Jackson State University and the Night of May Fifteenth

Jackson State University was founded in eighteen seventy-seven as Natchez Seminary, established by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to provide moral, religious, and intellectual education to Black Mississippians. Its first enrolled class included twenty formerly enslaved men training to be ministers and teachers. The school moved to Jackson in eighteen eighty-three and eventually became Jackson College, supported by the State of Mississippi from nineteen forty onward. Today it is one of the flagship historically Black universities in the South, enrolling thousands of students in a broad range of undergraduate and graduate programs.

The university's most painful chapter came on the night of May fourteenth, going into the early hours of May fifteenth, nineteen seventy. Tensions on campus had been building for weeks. Students had been protesting their treatment by white motorists who sped through campus on Lynch Street, hurling racial epithets and, on at least one occasion, hitting a student with a car. Against that backdrop, amid the national convulsion that followed the Kent State killings ten days earlier, a crowd gathered on campus. Someone set fire to a dump truck. Law enforcement arrived in force.

Just after midnight, officers opened fire on the front of Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory, spraying more than four hundred sixty rounds in under thirty seconds. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a twenty-one-year-old junior pre-law student with a wife and an infant and another child on the way, was killed. James Earl Green, a seventeen-year-old high school senior who had stopped to watch the commotion on his walk home from a grocery store job, was also killed. Twelve other students were wounded.

No one was ever charged. An all-white jury acquitted the officers in a civil trial. The area where it happened is now the Gibbs-Green Pedestrian Walkway. The campus keeps the memory. The country has too often forgotten.