Eleven days after the Kent State incident, two African-Americans were killed by police on the campus of Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi. It was reported as a sequel to Kent State, but in reality it was not about the Vietnam War. It was about racism. Lynch Street abutted the campus. It was common for white motorists to make racial comments to students as they drove by. Sometimes they steered as though they would run into them. And one did. The students began to respond with rocks. Students demanded the road be shut down, but the city leaders refused. On the evening of May 14, 1970, about a hundred students gathered in reaction to a false rumor that local Civil Rights activist Charles Evers (brother of Medgar) had been killed. A dump truck was set afire and the fire department responded. It requested police support. The crowd had grown and was belligerent. 40 police arrived, with their Thompson tank – an armored personnel carrier purchased by the mayor for situations like this. The police advanced onto campus for no good reason. Just after midnight, they approached a girls’ dorm where students were chilling. The police claimed a sniper opened fire from the building. In about 30 seconds, the police fired around 460 shots (mostly from shot guns). Philip Gibbs, 21 years old and a father, and James Green, a 17 year-old high school senior going home from work, were killed. 12 students were wounded. The police refused to help any of them. The n-word was used a lot. No cop was indicted. Later, the Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest determined that there was no evidence of a sniper and the shootings were unjustified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/Jackson-state-shooting-police.html
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jackson-state-shootings-fifty/
Phillip Gibbs and James Green
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