2015/05/20 – Forty-five years ago, songs like Edwin Starr’s “War” and Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” took aim at America’s actions in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as the death count of south Asian citizens and soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

These anthems also sought to make sense out of protests and demonstrations on college campuses across the United Sates during the 1960s. Although many Jackson State University students objected to the wars, the protests that took place there in May 1970 were different from the bloody protests that occurred days earlier at Kent State University in Ohio. At JSU, while students protested a war that disproportionately sent black boys to slaughter, they also marched against racial intimidation and terrorism at home.

“Jackson State (protests) were all about racism,” James “Lap” Baker told a crowd gathered to commemorate the events of May 15, 1970. “And I want to make that a point. It wasn’t about protesting the Vietnam War.”

‘Round Midnight

Before 1970, Lynch Street bisected JSU, connecting downtown with west Jackson. “There had been a lot of incidents between black students and white motorists,” said Robby Luckett, executive director of JSU’s Margaret Walker Center. “… Things like shouting racial epithets (and) throwing things at students, and at one point, a Jackson State student had even been hit by a white motorist driving through campus.”

Before midnight on May 14, 1970, several students assembled outside Alexander Hall, a female dormitory right off Lynch Street. People at the protest threw bottles at oncoming cars as the night progressed. In the 2012 documentary titled “May 15, 1970,” Gladys Johnson, an eyewitness and survivor of the event, said that in the early hours of May 15, a line of Jackson police and state highway patrolmen marched in lines toward the students outside Alexander Hall. A highway patrolman walked out from the line of police with a megaphone and said: “Ladies and gentleman, can I have your attention, please.”

At that time, a bottle broke at the patrolman’s feet. Officers fired on students with pistols and shotguns for 20 to 37 seconds, firing between 140 to 460 shots, depending on the accounts.

Luckett said police reported that the gunfire responded to the first shot fired from the fifth floor of Alexander Hall, but there was never any evidence that a sniper had been firing from the building. When the firing ceased, a dozen students were injured, and on the ground, far apart from one another, lay the bodies of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green.

Gibbs, 21, was a junior pre-law major at Jackson State University who was active with his church and played basketball. He had married his high-school sweetheart and had an 18-month-old child and another on the way. Green, 17, was a senior at Jim Hill High School and was walking home from his job when he was shot on the steps of B.F. Roberts Hall. Luckett points out that in order for police to shoot Green, they would have had to turn around and fire in the opposite direction of Alexander Hall.

In the JSU documentary, Gloria McCray, James Green’s sister, said, “If you are lined up facing the dormitory, shooting at the dormitory, why would you turn around to shoot somebody in the back of you? It was really a racial thing and an attack on anything black that moved.”

Bonds Rebuilt?

Jackson State and local dignitaries gathered on a hot Friday afternoon to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the police attack that occurred in the early hours of May 15, 1970. The event included readings of poetry and journal entries Margaret Walker Alexander wrote about the incident and testimonies of survivors of the bloody night that left 14 injured and two men dead.

The commemoration came on the heels of protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, amidst social-media-sparked movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and growing tensions between law enforcement and the communities they serve. In early May, the Baltimore protests prompted Bert Case, a reporter for WAPT, to ask Gov. Phil Bryant whether Mississippi would be prepared for protests like the ones in Baltimore. Bryant offered: “I think our race relations are better than other communities around the nation. I think our people are just simply better behaved and more respectful of authority than they might be in other communities. I think that would discourage the type of involvement that you’ve seen.”

The recent deaths of two Hattiesburg police officers—Liquori Tate, who was black, and Benjamin Deen, who was white—seemed to strain those relations even further. Bryant, a former Hinds County sheriff’s deputy, again weighed in about the deaths of Deen and Tate, penning an op-ed for The Clarion-Ledger in which he casts the conflict as one where people need to side with police and against what he calls criminal behavior.

In Jackson, however, local leaders don’t see police-community relations as good versus evil. In fact, they say the relationship between the cops and the community has drastically improved.

Jackson Police Chief Lee Vance has served the Jackson Police Department for more than two decades, a span in which at least nine of his fellow officers were killed while on the job. The police and community have a bond, but “when a police officer is killed in the line of duty, that bond is broken,” Vance said at JPD headquarters, the building where a murder suspect killed Det. Eric Smith and then himself during an interrogation on the third floor of the downtown police station in April 2013.

Three months later, a car hit Officer Bruce Jacob while he was trying to remove debris from Interstate 55. In all, 17 officers have died while serving since 1893.

“I think the average citizens and the average peace officer want the same things: They want a peaceful community to raise their families and thrive in their professions. We don’t want any barriers between ourselves and the community,” Vance said of policemen and policewomen.

Defense attorney and Mississippi Rep. Adrienne Wooten, D-Jackson, gave the keynote speech and said police do the unthinkable, often for the ungrateful. She agreed with Vance that tension between police and the community requires effort to rebuild.

With several incidents in the past year, including the deaths of several men at the hands of police, as well as the killings of police officers, she has observed law-enforcement interacting more positively with citizens.

“It’s more important now than ever for police officers to be out there in the community reassuring them that (police) have their best interests at heart and that, at the end of the day, their number one primary interest is to protect and serve,” Wooten told the Jackson Free Press.

Vance said his department works hard to earn trust.

“We have C.O.P.S. meetings; we organize our neighborhoods; we’ve got the reserve officers working for us; we’ve got the citizens’ police academy. All these things are designed for us to have a strong relationship with the people we serve,” Vance told the JFP.

But a group of onlookers awaiting judges to call their names for municipal court gave varying accounts of JPD’s relationship with the community.

One woman, who didn’t want to give her name, said the police are “too rude and disrespectful.” A man, who also declined to provide his name, was more ambivalent, telling the JFP of local police: “You got some good ones, and you’ve got some crooked ones.”

Source: Jackson Free Press

Zachary Oren Smith