Tim Spofford | “Lynch Street”
Tim Spofford, Author, Civil Rights, Human Rights
17857
page-template,page-template-full_width,page-template-full_width-php,page,page-id-17857,edgt-core-1.3,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,hudson child-child-ver-1.0.1,hudson-ver-3.3, vertical_menu_with_scroll,smooth_scroll,blog_installed,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-6.10.0,vc_responsive
 

“Lynch Street”

Alexander Hall. Crew repairs power lines after Jackson State killings

One warm Mississippi night in 1970, lines of blue-helmeted lawmen marched up a darkened street at Jackson State College. They stopped in front of a women’s dormitory to face a jeering crowd of Black students. Someone threw a bottle and it popped like a gunshot. A roar of  submachine guns, shotguns and rifles followed – a twenty-eight-second barrage that lit up the sky, downed power lines in a shower of sparks, and blew out the dormitory’s windows. When it was over, two young people were found dead and and a dozen others injured.

For the second time in ten days law enforcement officers had fired upon students on a college campus. First had been the killing of four white students by National Guardsmen at Kent State. It’s often remembered as a violent coda to the 1960s, but the killings days later on the Black campus in Mississippi were soon forgotten. Drawing on public records, court testimony, news reports and more than a hundred interviews, Tim Spofford presents the slayings in the context of the history of Jackson, Mississippi, and the student protests of the 1960s.

The Reviews