Continuing this week’s look back at Emphasis ’68, we deal with an archival reality — sometimes, things don’t survive long enough to be archived, but they often leave interesting traces behind.
(Image from the 1969 Corolla yearbook)
Senator Strom Thurmond was one of the noted speakers at Emphasis ’68. We know this because we have written evidence from newspapers and other media of his visit and speech. What we don’t have is the speech itself. That reel of tape didn’t find its way into the box along with the others when the material was originally drawn together.
What we do have is pretty interesting on its own, though. Thurmond did a forty-minute Q & A session, and his audience didn’t pull any punches, addressing the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam as well as recent Civil Rights-related violence in his home state of South Carolina (see this Wikipedia article on the Orangeburg Massacre).
You can listen to the Q & A in Acumen. But before you do that, you’re not left high and dry about the speech:
Click on the image below to read a preview from UA’s student newspaper, The Crimson-White, in its Emphasis ’68 Special:
You can also read a transcript of the prepared speech Thurmond gave to the press in advance of the event.
And below you’ll find a follow-up article from the March 25, 1968, edition of The Crimson-White:
