JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – The 52nd annual commemoration of the Gibbs-Green tragedy at Jackson State University (JSU) was held on Saturday, May 14. It brought back heartache to many.
In the late hours of May 14 and into the early morning of May 15, 1970, Jackson police and Mississippi Highway Patrol troopers marched onto the JSU campus and fired nearly 500 rounds of ammunition in 28 seconds into Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory. People who were there remember the terror.
“Why shoot at Alexander Hall? We hadn’t done anything. You passed a boys dorm. You didn’t stop and shoot the boys dorm up. You came on down to the women’s dorm. To this day, I don’t know why they stopped at Alexander Hall to point us out,” said Gailya Porter, who was there in 1970.
In combination with the events, a decade of action exploded the Civil Right Movement on Lynch Street. Many today said that’s why people need to put guns down in Jackson.
