Funeral in Jackson

on a hot mississippi day, not far from the jackson state campus where he was gunned down, they buried young james green

The main black boulevard in Jackson, Mississippi, runs west out of downtown, through the city's largest shanty ghetto, through the Jackson State College campus, and then out to the open fields and pine forests on the edge of town. It's called Lynch Street. The campus is normally very quiet, but on the warm night of May 14, 1970, 14 students were gunned down in front of the girls' dormitory. Six men and six women were wounded. Two students, James Green and Phillip Gibbs, were killed. They had been peripheral figures at an almost aimless demonstration that had its beginnings in simple spring boredom and then went on to protest the Cambodian invasion, the Kent State killings (a week before) and the race riots in Augusta, Georgia. All 14 victims were black, which was the only fact the Negro community of Mississippi could relate to, and they reacted in a way that is nearly reflexive for them by now: They scheduled a memorial service on Lynch Street.

• • •

The morning plane from Chicago stops in Memphis, bellies over a pine forest onto the runway at Jackson and sets you down about noon. To get to the cabs in front of the airport, you pass a curio counter inside that sells little rebel flags, Minié-ball key chains and Confederate money. Usually, you can get a cab to the Lynch Street ghetto any time of day or night, but this week the only white men who would go near it after dark were the National Guard. The troops were patrolling every evening now because there had been fire bombings for the seven days since the shootings, and today, Jimmy Green's funeral day, Jackson was right on the edge.

We rode past a billboard that read, Doctors Agree: Moonshine Kills, and then the cabby found 1072--Stringer Hall--without seeing the number because of the crowd milling in front, and the small klatch of police across the street. The black men in front of the hall were standing, talking and taking the noon heat through the dark suits they'd hauled out of winter closets. The others for whom there had been memorial services in this hall--Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Martin Luther King, the little girls who died in the Birmingham church bombing--were also killed in the spring or summer, leaving these people to mourn in the heat. The women in the crowd wore loose dark print dresses, and the little girls were all in starched white Communion frocks. The service wasn't to begin for two hours, but already a few people were beginning to fill the seats inside the gymnasiumlike hall. Nothing would begin until James Green's body was brought from its cool place at the Collins Funeral Home to lie in the muggy still air at the foot of the flower-banked stage. That would be between one and one-thirty. And nothing official could begin until two o'clock, when the charter buses, full of Northern Senators, Congressmen and newsmen, would arrive. I walked west up Lynch, toward the campus and Alexander Hall, the girls' dorm that had taken the barrage of automatic-weapons fire a week before. The campus runs for about four blocks along both sides of Lynch, and its new buildings, concrete and glass, are in stark contrast to the hovels that surround it.

More police were arriving now. A squad car left three riot-helmeted men off at the corner of Lynch and Dalton. They had heavy-gauge shotguns in one hand and canvas bags full of deadly number-one shot ammunition in the other. A group of about 20 young blacks across the street in front of the Little City "Gro" watched them quietly. They call them corner boys in Jackson. They're not students and there is no work for them in or out of the ghetto. The night of the shooting, they joined the demonstration as easily and naturally as the groups of long-haired street people in Berkeley have done over the years. They are Lynch Street's fiercest residents, and risk little in an angry crowd scene; but now, as the police looked at them, they turned their eyes away. All black men in Jackson fear the police. And all Jackson police fear black men. The three officers cracked their shotguns and, without taking their eyes off the group, each fed two shells into the chambers, then they slung the stumpy guns, almost casually, onto their shoulders.

Local television news teams were arriving now, and they parked their equipment station wagons in what shade they could find, but it didn't make much difference. It was a Jackson-hot day, getting hotter, and as they undid their cameras and recorders, they took off their sports coats and loosened their ties. When they were ready, each team--cameraman in the middle, with his camera mounted to his shoulders, sound man hooked to him on the right, light man with a battery-pack belt on his left, and the director pointing the camera angles--started across the street toward the dorm.

"Shoot that group in front of the dorm," one director told his crew, sounding eerily like a cop. He was pointing to the 15 or so young black men who were holding vigil on the lawn in front of the building. They wore black arm bands and had stationed themselves here for a week on guard, saying that they wanted the bullet holes to stay, in memoriam. Behind them on the ground, four small canisters of flowers sat dying in the sun.

