Advertisement
We Must Not Forget The Jackson State Massacre
Fifty years ago, the police fired into a crowd at the historically black college, killing two.
JACKSON, Miss. — In the 1960s, white motorists driving along John R. Lynch Street, which cut through the middle of the historically black campus of what was then called Jackson State College, would often taunt students along the way with racist epithets, throw objects at them and threaten to hit pedestrians.
On Feb. 3, 1964, a white driver slammed into a Jackson State student named Mamie Ballard, sending her to the hospital. This incident began a yearslong push to close Lynch Street to traffic, which in turn helped propel the already potent local civil rights movement.
Jackson State may have been majority black, but it was in the capital of a state dominated by white supremacists, who governed the college. Informed by the civil rights and Black Power movements, students naturally saw the fight to close Lynch Street as a cornerstone of their broader push for justice and equality in Mississippi. With an increasingly aggressive tenor, the ensuing student demonstrations, which peaked each spring, demanded justice for Ms. Ballard, who survived, and that Lynch Street be closed.
On May 14, 1970, someone set fire to a dump truck parked in the middle of Lynch Street a few blocks from campus. While there was no evidence that student protesters had been involved, white authorities cited the vandalism to justify the use of force.
Late that evening officers from the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol marched onto campus, accompanied by the so-called Thompson Tank, an armored personnel carrier that Mayor Allen Thompson, the city’s segregationist mayor, had purchased in 1964, ahead of what he termed the civil rights “invasion” of Freedom Summer. That same year the Mississippi Legislature gave the Highway Patrol broad authority to intervene in protests, even if local authorities hadn’t requested them. The patrol still held that power in 1970.
The phalanx of officers proceeded to Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, arriving close to midnight. But instead of facing a mass of angry protesters, they found scores of students enjoying a Thursday evening relaxing outside as graduation neared. Later asserting that a sniper had shot at them from a window in Alexander Hall — an absurd claim with no evidence — the police fired more than 400 rounds of ammunition over 28 seconds in every direction.
In the chaos that spilled into the early morning hours of May 15, two men, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, were left dead; a dozen other young people were wounded in the gunfire. Hundreds of others bear physical and psychological scars to this day. Gibbs was a junior political science major at Jackson State. He had married his high school sweetheart, and they had one son. Unbeknown to Gibbs and his wife, Dale, she was pregnant with their second son.
Green was a senior at nearby Jim Hill High School. He had been walking home from his after-school job on the opposite side of the street from Alexander Hall, which meant the police had turned to fire in the opposite direction from the supposed sniper.
Graduation was canceled, and the Class of 1970 received their diplomas in the mail. A number of injured students and the families of Gibbs and Green sued the city and state, represented by the renowned civil rights attorney Constance Slaughter. The plaintiffs lost; no one was ever charged in the killings. The section of Lynch Street through campus was finally closed, and the Gibbs-Green Memorial Plaza now stands in front of Alexander Hall. But those concessions did nothing to lessen the trauma for those who survived.
The 50th anniversary of the police attack at Jackson State comes at a moment when America is struggling with a pandemic, the impacts of which have weighed heavily, and unjustly, on black bodies. Thanks to the insufficient and belated response of national and state leaders that has inflamed the pandemic, people of color are disproportionately represented among Covid-19 cases, and they bear the brunt of the government’s aggressive enforcement of quarantine rules.
Then came the video showing the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man out for a jog in Georgia. Although he was killed in February, only last week were the men shown on a video confronting Mr. Arbery arrested. As the survivors of the May 1970 attack at Jackson State and modern proponents of Black Lives Matter understand, justice remains elusive.
Through it all, we must be reminded that state-sanctioned violence aimed at the marginalized remains a systemic part of American life. That ever-present threat continues to prop up white supremacy in this country.
This spring, Jackson State’s Class of 2020 was supposed to graduate in a special ceremony: The Class of 1970 was prepared to walk across the stage for its 50th reunion and be handed their diplomas for the first time, while relatives of Phillip Gibbs and James Green were to accept honorary doctorates on their behalf. While the administration at Jackson State and our community hold out hope that we will be able to safely gather for these events at some unknown date, there is a real prospect that this modern catastrophe, 50 years later, will prevent us from doing so.
Whatever happens, the moment must not go unrecognized. The students, alumni and community at Jackson State must demand an honest dialogue around our white-supremacist history and its present-day manifestations. As the civil-rights demonstrators in Jackson demanded a half century ago, white Americans in particular must take responsibility and action if our society is to begin rooting out racist power and all its implications.
Robert Luckett (@robbyjsu) is an associate professor of history and the director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Advertisement
No comments:
Post a Comment