ORANGEBURG, S.C. — This rural community in the South Carolina midlands has a prosperous face it shows the world.
Orangeburg boasts two shopping malls, several industrial parks, chain hotels just off the interstate and a batch of franchise restaurants. A civic rose garden abuts a neighborhood of homes with broad lawns, wraparound porches and expensive cars in driveways.
But that's only part of the backdrop for tonight's first presidential debate.
Those stately homes sit on the mostly white side of town. In the city's poor black neighborhoods, the odd laundromat and ramshackle corner grocery are spread amid broken-down cars and beat-up furniture left stranded on the buckled sidewalks. A decrepit mobile home park and some clapboard homes -- windows gone, porches collapsed, boards missing -- seem scarcely fit for human habitation.
Those disparities could force an uncomfortable conversation. The issues likely to come up in tonight's Democratic presidential debate are familiar ones -- the war in Iraq, healthcare, the economy, education. The big difference in South Carolina is race, which overlays just about every policy discussion in the state, as it has since Emancipation and reconstruction.
"Here you have to face issues that candidates shy away from elsewhere," said state Rep. Bakari T. Sellers, who went to school in Orangeburg and now represents the district next door. "Issues of justice and inequality. Issues of race."
Sellers, 22, is one of the youngest state lawmakers in the country; he has been courted by virtually all of the Democratic candidates, eager for his support in South Carolina's early primary.
Sellers' father, Cleveland, has an indelible role in Orangeburg's history, a chapter many in this city of 15,000 prefer not to discuss. In February 1968, three black college students were killed by state troopers and 27 were wounded as they protested segregation at a whites-only bowling alley. Most of the victims were shot in the side or back. The only person convicted of a crime was Cleveland Sellers, a veteran civil rights activist sprayed with buckshot. He served seven months in prison on a flimsy riot charge.
The story of father and son might be a parable of racial progress, reflecting how far South Carolina has come since the Orangeburg massacre, as the incident is known. The younger Sellers marveled at the fact that a woman, a Latino and an African American will be among the candidates assembled tonight on the South Carolina State campus, just a few strides from where the shootings took place.