The team moved closer. These were some of the same men who had been here the night of the shooting and who had produced almost no usable film. The confusion of events, the attitude of the police, the hostility of the students, the darkness, had caught cameraman separated from light man--or so they said. Of two local TV stations, only one actually covered the shootings of May 14. And finally, the only film that came out of the moments of horror was a short underexposed clip, showing students diving and running just after the shooting began, and illuminated only by the explosion of police and highway-patrol gunfire. But now these men who had missed the act were working hard in its wake.

The camera rolled. The student guards, who had hung a cardboard sign that read, Our Colleges: Slaughterhouses to the nation, looked straight into the lens. It panned up over their heads, above the double doors with their glass shotgunned away, and up over the five stories of facade: shattered cement and windows and torn metal paneling (someone counted 400 holes; the shooting had lasted not quite 30 seconds). Some of the glass in the big windows was left where the automatic rifle and submachine-gun fire had cut cleanly through, and in other places only shattered, icy-looking shards were left. A light warm breeze blew through and flapped the shredded curtains.

A Mack-truck cab without its trailer passed routinely up the street. The driver, who looked like Floyd Patterson, forgot for a moment to drive and stalled his huge rig as he stared out the window at the torn dormitory. A cop moved up the street waving angrily at the driver, who fumbled to start the truck and then left hurriedly.

The director was on the lawn now, running his finger under the collar of his white shirt, asking one of the students, very politely if he and his team could go into the building to film. The student cocked his head back and said, "I ain't got nothing to say about it. I'm just here guarding evidence. But if you want to take a chance on Governor John Bell Williams arresting you, then you go right ahead in."

The newsmen removed one of the jerry-built plywood panels that had been set in place of the door glass, stooped through, stepped carefully over a large bloodstain and started up the stair well that had taken the shooting. The concrete-block walls inside were nicked and pocked where the bullets had ricocheted through. The stairs were covered with shattered glass and someone had taken a spray can of red paint and written "blood" in script letters in several places on the walls. When they reached the third-floor windows, they stopped and looked back out onto Lynch Street. "See if you can get the kids out front through the bullet holes," said the director. There was the crunching of glass underfoot as the cameraman stood tiptoe and then craned around, trying to catch the light through the spiderweb patterns in the glass that was left.

Down the street in front of Stringer Hall, motorcycles were beginning to arrive. All leaves and days off had been canceled for the Jackson police, and this Friday, after the week of fire bombings and shootings around Lynch Street, they expected to be the worst day and evening of all.

The main group of police, 20 of them by now, was gathered on the other side of the street and down 50 yards from the hall. Right across Lynch from them, on the porch of a wood-frame shack, an old black couple watched across their front-yard vegetable garden of beans, watermelons and corn, as the riot-helmeted cops bivouacked on the edge of what seemed to be an empty field of weeds. It was a cemetery; unvisited, uncared for, with no walls or fences and only a few headstones angling this way and that, barely visible through the tall grass. They had an orange pickup truck with water canisters in it pulled back under the crumbling white portals that had once been the entrance to the graveyard, and they stood, with tombstones at their backs, laughing and kicking at the dust.

By 1:15, a white hearse had delivered James Green's body, and Stringer Hall was full. More than 3000 black people had filed in, and now all the seats and standing room along the walls and in the balcony were filled. The two-page programs ("In memoriam James Green ...") were being used as fans, and they fluttered back and forth; the one big noisy air conditioner near the ceiling wasn't up to the day or the crowd. The center aisle in the auditorium had been left open and a steady line of mourners filed up toward the open bronze coffin in front of the stage. Just above, on the stage itself, a hundred or so chairs sat vacant, waiting, as was the crowd now, for the arrival of the dignitaries.

A few minutes before two o'clock, three air-conditioned Continental Trailways cruisers turned onto Lynch Street. The news cameramen had stationed themselves across from Alexander Hall, so that they could film the buses going by. When they pulled up in front of the dorm, the doors of the lead bus opened and Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie (he had chartered the jet and the buses with his own money, aides said) led a contingent from Congress including Charles Percy, Adam Clayton Powell, Claiborne Pell, Daniel Inouye, Philip Hart, Ralph Yarborough, Herold Hughes, Thomas Eagleton, John Anderson, Robert Eckardt, John Conyers, Charles Diggs, Abner Mikva, William Moorehead, Henry Reuss, Sam Steiger, former ambassador Averell Harriman and others into the hall. And the newsmen they had brought followed them: from Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Metromedia, A. P. and some columnists.

