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbil joins show producer/editor Ambre Moton to take a look at how the city of Tulsa was central to The Monkees hitting the FBI’s radar as persons of interest.
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Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Boy bands are pretty popular nowadays, and most people probably credit the Beatles for the creation of the phenomenon. But some people remember the Monkees, a group often referred to as the Pre-Fab Four, a U.S. pop band that was created in 1968 for a television show of the same name that originally aired for two seasons and then went on to become a legitimate pop band in its own right.
Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the show's producer and editor. Back with another story that you may not think of as a traditional true crime case.
Okay. The band, it consisted of Micky Dolanz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show played well to both fans and critics and performed well in its original run and through syndication and Saturday morning repeats.
The show is a scripted comedy, all about the four bandmates struggling to make it in the music business. And of course, the hijinks that ensued while a manufactured band. The music really did catch on, and they eventually toured to sold out crowds on a cool OC. But how did the creators of Daydream Believer and I'm a Believer, a song brought back into the lexicon by the band Smash Mouth for the Shrek soundtrack, Lend themselves the subject of a true crime podcast?
Well, would you be surprised to learn that the Monkees were the subject of an FBI investigation? The group's final surviving member, Micky Dolenz, sued the FBI in 2022 to obtain any files on him. The band and his bandmates, after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request in June of that year and failing to receive anything more than an automated response within the 20 days that federal agencies are obligated to respond.
Randy Krehbiel, you may remember from the series of episodes we did with the Tulsa World about the Osages during the Reign of Terror, joins me in this episode to explain how the pop band came to the attention of the FBI. And of course, the tie to Tulsa.
Randy, it is great to have you back on the podcast, so thank you so much for doing this.
It's with you!
You wrote an article about The Monkees, the band, and a tie to the FBI. But let's kind of start a little bit with who the Monkees were. I remember them... when I was little, I think around when I was four, MTV was airing reruns of their TV show, which was a sitcom, if I remember correctly, and I absolutely adored it. Can you just kind of talk about the history of The Monkees?
Sure. So I was kind of the Monkees target audience when they came out. But in the 1960s, when they you know, we had the British invasion then and sort of pop music and rock music was really exploding onto the scene. Some TV producers got the idea of creating a band and making a television series about the band.
And initially the band was not going to be performing their own music. I think the idea was they actually would do the singing but not play the instruments. And the show turned out to be like a lot of music in that era that the band became rapidly popular and almost as rapidly faded from the scene. But at any rate, they they became proficient enough, I guess you would say.
Basically, they just insisted that they were going to be the band, that they didn't need all these other people. So they went out on tour. They had at least a couple of them and well, actually they had more than that, I think. But they went out on tour and they were quite successful. Like I found that they they sold something like 75 million records in about a two or three year span.
So like they were pretty much a big deal. They because it was put together by these TV producers, they hired some some of the big, big name songwriters in the Brill Building in New York, which was, you know, the place where a lot of the fifties and sixties and on into the seventies. Big hits were written in the Brill Building in New York.
And so so they had and they had some very big hits. And so they and they and then you mentioned MTV. They had kind of a second life when MTV came out because they started playing those shows in reruns and they became popular again. And at least some of them started touring again. And then I guess it was in the eighties and even there's one of them still alive, Micky Dolenz And he still does some shows at 78.
Where didn't the show actually win an Emmy, I think. Yeah, I think one year the show won an Emmy for best comedy series. It beat out like Andy Griffith and some shows like that. So, I mean, it was legitimately entertaining, it sounds like, and critically acclaimed. So it was different because they as I recall, they they would come out and there were sort of plots, but it was almost kind of an absurdist comedy in that they were kind of goofy and they were just a lot of little series of scenes.
And some people have drawn a line from that show to music videos in the you know, in the MTV area, because the you know, it was set up to kind of sell this and sell the music. And and it all revolved around the music. I mean, the the plot such as they were were pretty simple and silly and really silly, I should say.
Right, Right. Okay. So let's set up the crime in air quotes here. So the Monkees were in Tulsa. You said they were touring. They were in Tulsa in 1967 to play a concert. Can you kind of set the scene with that? Yeah, they came. It was actually on January the second, 1967. They played at what was then called the Convention Center Arena.
It was a downtown venue that had not been open very long at that time. It would hold about 8500 people for a concert like this, and they sold out. It was mainly like young teens. I think you know, probably 11 or 12 to 16, 17, something like that. And their parents said mom would get roped into, bring in, you know, five or six kids from the neighborhood or whatever.
And, you know, we know there was no big controversy, I don't think, at the time, except this entertainment writer editor from the Tulsa Tribune, which was an afternoon paper here at the time. And he just he didn't like it. And and one of the criticisms in general of the Monkees was that it was a it was a back then.
