The Mythology of Jackson State

In a segment of the new Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War, the filmmakers describe the student shootings of May 4, 1970, at Kent State, then refer briefly to an event on another college campus 10 days later:

Narrator Peter Coyote: “At Jackson State University in Mississippi, state police opened fire on a dormitory. Two students died. Twelve more were wounded.
Voice of black Vietnam veteran: “Jackson State. Those were my people. Those were black kids. And they died.”

Though the film does not explain the causes of the Jackson State tragedy, anyone watching would assume that the Mississippi murders were, like those in Ohio, the result of anti-Vietnam War protest. Most histories of the period also make this assumption, equating the contexts of the two events and ensuring that they have also remained equated in popular memory.

Tim Spofford’s 1988 study Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College (Kent State University Press), for example, strives to imbricate the two tragedies, suggesting that the Jackson killings “had given the South its own Kent State.” The book’s frontispiece image is a Herb Block editorial sketch from May 1970 that asserts Ohio-Mississippi parallels.

Spofford’s book is a valuable document, but it reveals few elements in common between the Kent and Jackson protests. The more detail the text offers about Jackson State, the more dissimilar the two events become, undermining the frontispiece’s implicit claim.

At the 2016 commemoration of the Kent State tragedy, the university’s president, Beverly Warren, declared, “We are indelibly linked to the loss of lives at Jackson State.” A banner behind her read, “Long Live the Spirit of Kent State and Jackson State!” and later in the ceremony her audience shouted the same slogan. In a scripted chronology read aloud at this and all Kent commemorations, escalation of the war in Vietnam was cited as the principal cause of both protests.

In fact, the two events were not related. The killing of unarmed antiwar demonstrators at Kent State was the culmination of four days of student activism in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia; what happened in Jackson on May 14 and 15 was the product of longstanding conflict between white law enforcement and black students who were angered by racial harassment and intimidation.

As The New York Times of May 17, 1970, reported, the violence in Mississippi “had little or no connection with the nationwide campus protest movement, the war in Southeast Asia or reaction to the Ohio National Guard’s killing of four Kent State University students.” Instead, as far as local blacks were concerned, the deaths in Jackson were “almost entirely a Mississippi phenomenon … the latest in a series of racial killings by the white authorities.”

The tendency of primarily white historians to associate Kent and Jackson has lent a symbolic universality to our Vietnam War memory rituals. However, it has also required a systematic forgetting of intrinsic truths about race in America.

Lynch Street, the main road that bisected the Jackson State campus, had for years been a site of confrontation between white drivers and black student pedestrians. The busy four-lane thoroughfare ran between the men’s and women’s dormitories and the campus cafeteria and was also the route white motorists took to and from their homes in West Jackson and their downtown jobs. Beginning in 1961, aggressive harassment of students and responsive “miniriots” had been an almost annual ritual along Lynch Street. There were conflicts in 1963, ’64, ’67, ’68, and ’69.

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, police officers drew their weapons and, in a 31-second barrage, fired 460 rounds into groups of students on the ground and upper floors of Alexander Hall, killing two and wounding 12. The gunned-down young men were Phillip Gibbs, a Jackson State student and the father of an 18-month-old; and James Earl Green, a high-school senior who had been walking home from his job at a grocery store. Explaining the cause of the shooting, President John Peoples of Jackson State noted that the students had cursed the police, and that Mississippi lawmen were “not used to being cursed by blacks.”

Less than a year after the shootings, Jackson State students interviewed for the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest tried to correct the notion that the riot in Jackson was about Vietnam. And in 1972, the American Association of University Professors researched the Kent and Jackson shootings and concluded that “there was no apparent connection between the two campus tragedies.”

At Jackson, the tensions between students and police ran back deep into the history and culture of the state. ... Many students, their friends and their families had experienced insulting or demeaning treatment at the hands of state police officers. ... It was hardly surprising that the appearance on the Jackson campus of a highway patrol contingent ... created extraordinary tensions and hostilities.

In interviews I conducted in 2016, James (Lap) Baker, a Jackson State senior in 1970 who witnessed the shootings and is now an acknowledged authority on the incident, cited specific factors and motives:

We weren’t thinking about Vietnam. We were thinking about a racist governor and racist whites yelling things and throwing things at us from their cars. And the racist governor sending in the police and calling out the Guard. We were thinking about assassinations: Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1968.

As murders of black men by an all-white police force, Baker noted, the Jackson killings were unusual only in the number of shots fired and the number of witnesses.

Why have assessments by enlightened, socially conscious thinkers de-emphasized the civil-rights context of Jackson State? Here is a proposed explanation: The tragic deaths of four white students in Kent produced worldwide outrage. It was clear from the beginning that the event was iconic. But the unrelated and only superficially comparable deaths of Gibbs and Green 10 days later raised a question — the question of whether their deaths would also produce mass outrage, though centuries of black murder had not.

If the answer was no, then the meaning of Kent State narrowed, enabling and validating interpretations of Kent’s notoriety as only one more example of the long-held African-American adage that “America does not have a problem until it affects white people.” For those connected with Kent State who wished to certify that their empathy could and did transcend the racial divide, the answer had to be yes. Ultimately, the fact that the Kent-Jackson correlation was imperfect because the two events had little or nothing to do with each other mattered less than the picturesque synergy created by the pairing of black and white protest deaths.

Nevertheless, the “link” between the two events has accorded with a simple formula: All discussions of anti-Vietnam War campus protest revolve around Kent State; many of those treatments peripherally include Jackson State. But the latter, circumscribed by the Kent tragedy, is rarely examined on its own.

The overdue attention now being given anti-black police brutality offers an opportunity to reassess Jackson State, beginning with the recognition of equivalencies between the deaths on that campus and the core issues of Black Lives Matter. Speaking just after the murders, Charles Evers, the mayor of nearby Fayette, said that “If Jackson State had been a white campus, not a single bullet would have been fired.” His point was that the freedom to protest state authority has been a manifestation of white privilege.

The point was made as well by black Kent State students, who did not attend the May 4 protests on their campus because, as one student said later, “As far as we were concerned, the National Guardsmen were the police. And because we’d been subject to so much harassment and abuse by the police, I had no illusion that those guys had blanks or pellets in their rifles. We all assumed they had real bullets, and we would be the first ones to be shot.” State-sponsored violence was nothing new to African-Americans; they had been enduring its consequences for centuries. As Ta-Nehisi Coates recently observed, “In America it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

That few blacks were involved in the Kent protests and whites were not involved in Jackson (only one white student was enrolled at Jackson State in 1970) was therefore no accident; it was part of the conditions that shaped the events in the first place.

The interpretation of Jackson State we should now be discussing was offered 47 years ago by Edmund Muskie, a U.S. senator from Maine, who traveled to Mississippi with a congressional delegation in May 1970 to investigate the killings and attend the funeral of James Earl Green. Speaking to black leaders and journalists on the plane to Jackson, Muskie delivered a prescient assessment:

Two young black men are dead. They died during a senseless display of violence at Jackson State College. Black Americans are all too often required to live in fear, fear often from the possible illegal overreactions of police authorities. From the facts at hand today, we seem to have yet another example of black lives not being valued.

Burns and Novick, in what is likely to become a definitive film version of the war, only sustain the process of co-opting and distorting the Jackson tragedy. More work is required to acknowledge the real “spirit of Jackson State” and include it in our urgent national conversation about race.

Patrick Chura is a professor of English at the University of Akron.