Jackson State, May 15, 1970

Phillip Lafayette Gibbs was twenty-one years old, a junior from Ripley, Mississippi, studying at Jackson State College. He was married. He had a four-month-old son. On the night of May fourteenth, nineteen seventy, he was on campus.

James Earl Green was seventeen. He was a senior at Jim Hill High School in Jackson and a promising distance runner. He was cutting through the Jackson State campus on his way home.

In the months before that night, the relationship between the campus and the surrounding white community had been building toward a break. White drivers on John R. Lynch Street, which ran through the edge of campus, were known for shouting racial slurs at students, throwing things from their cars, and accelerating toward students in the crosswalk. There had been incidents. The campus had been on edge.

That night, a confrontation between students and police had grown through the evening hours. Just after midnight on May fifteenth, a line of about forty Mississippi state highway patrolmen opened fire on a crowd of students near Alexander Hall. The shooting lasted approximately thirty seconds. More than four hundred sixty rounds were fired, from shotguns, rifles, and submachine guns, at a distance of thirty to fifty feet. Phillip Gibbs and James Green were killed. Twelve others were wounded.

An investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found no evidence of sniper fire from the students. No one was ever charged with the deaths of Phillip Gibbs and James Earl Green.

Eleven days earlier, four students at Kent State University in Ohio had been killed by National Guardsmen during a protest against the Vietnam War. The country convulsed. Hundreds of colleges shut down. The President spoke. The Jackson State killings received a fraction of that attention, a disproportion that many observers attributed directly to race: four white students in Ohio, two Black students in Mississippi, the same week.