African-American students in Jackson faced racism since the institution was established as a teachers college in the 1800s. The college was moved from its original location -- too close to the white downtown -- to its current home in a black neighborhood split in half by Lynch Street. Named after John Roy Lynch, Mississippi's first black congressman during Reconstruction, Lynch Street was the unofficial capital of black Mississippi in the early half of the 20th century. In his book Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College, Tim Spofford details a history of hardship black students in Jackson faced. Even though the Masonic lodge just one block east of the university on Lynch Street was the center of Mississippi's civil rights movement, Jackson State students participated little in protests of that era. A state-supported institution, college officials couldn't afford to alienate the all-white board of education that was their bread and butter.
But students attending private Tougaloo College just a few miles away were trained in nonviolent protests and civil disobedience. Tougaloo students brought the sit-in to Jackson when they refused to leave the city's whites-only public library. They marched openly and picketed.
Few of their state-college peers joined them. Students at Jackson State took out their frustrations on Lynch Street, where white motorists speeding to the suburbs often hurled racial slurs out the windows. Black students retaliated with rocks and bottles. Spofford and others write that an annual mini riot unleashed on campus every spring forced city police to close off Lynch Street.
Although college officials begged the city to route traffic around for the safety of both students and motorists, the city refused.
Earlier in the spring of 1970, a popular female student was injured while trying to cross Lynch Street. Motorists had no regard for the black pedestrians, say student and community members of the time.
Outraged by the incident on Lynch Street and fueled by frustration over the shootings at Kent State, Jackson State students once again amassed on Lynch Street on May 13. Edward Curtis, dean of student services at Jackson State, was director of housing, acting director of men and commissioner of the campus police force at the time. He says it wasn't just one injustice that made students so restless. Blacks were being sent to Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, and a ROTC division had recently been established on campus. Add to that the shootings at Kent State and the early closing of most other universities. Students were tired. It was humid. And in Jackson, there was ever-present
discrimination by white people.
  
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