Some people call them the pre-fab four because they they you know, they were created specifically for television. It wasn't a group of guys who just kind of came together and started making music together. They were they were created and some people didn't like that. And and and their music was not intended to be, for the most part, real, you know, deep and social meaning or anything like that.
And so anyway, he didn't like it. He and he wrote a letter to the FBI. Well, it's not clear to me in the in the report is not clear whether he wrote directly to the FBI. You know, apparently he maybe sent this to the television production or the television studio complaining that they were projecting subliminal messages onto a screen behind them during one of the songs, which is one of the things if you weren't around in the sixties, there was all kinds of stuff like that in the sixties and early seventies.
You know, if you play Beatles records backwards, they had some kind of acid or, you know, there was that big set, a lot of a lot of radio stations and so forth would be played. Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen, because no one could understand the lyrics, but they were pretty sure they were bad, so they didn't understand. It was just a very poor recording.
But so he anyway, he complained to the FBI. I don't know that the FBI really took it that seriously because as I wrote in the story, they had the guy, the guy who complained his name was Bill Donaldson. So they had his name wrong in their report. They had his newspaper wrong and their report and they had the date of the concert wrong and their report.
But what happened was they said someone. A few months later, I compiled all of that into a bigger report is like 80 pages long on the influence of communism and subversive groups on Hollywood. And so that that was included in there. And, you know, I don't think anything came out of it. But if I could, I mean, I this is all kind of fun.
But on the other hand, it does make people kind of stop and think it should make people kind of stop and think about, well, what does it take to get, you know, to have an FBI file? Apparently not very much writing. What was the political climate like back then? Yeah, it was it was very it was very is a lot of turmoil.
And so what? And in this particular case, what they had done, they had a song that did try and it was called I Want to Be Free. We did try and have a little bit of a social message and they were showing that there is nothing subliminal about this. They were showing images of riots and the war in Vietnam and peace marches.
And I think they had something on the maybe Well, I think there were scenes from the Selma, Alabama, march which would have actually taken place, you know, several years earlier. But at any rate, was still very much in the news. And so so it was it really subliminal? It was stuff they'd see on on the news every day.
But but the bigger picture was that, yes, there was a lot of turmoil. There's a lot of opposition to the war in Vietnam. There was you know, it was the sixties. It was approaching a protest era. There were quite a few violent demonstrations and there was a lot of concern about the communists taking over. So a lot of a lot of this file was there was a radio station in Los Angeles that would from time to time have members of the American Communist Party on the job and they would mention that so-and-so so-and-so, who is now a very well known personality or producer at dinner with so-and-so, and back in 1938, they attended a dinner and known communists, you know, things like that. And for some reason that this it mentioned Robert Vaughn quite a bit. And people may not remember Robert Vaughn, but he was a popular actor in the sixties. He was in he was one of the Magnificent Seven in the movie The Magnificent Seven. And then later he starred in a TV show called The Man from Uncle, which kind of had a cold following.
And, you know, he was always popping up at some kind of demonstration or something like that. So it was a very tumultuous time. Also, the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, who liked to get as much dirt as he could on as many people as he could. So that may have had something to do with it. I don't know.
And we have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. You said that Donaldson had accused the band of a deliberate manipulation or a preconditioned, immature audience for propaganda dissemination. And you mentioned that it wasn't in any way subliminal like the message they were getting across in their one potentially political song was was pretty obvious. But do you think he was just reading into things because he didn't like the music or…
Well, so Bill Donaldson and I didn't know him. He well, he was still at that. So the Tribune closed in 1992 and I started a year before that. And I, I was at the World when he was at the Tribune, but I don't think our paths ever crossed. He was an older he was part of that older generation.
He was a World War Two veteran. You know, patriotism was very big. He also he had an English literature degree from Swarthmore. He just you know, he yeah, I think I think first of all, I don't think he cared that he didn't like the music that much. But second of all, he didn't like the idea of this sort of manufactured he called it manufactured hysteria or manufactured emotion.
He didn't like that. So I felt I think he he felt like, you know, these young people were being manipulated and, you know, probably to a certain extent they were. I'm not. But nobody after the concert was over, went out and started trying to burn the city down or anything like that. It was it was mostly just fun.
And so I think to a large extent it was I can remember my own dad when I was a kid and that show was on. We we were not supposed to watch it. It just because it didn't it wasn't that he was it made him mad or anything. He just it's a stupid show within the category of television program.
It's just a stupid show. And so we were we didn't watch it. And I think, you know, so there's that there's that category category. I wonder what Donaldson would think about, you know, like the Swifties and, you know, of course, the boy band fans, you know, like in I think maybe he'd be appalled. He had a background in the theater.
