Blood and Bone: Truth and Reconciliation in a Southern Town, Jack Shuler.

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. 247 pages. By Doug Hunt The central event in Shulers book is one that brought brief national attention to his hometown of Orangeburg, South Carolina. On February 8, 1968, during a week of protests centered on attempts to desegregate a bowling alley, a large group of law enforcement officers and crowd of students faced each other near the campus of historically black South Carolina State College. The students threw hard words at the state troopers who were at the front of the law enforcement phalanx. Some threw bottles and scraps of wood as well. Whether any carried weapons or fired shots would later become a matter of much dispute. The state troopers had come with loaded pistols and carbines, and nine of them opened fired for a period of about 8 seconds. Three students were killed and several more injured and rushed to hospitals. Shuler was born nearly a decade after the event, which has been variously described as an incident, a riot, a murder, and a massacre. He grew up in an Orangeburg still deeply divided along racial lines and he attended, as almost all white Orangeburgers of his day did, a private school rather than the overwhelmingly black public school. His book is partly the story of his attempt to come to grips, personally, with the legacy of segregation and racial injustice in his own community; partly an attempt to discover how those who lived through the events of 1968 have coped with the trauma; and partly a means of addressing some festering communal wounds by exposing them to light and air. At times it becomes a detective story as Shuler searches for evidence not revealed during the trial (and acquittal) of the nine state troopers. Structurally, the book shuttles between the events of 1968 and conversations Shuler had in 2009 and 2010 with some of those who had been present either in the town or at the scene during the violence. Though readers who just want to know what happened in 1968 may find this pattern of digression and return frustrating. I count it among the books strengths. Shuler has a talent for appreciating and describing the characters of the people he interviews, and by the end of the book I felt I had met an interesting cross-section of the citizens, black and white, who lived in Orangeburg in 1968 and live there still. I also came to see the explosive events of February 1968 as an anomaly in a communityhalf black and half whitethat had been slowly and peacefully searching for ways to bridge its deep racial divide. Shulers book is a local history, but then all history, but then all history, when examined deeply becomes local. The Orangeburg tragedy of 1968 was rooted in two centuries of American racial injustice, and its after-life in the psyches of Orangeburg residents tells us a good deal about where America stands on racial matters, even today.

The International Journal of Conflict & Reconciliation Fall 2013, Volume 1 Number 2 1