Remembering the Jackson State Massacre

    The 50th anniversary of the police attack at Jackson State comes at a moment when America is struggling with a pandemic, the impacts of which have weighed heavily, and unjustly, on black bodies. Thanks to the insufficient and belated response of national and state leaders that has inflamed the pandemic, people of color are disproportionately represented among Covid-19 cases, and they bear the brunt of the government’s aggressive enforcement of quarantine rules.

    Then came the video showing the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man out for a jog in Georgia. Although he was killed in February, only last week were the men shown on a video confronting Mr. Arbery arrested. As the survivors of the May 1970 attack at Jackson State and modern proponents of Black Lives Matter understand, justice remains elusive.

    Through it all, we must be reminded that state-sanctioned violence aimed at the marginalized remains a systemic part of American life. That ever-present threat continues to prop up white supremacy in this country.

    This spring, Jackson State’s Class of 2020 was supposed to graduate in a special ceremony: The Class of 1970 was prepared to walk across the stage for its 50th reunion and be handed their diplomas for the first time, while relatives of Phillip Gibbs and James Green were to accept honorary doctorates on their behalf. While the administration at Jackson State and our community hold out hope that we will be able to safely gather for these events at some unknown date, there is a real prospect that this modern catastrophe, 50 years later, will prevent us from doing so.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/Jackson-state-shooting-police.html

     

    Comments

    Can't access Ny times, but again, a mashup of too many things to make sense of. I found 1 available piece discussing Jackson State, but talked about blacks throwing stones at white motorists but blaming those whites. Idunno - I think the main reason we know Kent State is it was clear what they were protesting, plus Kent, Ohio closer to a national media hub, whereas th South largely a backwater. Don't see it much related to Arbery either, since he was neither protesting nor breaking the law, just jogging, and it was renegade "justice", not an official police/national guaslrd response. Though yes, there were black people involved.


    When multiple sources made a direct connection between Arbery and Trayvon Martin, you could not see it. Your response here is not surprising. Thanks for taking time to comment.


    PP, the NYTimes op-ed is by Robert Luckett (@robbyjsu) is an associate professor of history and the director of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. And he explains how the university was going to do a commemoration of this at graduation this year to draw more attention to it, including honorary doctorates for relatives of Gibbs an Green. To "start dialogue about ignored history: type of thing. So I read this op-ed as a substitute for being able to do it that way. Which is quite understandable.

    One thing I find interesting is something I was expecting to happen soon but not with impetus coming from an academic. He says 

    Thanks to the insufficient and belated response of national and state leaders that has inflamed the pandemic, people of color are disproportionately represented among Covid-19 cases, and they bear the brunt of the government’s aggressive enforcement of quarantine rules.

    "Free us from unfair quarantine" coming next? When it is the only "cure" humans have right now for this thing. "The man" caused it to be highly contagious? Trumpies don't want quarantine either. Argument makes no sense.Just a while ago it was "all the rich whypipple get to quarantine in their spacious country homes and we don't". Oh well.


    I understand quarantine having a harsher effect on blacks, rescue monies going less to blacks, etc. When people like DeBlasio screw up pandemic response, it does on average hurt blacks more than whites in terms of death's and total life upheaval. And if 2 people 1 white 1 black outside have a mask half on, the cops are more likely to hassle the black guy - same with a ton of altercations. So where police are enforcing new rules with the public, blacks are more likely to get less tolerance.


    I see absurdity in that situation, though. Try the opposite, let's say government allowed all minority-owned businesses to open up first and lax enforcement of social distancing and mask wearing among people of color and tougher enforcement towards people with white skin. Wouldn't we be hearing then that the government was trying to kill off minorities?

    Public health measures in an pandemic are anti-civil rights, they are totalitarian of necessity, civil rights are temporarily put on hold. This is why the Trumpie libertarians dislike them so much.Just saying that it was a no brainer that this was coming to this country, individual freedom is very much part of our core founding culture and the left and the right would be screaming about any public health initiatives.


    The absurdity is in the way you pose the situation. Black businesses were not asking for lax conditions. The armed thugs who helped businesses defy shutdown orders were white.

    Black businesses were asking for funding support 

    The economic effects of the pandemic on black communities can be explained by several factors. Almost half of black-owned businesses are in industries — such as administrative and support services, health care and social assistance and retail — that are bearing the brunt of this pandemic. These industries not only pose a health risk because of the interaction between workers and customers, but they are also especially vulnerable to lower consumer demand due to social distancing measures. 

    Over 90% of small businesses in majority black communities hold cash reserves of fewer than 14 days, so they are more likely to run out of operating funds when customers stay at home. And the most recently available Federal Reserve data shows that black business owners are denied loans at twice the rate of white owners, so they are more likely to have trouble finding capital to survive the pandemic. 

      In the face of large-scale shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 crisis, there is a clear need for policies to support small business. But the spending programs passed by Congress thus far have ignored the challenges of capital access facing black-owned firms. 

