40 Years Ago: Police Kill Two Students at Jackson State in Mississippi, Ten Days After Kent State Killings


Four decades ago, on May 4, 1970, four students were killed at Kent State University when National Guardsmen opened fire on hundreds of unarmed students at an on-campus antiwar rally.


The killings received national media attention and are still remembered forty years later across the country. But the media has largely forgotten what happened just ten days after the Kent State shootings.


On May 14, 1970, local and state police opened fire on a group of students at the predominantly Black Jackson State College in Mississippi. In a 28-second barrage of gunfire, police fired hundreds of rounds into the crowd. Two were killed and a dozen injured. The Jackson State shootings didn�t receive close to the attention from the media that Kent State did.


Howard Zinn, the late, great historian and author of A People�s History of the United States, spoke about why the Jackson State killings were largely ignored in his very last interview we did with him on Democracy Now! just last May.


HOWARD ZINN: Yeah, well, it�s a very common thing in history to ignore the things that happen to Black people. And, of course, the Kent State shooting was a very dramatic and terrible event and deserves to be remembered as one of those shameful things in American history. But the media tend to focus on some things and not on others, and the media did not focus on the other shooting that took place at Jackson State, where two Black youngsters were gunned down. And so, yeah, I think our job as historians is to bring out things that we did not get ordinarily in our history lessons.



25 Years Ago: Philadelphia Police Bombs MOVE

Scene of West Philadelphia fire that firefighters allowd to burn uncontrolled after bombing of MOVE in 1985. Credit: Library of Congress

Headquarters Killing 11, Destroying 65 Homes.
This month also marks the 25th anniversary of a massive police operation in Philadelphia that culminated in the helicopter bombing of the headquarters of a radical group known as MOVE.


The fire from the attack killed six adults and five children and destroyed 65 homes. Despite two grand jury investigations and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from city government was criminally charged.


MOVE was a Philadelphia-based radical movement that was dedicated to Black liberation and a back-to-nature lifestyle. It was founded by John Africa, and all its members took on the surname Africa.



May 13th at 25
By Mumia Abu-Jamal

May 13th, 1985 is more than a day of infamy, when a city waged war on its own alleged 'citizens', but also when the city committed a massacre - and did so with impunity.


When babies were shot and burned alive, with their Mothers and Fathers, and the killers rewarded with honors and pensions - while politicians talked and the media mediated mass murder.


On that day, the City of Philadelphia, armed and assisted by the U.S. government, dropped a bomb on a house and called it "law."


The Fire Department watched buildings ignite like matches in the desert, and cut off water. The courts of the land turned a blind eye, daubed mud in their sockets, and prosecuted Ramona Africa, sending her to prison for nearly a decade for having the nerve to survive an urban holocaust, and jailed her for the crime of not burning to death.


Eleven men, women, and children died - and not one killer was even charged with a misdemeanor.


But on that day, more than MOVE members died. The city died too. Its politicians died. Its media died. its courts died. And its churches and houses of worship died - for they ceased to function, and served power and money, over life.


In a very real sense the city massacred itself; for when faith in such institutions died, they became empty, hollow and dead, but for the shell.


May 13th, 1985 is a day that shall live in infamy.


But for more reasons than the obvious. It was the death knell of a system committing suicide.


It proved that a man called John Africa spoke powerful truths when he named the nature of the system as corrupt, flawed and poisoned.


Everyday past that date, has only proved it even more.

-(c) '10 maj
================

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