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Jackson State: More than a footnote to Kent State By Christina Hange Kukuk Few in the world were watching in February 1971 when a young widow gave birth to a son in Jackson, Miss. The child, Demetrius Gibbs, would grow up to do something his father never had the opportunity to do: graduate from Jackson State University. Demetrius Gibbs' father was a victim of the campus violence of May 1970. Just two weeks after four students were killed at Kent State, police and state highway patrol forces riddled the all-black Southern college with bullets that killed two and wounded 15 others.
Seventy campuses across the nation closed that spring. Students and police forces clashed at Harvard, Yale, California State University and Ohio State University among others. But Jackson State and Kent State made headlines together because at these two campuses students became casualties of war. Even President Richard Nixon put the two colleges together in the same sentence. In the Jackson State archives, a yellowed newspaper clipping from The Washington Post records Nixon's comparing Jackson State to Kent State this way: "When dissent turns to
violence, it invites tragedy."
The violence on each campus was similar but different. Unarmed students died in the North and in the South. But some of the circumstances were as different as black and white.
Demetrius Gibbs wasn't there in May 1970. Born nine months later, he is the son of a collegiate revolution that shook the country in 1970. And if it had not been for the shocking death of four white students in Ohio, the country might never have remembered his father Phillip Gibbs.
"If I try to tell people about the shootings at Jackson State, they don't know about it," Gibbs says. "They don't know until I say 'Kent State.' For us to even be acknowledged, it had to
happen at Kent State first."
Demetrius Gibbs graduated from Jackson State in May 1995 as the university commemorated the 25th anniversary of the
campus shootings. He spoke at the commemoration along with the youngest daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
"Sometimes I close my eyes and wish I was never a part of it," Gibbs says. "There are so many stories and so much distortion that nobody ever knows the truth."
That applies to the North as well as the South. Many scholars say the incidents at both universities shouldn't have shocked the country as much as they did. In the climate of those times, students could have died anywhere. To make sense of his history, Gibbs looks to a man a generation wiser whose place in documentaries is already secured.
Previous page: Police opened fire outside this women's dormitory at Jackson State. (Jackson State University Archives)   |
