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.

Orange is the New Black - by Piper Kerman

I've been intending to read Kerman's memoir ever since the debut of the Netflix series of the same name in premiered in 2013. After recently watching the fifth season, I finally got over to my public library and checked the book out. Much less edgy than the television show, Kerman's book is, nevertheless, a quick and fascinating read.

While the television show's characters Poussey (Samira Wiley) and Taystee (Danielle Brooks) might have one believe that the prison library is a hub of activity, it was in fact barely mentioned in the book. Most of Kerman's reading materials were sent to her by friends and family, so much so that she ended up with her own personal library, which she was glad to share with others. When she left the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut she donated all of her books to the prison library. She knows her books are being used when a year after her release she receives a letter from Danbury

Formal and stilted, it was from Rosemarie, and folded into it were two photographs of my grandmother. My cousin had sent them to me in prison...Rosemarie wrote that she hoped I was doing well on the outs, and that she had found these photos in a book in the library and recognized who it was. 

Photographs are among the more innocuous things found in returned library books. For some real tales from the stacks see this post from BookRiot, and this one from BuzzFeed.

Another fellow inmate, Levy, upon being released was interviewed by the Hartford Courant newspaper and described her six-month sentence as a "holiday" with a "wide range of classes" as well as "two libraries with a wide array of books and magazines, including Town and Country and People". All of this, of course was a surprise to her fellow inmates who listened to her complain and cry every day of her incarceration.

In the book's Afterword Kerman (now serving on the board of the Women's Prison Association) points out that the United States has the world's biggest prison population with 25% of the wold's prisoners, but only 5% of the world's population. Low level offenders make up a huge proportion of these inmates. She further explains

Most of the women I know from prison have lived lives that were missing opportunities many of us take for granted. It sometimes seems that we have built revolving doors between our poorest communities and correctional facilities, and created perverse financial incentives to keep those prisons full, at taxpayers' expense. America has invested heavily in prison, while the public institutions that actually prevent crime and strengthen communities - schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, community centers - go without.

Sing it, Sister!

Hidden Figures - the movie

I don't often go to the theater to see a movie. I prefer to wait until they are available streaming or on DVD so I can watch them in my living room and enjoy reasonably priced snacks from my own kitchen and bathroom breaks whenever they are needed. Yesterday I made a rare exception and went to see Hidden Figures at the local cinema. This film based on the true story of African-American women who worked for NASA during the 1960s lives up to all the hype and was well worth the price of admission. I can also only assume that the racism and sexism we see in the film has a Hollywood sugar-coating and that it was much worse than what is portrayed in the film. 

One thing we don't see is any of the trailers for the film is a pivotal library scene. Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) is thrown out of the public library for daring to look for a book in the "white" section when she realizes what she needs is not available in the "colored" area. Once she is back on the bus with her two sons she pulls out a library book on Fortran from under her coat. When one of her sons asks if she "took" it Vaughn explains that she pays taxes like everyone else, and that you can't "take" what you already paid for. She uses the book to secretly learn to program the new room-sized IBM mainframe computer that has recently arrived at NASA that will surely put her and many of her denizens out of a job. By learning the computer language she not only changes her own destiny, but that of dozens of other women, both black and white, who work for the space program. This episode is one of many in the film that reminds us that what is legal is not necessarily right, and what is illegal is not necessarily wrong. Powerful lessons that are still relevant today.

Update July 26, 2024:

Today I discovered that this post is cited in The Reel Librarians blog!

Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender - by Paula Rothenberg

Author Rothenberg examines her life as both a perpetrator, and victim, of privilege while growing up in a weathy Orthodox Jewish family in New York, then as a college student, as a professor, and as a parent. Unaware of her privilege as a child she simply accepts things as they are. A succession of black cleaning ladies is just ordinary life to her. She also learns as a young child not to tell when she is victimized by a sexual predator, a tough lesson with consequences she will face much later in life when it prevents her from earning her doctorate. As an adult she looks back on these experiences and sees them through different lenses.

There is a lot about reading, and books, in this memoir. Education, to varying degrees, was important to Rothenberg's family and she was encouraged to read by her mother, who was also an avid reader. Most of the early passages about books though, are about purchasing, or owning books, although she does say that her grandmother used Womrath bookstore's "lending library" to read countless mysteries. She also tells of her summers spent at the family's second home in Connecticut, when she was "allowed...to buy stacks of books to see [her] through until school began again" and admits that "to this day, books are the one thing I can buy without any feelings of being extravagant" (p.65). Late in the work however, while describing her suburban home in New Jersey and her children's schools she recognizes that the schools in the "white neighborhoods" were the ones with "new science laboratories, extensive libraries, and well-equipped gyms and caferterias" (p. 206), and that children of privilege will have parents who have time to volunteer in the school library, and in fundraising efforts to buy more books. (It is also true that these same parents can afford to buy books for their children - not that a bookstore is any substitute for a library!) It is a sad truth that too often libraries are places for the privileged, and it grows ever more true as libraries become easy targets for budget cuts. (See my post on defunding libraries.)

A final look at libraries comes almost as an afterthought when she describes taking her young daughter to the public library to do some research on poet Paul Laurence Dunbar for Black History Month. She seems to think of going to the library only after exhausting all the resources she has at home. They do find some information, but are not surprised that there are no children's books about him. In a follow up visit (many years later) she does discover some books on Dunbar in the Children's Collection. Let it never be said that librarians do not respond to the needs of their communities.

Find out more about this work at http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/rotinv.html