Paul Sancya/AP Photo
A protester carries his rifle at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, April 30, 2020.
In Jackson, Mississippi, one spring evening 50 years ago today, fed-up students threw rocks at drivers and set fire to a dump truck. Drivers often cruised on Lynch Street through their Jackson State College campus throwing bottles and rocks, and yelling, “nigger.”
The Jackson police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol arrived on Lynch Street. Bottles and rocks flew after firefighters put the blaze out, and shortly after the midnight hour on May 15, 1970, the officers began firing hundreds of bullets into campus buildings. A dozen injured students survived. James Earl Green, a high school senior, and Phillip Gibbs, a married junior with one child and another on the way, died of their wounds.
The Jackson State killings inhabit the dark recesses of America’s repressed memories, grafted onto the killings during the May 4 Vietnam anti-war protests at Kent State in Ohio. But the events of May 15 began less in anti-war passion than in black rage against a terroristic white male power structure designed to keep African Americans servile and scared.
Guns are still among the tools that help keep this edifice standing. So equipped, white men can put on a badge and kill with impunity; they can shoot up a school, hunt down a black man jogging, or brandish weapons of war in the halls of government.
AP Photo
The bullet-riddled windows of Alexander Hall, a Jackson State College women’s dorm in Jackson, Mississippi, after two African American students were killed and 12 injured when police opened fire on the building, May 15, 1970.
A couple of hundred mostly white men and a few women milled about in the rain on Thursday at the closed State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, their fury unleashed against their governor’s decision to take drastic action to save lives during the fiercest pandemic to hit the human race in a century.
The white men who want Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to relax stay-at-home orders that have cratered commerce brought along their assault rifles and handguns, as Michigan law allows them to do. One man carried an American flag with a doll and a noose attached to it. Nooses and Confederate flags have been the accessories of choice at several of the Michigan protests. These symbols appear to have talismanic powers that include paralyzing Republican lawmakers from prohibiting weapons inside the Capitol or its grounds.
At a late-April protest, these armed men made their way into the Capitol to yell outside the House Chambers and turn the Senate visitors’ gallery into a potential sniper’s nest. Stoic state police stood by while white men demanded access to House Chambers and screamed in their faces.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel issued a formal opinion that the Michigan State Capitol Commission had the authority to prohibit guns from the building. But with commission members beholden to their Republican overlords, they instead decided to “study” the idea of prohibiting firearms—as if discharging weapons in a legislative chamber required ballistics tests, perusal of autopsy reports that describe how AR-15 bullets can shred human flesh, or an extra night’s worth of sleeping on various blood-soaked scenarios.
After April’s display of legislating at gunpoint, an African American lawmaker, state Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Lansing Democrat, recruited a small group of well-armed black and Latino men and women to escort her into the building. Others lawmakers decided to wear bulletproof vests. Republicans, however, protected themselves this week by shutting down the whole building, while their colleagues on the other side of the aisle expressed dismay about the protesters.
“It’s very much a rally of a predominately white group that just is fighting against whatever they decided to fight against,” says Democratic state Sen. Jeremy Allen Moss of Southfield, who represents a suburban Detroit district, of the Thursday rally. “I don’t know if they were fighting against a strong female governor who was making a decision against reopening until it was safe, or if they were fighting against a perceived lack of power that white men have held in this country for a very, very long time. But it was very much not a fight against COVID-19.”
It goes without saying that the political and law enforcement response to large numbers of black and Latino men equipped with military-grade weaponry would be quite different. In 1999, when hundreds of Detroit residents—parents, educators, and activists—went to Lansing, all unarmed, to protest the state takeover of the city’s public schools, they were required to go through metal detectors. This spring, Michigan’s white reopeners walked right in. When the Black Panthers showed up at the State Capitol building in Sacramento, California, three years before the Jackson killings, state lawmakers quickly passed the Mulford Act, which prohibited public carrying of firearms. It was signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan.
It goes without saying that the political and law enforcement response to large numbers of black and Latino men equipped with military-grade weaponry would be quite different.
In the current Michigan pandemic episode of white supremacy, a white woman has taken the brunt of the abuse. Whitmer’s executive orders have provoked death threats, depictions of her as Hitler, and the lynched doll and other savage images. Attorney General Nessel, the first openly LGBTQ person elected to statewide office, has also received death threats. “I truly believe,” she says, “that if the exact same orders were issued by our former governor, a white male by the name of Rick Snyder, that we wouldn’t see these protests.”
Consider also that the protests would probably have unfolded differently or not at all if the Upper Peninsula rather than Detroit had emerged as the state’s COVID-19 epicenter. The resentment against the black city is fierce in “outstate” Michigan, hundreds of miles from the metropolitan area, says Moss, the state senator. They don’t recognize that what they perceive as harsh restrictions have so far spared them the fear and death that has gripped metro Detroit. “People feel that they are on the outside of the crisis looking in,” he says. Moss notes that “the win is that they are not suffering from the deaths that we were.”
White supremacy can still engender many bloody possibilities, just as it did on a college campus 50 years ago. Events, though, have shaved off some of the immunities for white men with guns. Oblivious about contracting COVID, the Michigan reopeners can return home with dreams of killing fields dancing in their heads. But if they make their dreams come true, neither they nor their spiritual leaders in Lansing and Washington will be able to direct or control the mayhem in a country where anyone can pack heat.
