Jackson State College, 1970
In 1970, Jackson State College, Mississippi (now Jackson State University), was a mostly black college. On May 14th, a false rumour spread that Charles Evers, the black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, and his wife had been assassinated by white supremacists. The demographic of Jackson State meant that it was frequently the site of racially-charged confrontations, and so it made sense that even non-students gathered there to protest against this latest show of racism in the Deep South. The protestors threw rocks as passing white motorists, started fires, and overturned a nearby dump truck. Several motorists called the police.
75 police officers and the Mississippi Highway Patrol arrived to control the protestors while fire fighters extinguished the blazes. Shortly after midnight, the police spotted a group of black students congregated outside Alexander Hall, a dormitory. Their involvement in the riot, or indeed lack of, is not recorded, but the group refused to move when confronted by the police. For one reason or another, the police opened fire on the group for 30 seconds, spraying 150 bullets at the youths, killing two and injuring 12. The police later claimed they saw snipers, but an FBI investigation found no evidence.
The two students killed were Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, aged 21, and James Earl Green, 17. The Jackson State incident happened only 10 days after the more famous Kent State shootings (below), and was investigated by Richard Nixon’s National Commission on Campus Unrest. The Commission found that ‘the 28-second fusillade from police officers was an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction’, even were there a sniper. Shockingly, though, no one was ever brought to justice for the shootings. Jackson State renamed the area the Gibbs-Green Plaza and erected a memorial stone but, symbolically, Alexander Hall still bears the scars of the police bullets.