He had performed in the theater here in Run a theater in Tulsa for a while. And, you know, I mean, I just think there would be something, although, you know, I mean, he would have gone through the period when he would have gone through the Elvis Presley period, he would have gone through the Frank Sinatra period when, you know, for even someone my age, Frank Sinatra was always kind of the older guy.
But there was a period in the fifties and sixties when, you know, girls would swoon over Frank Sinatra. So anyway, you know, he he knew a little bit about that, and that got it. But he just thought this was too too fake, too phony, that these guys had. No they had done nothing to deserve the adoration and attention they were getting and that whoever had, you know, whoever had created this group was using this group to to warp the minds of Americans.
You bear enough may not be entirely wrong, but I think it was probably more to sell albums and TV shows and tickets as a party. It was. It was to make money. That's all I care about, you know. And and I have to say that, you know, there maybe was a little bit of anti anti-Semitism involved. The Monkees weren't the Jewish, but the producer.
So the one of the producers was the son of the head of one of the studios in in Los Angeles. And they and they seem to have been Jewish. And so, you know, I don't know. But there could have been some anti-Semitism involved in that, too. I mean, you saw that these guys were all all white, but, you know, with some of the black performers of the time, it was it was really evident, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, this is getting a little far afield, but some people think that President Nixon pushed for the criminalization of marijuana because he believed he associated it with black performers and music genres that he didn't understand or didn't approve of. And so he you know, he he wanted to put those guys in jail. Okay. So you said you didn't think that the FBI really gave it much attention. You mentioned like the misspellings and inaccuracies in the report. Did it give you any indication that they actually followed up and looked into it? Well, so I didn't see this report.
But the lawyer, Mr. Zaid, is a lawyer for Mickey Bones, said that there was another report where an FBI agent went to one of the concerts, and it's not clear whether he went because of this report or he went because he had a 12 year old daughter. But anyway, she he went in and said more or less the same thing that Bill Donaldson and I fully admit I really wanted to do this because any time I can talk about Daydream Believer, it makes me happy.
My mom said I would run around screaming the lyrics to that song when I was little. So that was always fun. But I mean, is the general consensus does not seem to be that the Monkees were some sort of big, subversive group, is that right? Correct. But but I will say and I, you know, I that again, it shows you how, you know, it's easy to get on some on someone's not on the FBI or whoever's list you know you think about we have these terrorism watch lists now where if your name is close enough to somebody else, you can be in trouble.
I mean, so the attorney is also representing the actor from Two and a Half Men, John McCain, I think compared with John. Yeah. Yeah. So he he man him and John Pryor and and Jon Cryer said, well, I don't think I've got anything. But my uncle was an anti-war activist and we kind of like to know if he has anything.
So the lawyer put in a request for, you know, this man's file. Well, it turned out it was like 3000 pages long. Holy cow. And I don't know that he was a particularly prominent. I mean, it's not like he was Abbie Hoffman or something, but. Right. Yeah. They've got 3000 pages on it. So and it can be kind of a long, protracted thing to get these because according to the lawyer, they will only process 500 pages a month on any one request.
Yeah, right. And so and then and then when you get it, it may be all redacted and you've got to go to court to have the redactions removed. So, I mean, I don't want people in a panic or anything like that, but I think they ought to be aware that, you know, there there is a lot of information out there.
And, you know, some people don't like that. Yeah, I don't have good answers. But obviously in this you know, in this case, it's it's difficult. It really is. And, you know, this didn't help the average person, but if they are interested in some of these, better known FBI files, they are they are available online. You can go look up.
I mentioned Abbie Hoffman. You can go read every file online if you want. That's pretty much everything I had. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you really want to make sure we get in there? You know, this is kind of one of those deals where we got the email from the lawyer and when we first looked at it was, you know, what the heck is this?
And then the more we thought about it and the more we got into it, it was, you know, it's one of those things it's that's fun and people seem to be interested in it. But at the same time, it does sort of illustrate a bigger issue. Mm hmm. You could be on a list and you don't know it's or, you know, like, how easy is it to just suggest something and have it make it on to some FBI agents desk and then and now, with the digitization of everything, once you're in there, there's no telling where it's over.
Maybe it's it's not quite as bad as Twitter, but yeah, you know, I completely agree. Well, thank you. That's. That's all I've got. I was just talking to you. It should be noted that there were multiple musical artists in that era who were known to be tracked by the FBI artists that the group interacted with, including the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.
So the Monkees are far from the only musical act to catch the attention of the federal government. But this was still a pretty interesting story. That'll do it for this week's episode of Crime Beat Chronicles. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what we have coming up next. Thanks for listening.

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