Jackson State University

Jackson State University, on the west side of Jackson, Mississippi, carries one of the most charged histories in American higher education. The school was founded in eighteen seventy-seven in Natchez by the American Baptist Home Mission Society, originally called Natchez Seminary. Its purpose was to train Black ministers and teachers in the post-Reconstruction South. The school moved to Jackson in nineteen eighteen and eventually became a state institution in nineteen forty, though it operated under the crippling inequality of Mississippi's segregated education system for decades.

The campus entered national consciousness on May fourteenth, nineteen seventy. That night, Jackson city police and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers opened fire on a crowd of students near Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory. Two young men were killed: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a twenty-one-year-old junior and father, and James Earl Green, a seventeen-year-old high school student who had been walking home through campus. Twelve others were wounded. Officers later claimed they responded to a sniper, a claim that investigations found unsupported. A President's Commission on Campus Unrest concluded the fusillade was "clearly unwarranted and unjustified." The dormitory's front facade was left pockmarked with bullet holes.

The killings came just eleven days after the shootings at Kent State in Ohio, yet Jackson State received a fraction of the national attention, a disparity that activists and scholars have pointed to as a measure of whose lives the country chose to mourn. The two campuses are now formally linked in memory through the Commission's findings and through annual commemorations.

Despite this trauma, Jackson State has built a formidable academic legacy. It joined the university system in nineteen seventy-four and became one of Mississippi's doctoral-granting institutions. Among its graduates: Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears running back who grew up in Columbia, Mississippi, and starred at running back for the Jackson State Tigers before being drafted by the Bears; Jerry Rice, the wide receiver widely considered the greatest in NFL history, attended Mississippi Valley State but played against JSU repeatedly; and physicist Walter Massey, who led the National Science Foundation and directed Argonne National Laboratory. The university now enrolls roughly seven thousand students and remains a pillar of the historically Black college tradition in the Deep South.