Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College - by Nancy Bristow

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970 two young black men, James Green and Phillip Gibbs, were killed by police fire on the Jackson State College campus in Mississippi. Several other students were wounded and a women's dorm at the historically black college was left riddled with bullet holes. 

While often likened to the killings at Kent State University (see my post on When Truth Mattered by Robert Giles) on May 4 of the same year, the shootings at Jackson State were not the result of a Vietnam War protest, 

but rather another chapter in the long history of state violence against African Americans, a story inseparable from their identities as students attending a black college in the capital city of the nation's most racially repressive state.

 Roy Wilkins the national director of the NAACP stated in 1963 that 

There is no state with a record which approaches that of Mississippi in inhumanity, murder, brutality, and racial hatred. [It was] absolutely at the bottom of the list.

Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act six years before the shootings little had changed in Mississippi. And at Jackson State where "the administration, controlled by the state's all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning, worked hard to keep the campus quiescent" even as a growing number of students and faculty were starting to protest. 

While there was local and national coverage of the event at the time, including reports in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and even an article in Playboy magazine the tragedy has largely been forgotten since, even as the shootings at Kent State University which happened less than two weeks earlier are remembered each year on its anniversary. There are other parallels with the Kent State shooting, including false reports of rock throwing and sniper fire before police opened fire.

Bristow's book places the shootings within the historical context of a state founded on enslavement, racism, segregation, and white supremacy.

Of particular interest to this blogger was that in 1961 students from another historically black institution, Tougaloo College "attempted to desegregate the downtown's white library with a 'study-in'" as part of a protest of the city's Civil War Centennial celebration.

The students began by visiting the local black library to request volumes they knew the branch did not hold before entering the white library to request those same books. The police were quick to arrive, arresting nine students...They spent the night in the city jail before being released on bail...On the evening following the "study-in" youth from around the city protested the arrest of the group they dubbed the "Tougaloo Nine". At Jackson State College perhaps as many as 800 students gathered outside the campus library...President Reddix attempted to disperse the students and was undone when they resisted. Eventually he was seen just "snatching students at random and shoving them toward a [campus] policeman or deal with orders to expel them".

Documents about the shootings can be found at the College archives, and on display at the library, but "they do not captivate attention as they once did". Even annual memorial events draw low attendance. Although largely forgotten by society at large, the victims still remember. They remember the loss of friends and family, and they live with their own wounds both physical and psychological. There was no justice for the victims of the Jackson State shootings. There were no indictments against any member of law enforcement present that night, and a civil case brought by five of the victims and their families found for the defendants. Although the decision was appealed and a three judge panel found that "the barrage of gunfire far exceeded the response that was appropriate" it was further determined that "despite their guilt, the state and local governments, their officials, and their law enforcement personnel were insulated by 'sovereign immunity', the doctrine protecting the state and its representatives from suits or any penalties that could result". This same doctrine is still in place today and what still allows law enforcement to murder people of color with impunity.

Twelve Angry Librarians - by Miranda James

Baltimore County Public Library's #BWellRead 2018 Challenge for the month of May is to read a book recommended by a friend. My friend Fran recommended this one to me. And in a first for this blog it is a mystery novel! Honestly, friends are always recommending library-mystery books to me. The thing is, I have never liked mystery novels. Not even when I was a pre-teen was I even interested in Nancy Drew, or the Hardy Boys. I wanted to like them, all my friends did, and my big sister did, but I just could never get past how the characters in these series could get themselves into hot water so often. It's not like they are looking for trouble, but they always seemed to get tangled up into some sort of caper whether they wanted to or not.  

And so it is with Charlie Harris, interim director of the Athena College Library and his Maine Coon cat, Diesel. In this book the sleuths (human and feline) have the help of the librarians who are attending the Southern Library Association Convention to solve the mystery of who poisoned Gavin Fong, Charlie's library school nemesis. Lots of librarians in this one, and quite a bit of critical thinking, too.

I haven't been converted into a mystery lover, although I did find this to be a page-turner. I do, however, promise to read another library-mystery this time next year. It turns out that May is Mystery month!

Salvage the Bones - by Jesmyn Ward

Taking place over a twelve-day period, as hurricane Katrina develops over the Gulf of Mexico, this novel tells the story of Esch, and her brothers and father as they prepare for the storm. While Esch's father has his children collecting wood scraps and filling water jugs they all have other things on their minds. Esch has just discovered that she is pregnant; brother Skeetah is busy taking care of a new litter of puppies; and Randall wants to go to basketball camp. When the disaster hits each of these takes on a different significance.

It was beginning to look as if I would not be blogging about this book, but five pages from the end I was thrown a bone, so to speak. As Esch, her brothers, and friend Big Henry survey the storm's damage - the complete destruction of their neighborhood - Esch notices Randall "pointing down the street, pointing something out to [her youngest brother] Junior, where the library was that he visited with his school once, maybe." Of course I am always on the lookout for libraries when I read, so this small passage might be easily missed by others, especially among the rest of descriptions of annihilation, but for me it shows a true sense of loss of potential, and a loss of safety net. Libraries often are places where people can go when disaster strikes, and there is no place else to go (just as the Ferguson, Missouri Public Library stayed open while the schools were closed). It is in the loss of the library that I see the loss of hope.

The Help - by Kathryn Stockett

In Jackson, Mississippi, during the height of the civil rights movement, three women tell their stories in this bestselling novel. Aibileen and Minny, black women working as domestics for white families; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan a young white woman who returns from college to find that Constantine, the housekeeper who helped raise her, has "gone to Chicago" without so much as a good-bye. Skeeter's mother is evasive when Skeeter demands to know why Constantine left and how she can reach her. Unable to picture the life her two best friends lead of marriage, family, and bridge, and complaining about "the help" Skeeter sets out to make a difference in the world by writing a book detailing the lives of the black women who work for white families in Jackson. Assisted by Aibileen and Minny she gathers stories from 13 different women, telling the good and the bad (including the "Terrible, Awful" thing that got Minny fired from her last job - something which turned out to be even worse than I'd imagined). The stories are published under pseudonyms and set in a ficticious town called "Niceville".

Most of the discussion about libraries in this work surrounds segregation, and the fact that Skeeter checks out books from the "white" library (a place she describes as smelling "like grade school - boredom, paste, Lysoled vomit") for Aibileen because Aibileen has to wait so long to get them from the "colored" library. But Skeeter also finds something at the white library she does not expect: a booklet entitled "A Compilation of Jim Crow Laws of the South" detailing various state segregation laws. A comment she writes about this work is discovered by her friend Hilly, and marks the beginning of the end of their friendship.
The Ole Miss library is where Skeeter finds out about a job at Harper & Row publishers, and although is not nearly qualified enough, applies anyway. This inquiry, and its follow-up is what starts her on her way to writing her book.

There was also a bit about banned books, one of my passions, in this work. Skeeter receives a copy of The Catcher in the Rye through the mail. She "always order[s] the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of  Mississippi banned them, they must be good." The pseudonym she gives to her own family in the book she writes is "the Millers...after Henry Miller, [her] favorite banned author."

Three copies of Skeeter's completed work are ordered for the Jackson, Mississippi "white" library, but a long waiting list soon grows, and the bookstores sell out, when rumors begin about a new, inflammatory book, that might just be about Jackson!