A full day of services and events will be held on the campus of Jackson State University today to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the campus shooting that killed JSU student Phillip Gibbs, high school student James Green, wounded several JSU students and scarred a generation of black college activists and supporters. From the Clarion-Ledger:
Whatever the reason for their presence, dozens of Jackson police officers and highway patrolmen marched onto the campus, bypassing a men’s dorm, where students hurled rocks and insults at them, Weakley said.
The band of officers marched a few hundred yards farther to what Weakley described as a peaceful gathering of a couple hundred students in front of Alexander Hall, a women’s dorm.
There they stopped.
Weakley saw machine guns and shotguns in the officers’ hands. “But we didn’t think they’d shoot us,” he said. “All of a sudden, someone threw a bottle from behind the police; it fell in the middle of them.
“When it hit, it’s as if all of them went crazy. … I heard a sound like a hundred freight trains.”
