More than 50 years after two people were shot to death by cops at a historically Black college in Mississippi, two politicians issued a formal apology at a long-overdue commencement.
During a graduation ceremony for the class of 1970 Jackson State University, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Mississippi State Sen. Hillman Frazier, addressed to the families of the two men killed.
“As James Baldwin once wrote: ‘When we cannot tell the truth about our past, we become trapped in it,'” Lumumba said. “I believe, as a city, we must publicly atone for the sins of our past and proclaim a new identity of dignity, equity and justice.”
On May 15, 1970, 21-year-old Jackson State student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and 17-year-old James Earl Green, a high school student who was walking home from work were “unjustly gunned down two innocent young Black men, terrorized and traumatized a community of Black students and committed one of the gravest sins in our city’s history” according to Lumumba.
The shootings occurred during a campus protest of racial injustice stemming from white people hurling slurs and items at Black students on campus. After a member of the crowd threw a bottle toward police, shooting broke out resulting in Gibbs and Green’s deaths and 12 injuries.
The commencement ceremony for the Class of 1970 was canceled, with students getting diplomas in the mail. Some 74 people from that class turned out for Saturday’s ceremony.
“The state of Mississippi never apologized for the tragedy that occurred on this campus that night — never apologized,” Frazier said. “So, since I’m here representing the state of Mississippi in my role as state senator, I’d like to issue an apology to the families, the Jackson State family, for the tragedy that occurred that night because they took very valuable lives.”
No officer was charged in the incident and an entirely white jury did not award the families of Gibbs and Green with money in a civil suit, according to the Associated Press.
As part of the ceremony, Jackson State gave a posthumous honorary doctorate degrees to Gibbs and Green which were taken by their respective sisters.
With Wire News Services