Samuel Hammond
 

From that moment on, I looked at Sam differently. He was no longer just one of a handful of African Americans attending a predominantly white high school. He was Sam, a loveable individual with lots of heart and personality. I'm sure Sam made his family proud in the short time he had with them. He didn't deserve to die at such a young age, in such a tragic way. He showed so much promise had so much potential. I wish he'd lived a nice long life, had a successful career, children, grandchildren. That was all senselessly taken away from him. My imagination can't help but stereotype those cops in that South Carolina town on that fateful day. Sam, if you had lived to see how far this world has come, you'd be very pleased. And pleased that you did not die in vain.

Submitted by Kathy Haines 8/20/07

My friend, Sam Hammond Jr., was murdered by state troopers during a demonstration at South Carolina State College on the night of Feb. 8, 1968.
I got to grow up. Sam got to be an unlikely martyr, another fatality on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., and on a plaque erected at his old college not far from where he was shot.

Just 15 months before that terrible night, Sam was all hope and promise, one of 179 black kids allowed into our 2,500-student south Florida high school as an experiment. An experiment in what I don't know, maybe to see if black kids were just as awful as we were. He was a quiet guy, tall and muscular, a good student and a standout in football and track, the sport that brought us together -- Sam, the only black hand awaiting a relay baton in a sea of white.

Harold Riley -- a retired drywall installer living in Greensboro, N.C.-- who would play football with Sam at S.C. State and share a house with
him, told me the other afternoon that our friend's freshman season had some people predicting that the easygoing kid out of Fort Lauderdale might someday play pro.

It was a dream that would die the night Riley found Sam bleeding to death on the floor of the student infirmary.

But first I have to cut back to the track team we ran on during the bad old days, where away meets meant watching our coach scout roadside diners to see if they would serve black athletes.

Mostly Sam and I ended up eating together off paper plates on the empty team bus, not much fazed by the casual cruelty. Or casual when compared to the S.C. state troopers months hence dragging two other mortally wounded black teens by their feet down a grass embankment reportedly saying, "None of this would have happened if you niggers had stayed at home where you belong."

On that night, three unarmed kids died and 27, many of them coeds, had been caught in a blind fusillade of heavy double-ought buckshot after a three-day demonstration to integrate a local bowling alley. It seems now like such a small thing to die for and I might not have noticed at all had I not bonded with Sam that season, had I not opened my door at the University of Florida 37 years ago this very morning and found a Miami Herald.

How it got there was as big a mystery as Sam's photo being buried on an inside page. Actually, it was half a photo from high school. The missing half contained an image of me.

Sam was dead, killed in what the paper called a race riot and all I could do was doubt every word and write a heartbroken letter to my local
paper, a letter reprinted by Jack Nelson in his book, The Orangeburg Massacre. Between its crumbling covers the outrage over an FBI cover-up and the complete lack of public concern over a student massacre two years before Kent State still sits fresh and unresolved.

But it wasn't until I tracked down Riley that I heard firsthand about the violent passing of our big-hearted friend.

"Coming back from dinner we parked the car," Riley recalls, his voice a blend of sadness and outrage. "I stopped to talk football and Sam went on down the line to see what was going on. Then came the whistle. I'll never forget that. There came a whistle like football practice then the shooting, eight or 10 seconds of steady shotgun fire like it was planned because it ended with a second whistle."

Riley, like most of the dead and wounded students, had been shot while down on the ground. "I sat down behind a trash can that was up on four tiny legs and I was hit twice from beneath. After that second whistle I took off running to the student infirmary."

Riley, who still carries a bullet fragment in his knee, can't recall seeing any medical staff in that facility while Nelson claims that there was one nurse dealing with a battlefield situation that included a massive gunshot wound to Sam's back.

With no ambulances available to them and no help from police, the nurse had our mortally wounded friend carried by student car to a hospital. "I saw Sam there on the infirmary floor, nobody tending him," Riley said. "He was staring straight up, glassy-eyed, mumbling. He had eight or nine blood spots on his shirt front and we were all just in there hurt and scared with no security, no doctors, nobody on our side."

Nobody there but shot-up college kids and an 18-year-old boy named Sam, who would die crying for his mother at 11:30 p.m., an hour after the shooting began.Riley recalled, "Next day, all the commotion was over like a big wind just stopped blowing."

The only person convicted of anything following the incident was Cleveland Sellers Jr., a young student organizer. No inquest was held and a federal grand jury later exonerated the shooters, believing that they had fired in self-defense on what everybody present knew were unarmed teens. But the tragedy, long ignored even by black leaders, is now the subject of renewed interest in the South Carolina General Assembly, which may reopen the investigation.

Said Riley, "I want to see the people who killed Sam. I hope that there will come a day when we will at last see their faces. I want to see what they look like."

That letter I wrote on that long ago February morning, the one in the book, ended with this line, " ... I feel that someone has killed my brother."

Nothing has changed, not a thing.
 

Submitted by John Bogert 9/1/07

I was only at Stranahan 1 year.  I remember when I was a sophomore in 1967 I first met Sam as a fellow athlete trying out for the junior-varsity basketball team. At the time Sam was the only African American on the varsity at that time, of course two of us made junior varsity James Jones and myself, I got into some trouble before first game was released from the team. I was very sadden by this, from that day on Sam on daily basis encouraged to not give up on my athletic dreams, so I followed him to the track team which is my lifetime passion to this day, Sam was a wonderful athlete, I so much wanted to be just like Sam, to this day 42 years later, I am still walking in Sam's footsteps as mentor and coach. I knew Sam for only a short time, his words and encouragement has lasted me a lifetime. I will never forget him.

Submitted by Richard Herman 4/08/09

If you have memories of Samuel you would like to share, please contact the webmaster:  graham@stranahan67.com