How could I not have known this?

~ susie

I’m reading “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI” by Betty Medsger, and find out that 10 days after the shootings at Kent State, the same thing happened in Mississippi, at Jackson State — a black college — at a protest against our invasion of Cambodia.

Two students were killed and twelve others were injured. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior, and James Earl Green, 17, a senior and miler at nearby Jim Hill High School, were killed by rifle fire.

The cops opened fire on the dormatories, firing 140 shots. (They claimed there was a sniper.)

And I didn’t know this. Why? Yeah, I was only 15, but I followed the news avidly. Did I just skip over the story because it was Mississippi, and not relevant to my life? Two students were shot and killed, one of them not much older than me. I’d even attended a protest at Independence Mall that same night.

How did I not see? Do white people just block it all out?

Published by susie

5 thoughts on “How could I not have known this?”

  1. One thing follows another. Not as happenstance. In May 1969 the leader of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, was shot to death in Chicago as he slept. The tactical squad fired a thousand rounds into his home killing him. In August 1969, Charles Manson ‘killed’ the Hippie movement. In May 1970, the Peace Movement and the Black Movement were both intimidated and then discredited by the religiously anti-Communist J. Edgar Hoover. All of which brought a smile to Nixon’s face as he gleefully allowed to be killed by the Viet Cong as many “long-haired, Hippie, creeps” as he could get drafted into his army.

  2. I remember both Kent State and Jackson State vividly. I can still pull up from my brain’s memory coils the TV footage of the bullet-pocked dorms at JS.

    I was 18 when these shootings occurred, just a couple of weeks away from high school graduation. I was already politically active,had been for a couple of years, working with the United Farm Workers and the anti-war groups in my hometown.

    I remember it all starting with the 1960 presidential campaign and Jack Kennedy’s election and going all through the tragedies of the era we call “The Sixties.” Freedom Summer. The Berkley Free Speech Movement. The March on Washington. All the assassinations. Prague Summer. The Paris barricades. The hunt for and trial of Angela Davis. Chicago. The Christmas bombings. Watergate. The Vietnam baby airlift. And so much more.

    All of that is burned into my memory.

  3. I remember Kent State like it was yesterday, but Jackson State doesn’t pull up for me. Maybe ’cause I was freshman in a small all-white college in KS and police actions against the black community had become standard fare by that time. All the stuff caseyOR cites and more added to the context, but for whatever reason Kent St radicalized me like nothing else.

  5. Also too, the very same day as Jackson State, here in ABQ, the national guard bayonetted some students at a protest rally, nobody died, but blood was spilt.

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