Remembering the 1970 Jackson State College shootings 50 years later
Shortly after midnight on May 15th, 1970, racial tensions erupted at the historically black Jackson State College when a confrontation between students and the predominantly white local police department resulted in the slaying of two young African Americans and the wounding of many others. In this excerpt from Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College, Nancy K. Bristow recounts the events of that deadly evening and recovers a history that has for too long been overshadowed by the events at Kent State which ocurred just days earlier.
On May 14, 1970, James Earl Green finished his afterschool job at the Wag- a- Bag, a neighborhood corner store in Jackson, Mississippi, at about 10:00 p.m. Seventeen years old, Green had been employed at the market since the age of eleven, working as a car hop; taking orders; bagging; and delivering groceries, beer, and cigarettes to waiting drivers. He generally worked about six hours each evening, six or seven days a week, and earned $12.50 plus roughly $5.00 in tips per week. The middle of nine children, Green lived with his mother and stepfather, who worked as a warehouseman. James usually distributed lunch money to his siblings, gave roughly a third of his earnings to his mother, and shared all of it when the family needed it. As his oldest sister, Mattie, remembered, “He had this caring instinct about him, this loving instinct.” Another sister, Gloria Ann, recalled, “No matter how down you felt, he always lifted you up. . . . He could make a joke out of anything.” Green attended Jim Hill High School — the local African American school in a district just beginning to confront integration — where he was a solid student, loved running, and enjoyed “the girls.” He dreamed of going to college, even running in the Olympics. As he usually did, Green took a shortcut through the Jackson State College campus on his way home that evening.
The night before there had been a confrontation between students at the historically black college and the nearly all- white local police on Lynch Street — the busy thoroughfare named for the African American politician, John R. Lynch, who represented Mississippi in the US House of Representatives during Reconstruction — that ran through the campus. The street had long been a problem for students at Jackson State, as white motorists living in the suburbs west of Jackson commuted through campus and routinely tormented the students, speeding past pedestrians and yelling racial epithets. The previous evening frustrations had led to rock throwing. When police closed Lynch Street, the unrest quieted, and come morning the street was reopened, and the school day proceeded normally. That evening, though, the trouble resumed. A burning dump truck and a raucous crowd in front of Stewart Hall, a men’s dormitory, brought the Jackson police as well as the all- white Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol to the campus. With the fire doused and the National Guard on campus to relieve them, the police and patrolmen inexplicably turned and moved up Lynch Street to the center of campus. Shortly after midnight on May 15, James Green was standing across the street from Alexander Hall, a women’s dorm, as law enforcement marched toward him. Blocks away his mother, Myrtle Green Burton, knew her son was not yet home from work.
Shortly after the police and highway patrol reached the west wing of Alexander Hall, a bottle crashed on the pavement and the officers opened fire.
Phillip Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State, was across the street from Green, standing in the center courtyard near the west wing of Alexander Hall. Like most students at the college, Gibbs hailed from Mississippi — in his case the small delta town of Ripley, not far from the Tennessee border — and saw his college education as a route to economic opportunity. Gibbs was married and had an infant son, Phillip Jr., whom he affectionately called “Man.” His wife Dale, pregnant with their second, was living with her parents in Ripley and working for Head Start while Phillip went to school. They were hoping to save expenses that way.
Gibbs “loved to have a conversation,” according to his friend Larry Breland, and they spent many nights at school talking about all kinds of things, but especially the news, politics, and history. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” Breland recounted, so their group of friends would pool their resources and gather to eat. One of them worked in the cafeteria and brought leftovers, and everyone else contributed what they had — “fruit,” “a candy bar.” Phillip, “a sharing, caring person,” was known for his willingness to “help anybody” and was thinking about becoming a lawyer.
Phillip had just dropped someone off at Alexander Hall for the 11:30 p.m. curfew for women. His sister Mary lived on the dorm’s first floor, and she and her roommate — Eddie Jean McDonald, recently elected Miss Jackson State — were having some fun, leaning out the window to tease him when the officers marched up Lynch Street, stopped in front of the dorm, and turned to face the building and the students.
Stella Spinks had come to campus to borrow a book. Sitting on the grass outside Alexander Hall, she had seen the dump truck burning a few hundred yards away in front of Stewart Hall. When the officers began moving up the street toward her, Spinks had gone back inside the building and was watching the action on the street below from a window in the west stairwell, along with twenty or thirty other women.
Shortly after the police and highway patrol reached the west wing of Alexander Hall, a bottle crashed on the pavement and the officers opened fire. Ed Swinney, one of the only African American officers on the Jackson police force, was stationed on the edge of campus when “all hell broke loose.” “The sky lit up,” he remembered, “it was just red.” The shooting was loud enough to disturb neighbors, some of whom quickly realized something terrible was happening on campus.
When law enforcement stopped shooting twenty- eight seconds later, they had fired over 150 rounds. Nearly 400 bullets or buckshot had struck Alexander Hall. One bullet hit James Earl Green, causing hemorrhaging in his chest and fatal damage to his heart. Phillip Gibbs was struck three times, including two deadly shots to his head. Stella Spinks and eleven other young people inside and outside the dorm bled from gunshot wounds.
When law enforcement stopped shooting twenty- eight seconds later, they had fired over 150 rounds. Nearly 400 bullets or buckshot had struck Alexander Hall.
As the state and local police collected their spent shells, students rushed to aid the victims. Only the National Guard helped them. Hurrying to the scene of the shootings from their post at Stewart Hall, they soon replaced the police and highway patrol troopers on campus. In the hours that followed, hundreds of students remained in front of the dorm; they were outraged at what had happened and angry at the police as well as the politicians who had failed to control them. Some considered marching east to downtown but were dissuaded by others who feared this would only give law enforcement an excuse for more killings. Students grieved for their classmates, some of them praying, others singing freedom songs to try to ease their pain. By morning the Mississippi Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning and the president of the college had suspended the remainder of the semester.
While most students soon moved home, hundreds of others remained on campus, maintaining a vigil in front of the dorm. As Hillman Frazier, one of those students, recalled, they were determined to “bring attention to what was going on” and wanted to be sure that “it wouldn’t die.” Later they refused to step aside to allow the highway patrol’s crime lab workers to remove the damaged walls and windows of the dorm and filed a request for a restraining order in district court. How, they asked, could the same all- white law enforcement agency that had just opened fire on them be trusted to handle the evidence? When a judge ruled against the students on May 20, they defiantly burned the decision and maintained their protective cordon around the dormitory. Finally, on May 23 the students stepped aside, but only after the US assistant attorney general for civil rights allowed them to observe the removal process and promised that the evidence would be handed directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
Nancy Bristow is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound. She is the author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (OUP, 2012) and Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War.