      During the first round of funding provided for small businesses, borrowers seeking Paycheck Protection Program loans were required to work with banks already participating in the US Small Business Administration's (SBA) primary loan program, thereby excluding firms that worked with smaller community banks. Moreover, Congress allocated just $10 million to the Minority Business Development Agency. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, these conditions may have prevented 95% of black-owned businesses from receiving loans.

      https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/perspectives/black-businesses-coronavirus/index.html

      You make an insane argument 

       

      BTW, your description of me to PP was disgusting

       

       


      I kind of agree with both sides here - blacks face more risks, there's some damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't attributes if you stay closed or open either way, in an ideal universe much more funding & support would be available especially for minorities at risk, but we live in a bizarre universe sadly.


      The sequence of events

      Feb. 3, 1964, a white driver slammed into a Jackson State student named Mamie Ballard, sending her to the hospital. This incident began a yearslong push to close Lynch Street to traffic, which in turn helped propel the already potent local civil rights movement.

      Jackson State may have been majority black, but it was in the capital of a state dominated by white supremacists, who governed the college. Informed by the civil rights and Black Power movements, students naturally saw the fight to close Lynch Street as a cornerstone of their broader push for justice and equality in Mississippi. With an increasingly aggressive tenor, the ensuing student demonstrations, which peaked each spring, demanded justice for Ms. Ballard, who survived, and that Lynch Street be closed. 

      On May 14, 1970, someone set fire to a dump truck parked in the middle of Lynch Street a few blocks from campus. While there was no evidence that student protesters had been involved, white authorities cited the vandalism to justify the use of force.

      Late that evening officers from the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol marched onto campus, accompanied by the so-called Thompson Tank, an armored personnel carrier that Mayor Allen Thompson, the city’s segregationist mayor, had purchased in 1964, ahead of what he termed the civil rights “invasion” of Freedom Summer. That same year the Mississippi Legislature gave the Highway Patrol broad authority to intervene in protests, even if local authorities hadn’t requested them. The patrol still held that power in 1970.

      The phalanx of officers proceeded to Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, arriving close to midnight. But instead of facing a mass of angry protesters, they found scores of students enjoying a Thursday evening relaxing outside as graduation neared. Later asserting that a sniper had shot at them from a window in Alexander Hall — an absurd claim with no evidence — the police fired more than 400 rounds of ammunition over 28 seconds in every direction.

      In the chaos that spilled into the early morning hours of May 15, two men, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, were left dead; a dozen other young people were wounded in the gunfire. Hundreds of others bear physical and psychological scars to this day. Gibbs was a junior political science major at Jackson State. He had married his high school sweetheart, and they had one son. Unbeknown to Gibbs and his wife, Dale, she was pregnant with their second son.

      Green was a senior at nearby Jim Hill High School. He had been walking home from his after-school job on the opposite side of the street from Alexander Hall, which meant the police had turned to fire in the opposite direction from the supposed sniper.

      Edit to add:

      A similar view from the Nation

      Students there were first confused—there had been no trouble at the dorm, where the students were “just chilling out”—and then angered. A few yelled at the officers. And then a bottle hit the pavement and the police opened fire. Twenty-eight seconds later, James Earl Green, a high school senior who lived nearby, and Phillip Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State College, lay dead, and 12 other young people bled from their wounds.

      The racism of the officers numbed them to the horror they had unleashed. When the shooting finally stopped, students moved quickly to offer aid to the stricken. Neither Jackson policemen nor Mississippi highway patrolmen assisted them, instead turning to pick up their spent shells. Inspector Lloyd “Goon” Jones, onsite commander for the MHSP, ordered some of the young people, at gunpoint and using derogatory language, to check on those that appeared mortally wounded. Contacting headquarters he reported “several injured,” and when asked for details, noted simply, “They’re nigger students,” before turning to counting the number of “nigger gals” and “nigger males” who had been wounded. Dismissing the seriousness of what had happened, he explained further, “They ain’t hurt all that bad.” The conversation turned only briefly to the “two fatal” before moving on to a concocted story about a sniper and the need for coffee and cigarettes

      https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jackson-state-shootings-fifty/

       

      The connecting theme is that the black body is considered a threat.

       


      The author of the Nation article notes:

      In the five decades since the shootings, the problem of police violence against young men of color has persisted. African American men and boys are two-and-a-half times as likely as their white counterparts to face death by police shooting. The rate is highest for young black men in their mid-to-late 20s and constitutes a leading cause of death for this demographic. In recent days we have seen once more the horrors of this kind of white on black violence, as news of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery has gained national attention. Though in this case the men charged with his killing are a former policeman and his son, the same dynamics are in play and the investigation into the killing was delayed by months. None of this is unfamiliar to African Americans, who from childhood learn the danger posed by law enforcement; today, in the midst of a global pandemic, many African American men are afraid to wear masks in public, fearful that this will enhance their chances of dying at the hands of police. But even headline-making cases are dismissed by too many white Americans as one-off incidents. Confronting the history of events like the Jackson State shooting would make such a stance much more difficult to support.

      https://time.com/5836466/jackson-state-shooting-history/

      I don't find it strange that connections are made between the events.


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