Remembering the Jackson State Tragedy
If the shootings at Kent State University have been misrepresented and misremembered, the targets of the deadly assault by law enforcement at Jackson State College have been twice victimized, their story erased from the nation’s public narrative, their trauma largely forgotten.
Shortly after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers from the all-white Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) and the largely white Jackson police force opened fire on students in front of a women’s dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black school located in the African American community west of downtown Jackson. Many commentators immediately saw in the violence parallels to the recent shootings at Kent State University. On May 18, 1970, an editorial in the Indiana Daily Student headlined the news about the shootings by crossing out the words “Kent State” and simply replacing them with “Jackson.” A week later, Time offered a similar view, referring to the violence at Jackson State as “Kent State II.” But what had happened at Jackson State was not another Kent State. The violence was not caused by student protest against the Vietnam War but was instead another chapter in the long history of state violence against African Americans, a story inseparable from the victims’ identities as young black people attending college in America’s most racially repressive state.
Many on the Jackson State campus believed it had been a planned assault, and it is not hard to imagine that the state troopers, well known for their bigotry and violent repression of African Americans, headed to the dorm with the intention of opening fire. But even if this was not the case, it changes the criminal behavior of law enforcement only by degree. Maj. Gen. Walter Johnson of the Mississippi National Guard, waiting on the edge of campus to relieve law enforcement, was stunned when the shooting broke out. “Oh my God,” he exclaimed as he looked toward Alexander Hall, “they’ve done it all wrong.” If the shootings were not planned, they were nevertheless a terrible atrocity, rooted in the racism of both the state troopers and the local police.
Law enforcement approached the African American students that night with assumptions about their inherent criminality, overreacting from the beginning to the disturbance on campus. Though someone had set a dump truck on fire in the street running through campus, in the context of May 1970, this hardly constituted what the police maintained was a “riot.” With an exaggerated sense of the danger the students posed, the officers armed themselves with weapons better suited to a military assault than crowd control. The highway patrolmen carried state-issued shotguns and double-aught buckshot, personal weapons, and even “two 9mm submachine guns.” The Jackson police brought the infamous Thompson Tank. Hurrying to campus in a panic, the two forces acted without adequate preparation or a clear understanding of their mission, demonstrating their disregard for the well-being of the students. After firefighters doused the dump truck, law enforcement did the inexplicable, turning not to leave the campus but to march provocatively to its center, halting in front of the Alexander Hall dormitory, where they turned to face students gathered outside the dorm’s west wing.