Qualla: Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings

Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bullet holes are still there. More than half a century after the night of May 15, 1970, the facade of Alexander Hall at Jackson State University bears the scars of over 460 rounds fired by state highway patrolmen in roughly thirty seconds. Two students -- Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, twenty-one, and James Earl Green, seventeen, a high school student who happened to be walking nearby -- were killed. Twelve others were wounded. The shooting came eleven days after the Kent State massacre in Ohio, which killed four students and convulsed the nation. But while Kent State became a defining image of the Vietnam era, the killings at Jackson State -- at a historically Black college, in Mississippi -- faded from the national conversation almost as quickly as the gunfire itself.

Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings: A Street Named for Struggle

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lynch Street, which bisected the Jackson State campus, was named for John R. Lynch, a Black U.S. Representative during Reconstruction. By 1970, it had become a recurring flashpoint where Black and white Jackson residents collided. The road channeled white motorists through the he...

Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings: Twelve Minutes Past Midnight

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At least 75 officers from the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol moved to control the crowd while firefighters extinguished the flames. After the fire crews left shortly before midnight, the officers advanced on a group of students gathered in front of Alexand...

Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings: The Silence That Followed

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The President's Commission on Campus Unrest, also known as the Scranton Commission, investigated both the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. Its report called the police gunfire at Jackson State an "unreasonable, unjustified overreaction." Yet no officers were ever indicted....

Thirty Seconds on Lynch Street: The Jackson State Killings: Gibbs-Green Plaza and the Long Reckoning

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jackson State University eventually memorialized the site by naming it Gibbs-Green Plaza, a multi-level brick and concrete space on the eastern side of campus bordering Lynch Street and linking Alexander Hall to the University Green. A stone monument near the plaza honors Gibbs a...