Dead Serious and Political

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The Kent State shootings, May 4th, 1970, led to protests and a national student strike, causing hundreds of campuses to close because of both violent and non-violent demonstrations. The Kent State campus remained closed for six weeks. Five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and protesting the killing of unarmed students on a college campus.
The Jackson State shooting occurred on Thursday/Friday May 14-15, 1970, at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) in Jackson, Mississippi. A group of student protesters were confronted by city and state police. The police opened fire, killing two students and injuring twelve. This happened 10 days after National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio.

A group of around a hundred African-American students had gathered on Lynch Street (which at the time bisected the campus) on the evening of Thursday, May 14. By around 9:30 p.m. the students had started fires and overturned vehicles, including a large truck. Firefighters dispatched to the scene quickly requested police support.

The police responded in force. At least 75 Jackson Mississippi Police units from the city of Jackson and the Mississippi Highway Patrol[citation needed] attempted to control the crowd while the firemen extinguished the fires. After the firefighters had left the scene, shortly before midnight, the police moved to disperse the crowd now gathered in front of Alexander Hall, a women's on-campus dormitory.

Advancing to within 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 m) of the crowd, at roughly 12:05 a.m., police opened fire. The exact cause of the shooting and the moments leading up to it are unclear. Authorities claim they saw a sniper on one of the building's upper floors, while the students say police fired for no reason.

The crowd scattered and a number of people were trampled or cut by falling glass. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior, and James Earl Green, 17, a student at nearby Jim Hill High School, were killed and twelve others were wounded. Gibbs was killed near Alexander Hall by buckshot, while Green was killed behind the police line in front of B. F. Roberts Hall, also with a shotgun.

The police fired in excess of 460 rounds of ammunition (FBI estimate) in less than a minute, leaving over 160 holes in the walls of Alexander Hall. They then took some time to gather their spent shell casing before withdrawing[citation needed], leaving the scene in the hands of the National Guard.

Sorry for my historical errors. I misspoke any number of times as I told this story in performance for the first time. State troopers shot the students in Mississippi, not the National Guard. And I remember hearing that the students were in their beds but perhaps this was not true either? Also BHS must have voted to strike on the 5th or 6th of May, joining the colleges that had erupted earlier. We had a large crowd on the 15th of MAY as we had reconvened to vote whether or not to continue the strike - hot heads like yours truly thought we should continue because, I reasoned, we had not stopped the war yet.