Senate saluting ‘forgotten’ victims of 1970 Lamar Riots
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
David Lunn calls them “The Sad Six.”
They are the six black Darlington County students who, on March 3, 1970, were terrorized and banged up when a white mob overturned their school bus in Lamar to protest the court-ordered desegregation of county public schools.
Lunn, now 67 and living in Detroit, was one of them. “We felt that it was the end for us,” Lunn remembers. “You’re talking 200 people or more in a mob. … I’m so glad to be alive. … (But) we were the six people on the school bus that nobody asked about (later). It was almost like we were forgotten. We have never been recognized.”
That’s changing now. On Tuesday, April 30, Hartsville Sen. Gerald Malloy was planning to have the S.C. Senate honor the students who fell victim to what is now called the Lamar Riots.
Malloy, aided by his wife, Davita, have been locating and contacting the five surviving people aboard the bus that the mob overturned and inviting them to visit the state Senate and be recognized. Davita Malloy said they have also been trying to contact several people aboard a second bus that was attacked but not overturned.
It was set to be a brief ceremony. Malloy was to introduce his guests in the Senate visitors’ gallery, the Senate was to applaud them, and a resolution honoring them was to be read into the record.
For Lunn, that recognition will be more than enough.
Lunn lists the six students on the bus as himself, his brother Edward Lunn (now living in Texas), Ronald Bacote (now living in Virginia), Clarence Brunson (now living in Hartsville), Woodrow Wilson Jr. (now living in Columbia) and Sally Wilds, formerly living in North Carolina and now deceased.
Lunn told the News & Press last week that he was planning to be in Columbia for the Senate’s recognition. He said at least three of the surviving five who were on the overturned bus were expected to attend.
Sanitized accounts of the Lamar Riots have long maintained that the buses the mob overturned were empty. Lunn knows that was not the case.
He was a senior at Spaulding High School in Lamar when he was caught in that day’s events. Lunn remembers people in the crowd smashing out bus windows with ax handles; he estimates the mob at 200.
“It was a scary day,” says Lunn, who is now a pastor. “It happened so fast.” He says he saw 40 or 50 state Highway Patrol troopers nearby who made no move to stop the protesters from overturning his bus: “They just watched everything.”
The students crawled out of the overturned bus, Lunn says, and the mob didn’t try to attack them: “They let us crawl out.” After the incident, Lunn says, the six students were pretty much forgotten very quickly: “I was almost shut out altogether.”
Although glad they escaped serious injuries, Lunn says some of the six have always felt that they were done wrong – only a handful of men ever went to jail in connection with the Lamar Riots. Thus Lunn’s creation of the “Sad Six” name, which he had put on a T-shirt.
Lunn said he would welcome his moments of recognition from the Senate, but “it’s not only the recognition. That whole area (Lamar) still needs some healing.”
“The whole purpose,” Davita Malloy said, “is just to aid in the healing process.”