Making Our Way Home by Blair Imani & Patrisse Cullors

Author:Blair Imani & Patrisse Cullors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

After decades of relative peacetime following World War II, the Vietnam War inspired young people to take to the streets to speak out against inequality in new ways. As their peers were being drafted, maimed, and killed in Vietnam, young people organized protests in opposition to U.S. involvement in the war. At one gathering of students on May 4, 1970, at Ohio’s Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard opened fire and killed four students. Nine other students were injured, all while peacefully protesting the Vietnam War. At Jackson State University, a historically Black university, just eleven days later, more than forty Mississippi Highway Patrol officers fired over 150 shots at an occupied dormitory building, following an eruption of protests in response to a false report that Charles Evers, the son of civil rights legend Medgar Evers, had been murdered. Two students were killed, and twelve others were injured. National media covered the Kent State story and Life magazine dedicated its May 15, 1970, issue to the students who were killed there. Unlike Jackson State, Kent State was a predominantly white university, and the victims of the shooting were white themselves. The Jackson State shooting was only covered in Black media outlets, as if it had happened in a wholly different America.

Two years prior to these tragedies, at South Carolina State University, South Carolina Highway Patrol officers had fired into a gathered group of two hundred Black students who had been organizing for the integration of local recreation centers. In an act of retaliation against these young people who were pushing to upset the status quo, police killed university students Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond, as well as high school student Delano Middleton. In order to justify these extrajudicial killings and reckless acts, the police crafted a self-aggrandizing narrative, claiming that the protesters had been violent toward the police. The governor of South Carolina blamed the killing not on the unchecked racism within the police force but on the Black Power movement and unnamed “outside agitators” who must have antagonized the police. The same narrative repeats today, when police treat peaceful protestors with needless violence. Unlike the Kent State shootings that claimed the lives of white youth, the egregious act of police violence against Black students fell on unhearing ears. Today, the Kent State shooting sticks out in the public consciousness, while the shootings at the historically Black colleges Jackson State and South Carolina State University are remembered only by the survivors and their descendants.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson

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