Once off the air-conditioned buses, there was some adjusting of coats and ties while they wandered a moment near the students in front of the dorm. A cardboard sign on a small Cyclone fence near the sidewalk read: One Picture is worth a thousand words, but the Northern newsmen in the Edwardian suits and wire-rimmed glasses were writing frantically anyway, scribbling notes on a story that was the same, except for the details and the emotional geography, as the one they'd filed two weeks before from Kent State, Ohio. Notes taken and film rolled, the party moved off toward the hall.

The police near the entrance were impassive as the Senators and Congressmen filed in. Muskie had not called Governor Williams to say they were coming and, although they said they had notified Mississippi Senators James Eastland and John Stennis as a courtesy before leaving Washington, it was plain that except for the reception they got from the smiling and frightened black faces in the hall, their presence made Jackson nervous. It was the second time in six months that Muskie had brought a planeload of Northern outrage south. The first had been in January 1970, for hearings in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille. The collective memory of white Jackson (reflected this day in an editorial cartoon in the Jackson Daily News) stretches back, on such occasions, to the Civil War, when Federal troops occupied the city four times and raped it so completely that it was nicknamed Chimneyville. It mattered little that Charles Evers, the black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, had invited Muskie to come and grieve publicly for two black students who had received much less attention than the Kent State victims. The official Washington party was less than officially welcome in Jackson.

As they settled into their seats on the stage, they accounted for most of the white faces in the hall. The service began with a hymn. James Green's family sat in the first row and, through the singing, a gaggle of still and film photographers squatted and kneeled in front of them, waiting for an expression that would signal the grieving mood of this Lynch Street gathering to a thousand wire-service subscribers and TV stations across the country.

Stationary movie cameras had been set up near the front on tables and their big lights added heat to the room as they panned from the young faces of the Mount Nebo choir singing Nearer My God to Thee, across the famous faces on the stage, then down to the young attendants who were quietly closing the 17-year-old student's casket.

Green had been a student at Jim Hill High School. On his way home from an afterschool job, he had crossed the Jackson campus and been curious about the noisy crowd in front of Alexander Hall. The National Guard was deployed on the campus perimeter, and state and city police had gone in to disperse the crowd. Green was across the street from the dorm, behind the firing line, when the shooting started. There had been no warning and no tear gas. The police said they began firing when they heard a shot (or a bottle dropped from an upper floor); later, the justifying logic included reports that obscene yells had been directed at police. When it was over, the police walked through the wounded and the frightened and the two dead to pick up their expended cartridges. That done, they called for ambulances.

Inspector Lloyd Jones, the ranking highway-patrol officer on the scene, radioed that two students were "10-7" (out of service). The rest of his radio chatter was less cryptic.

"Got one more female shot here--think it's serious."

"A total of six injured there?"

"No, we got two more males, they say. ...

"I think there are about three more nigger males over there, one of 'em shot in the arm, one of 'em shot in the leg, and one of 'em somewhere else. They ain't hurt all that bad. Them gals, it was two nigger gals, two more nigger gals from over there shot in the arm, I believe. One of 'em is over there in the east end. I told ... there two nigger (continued on page 180)Funeral in Jackson(continued from page 152) females and three males we just discovered, that's a total of ten. ... Here's another one, let me see, what is this?"

James Green had been hit in the liver, lung and heart and died before he reached the hospital. The other dead man, Phillip Gibbs, was a student at Jackson State, married, with one child, and he had been buried earlier that week in a quiet ceremony, with only his family by the grave.

Muskie rose during the singing, stepped down from the stage, walked over to the family and bent to console the dead boy's mother. The cameramen jostled each other to get the picture and, strangely, their bustling and tripping and talking seemed to bother no one. Muskie returned slowly to the stage, and his eyes were moist.

Everyone who spoke during the service was black. And they spoke only to the fact that James Green was black. Nobody mentioned Kent State, or student unrest, or the war in Indochina. A telegram of condolence from President Nixon was read and Charles Evers took the podium. His slain brother, Medgar, had kept offices in Stringer Hall, and now Charles said, "You've seen me here five times in the last ten years. ... How long, O Lord, how long will our white brothers continue to destroy us? ... It has to stop now." Then he asked that the young blacks not leave Jackson, that they stay and help elect some people "who will get John Bell Williams and his kind out of the Statehouse." When he sat down, there was some clapping, but he signaled the crowd as if to say: No, not here, not now.

An old black preacher got up to deliver the sermon, which he called "A Common-sense View of Death." He looked at the family while he spoke:

"You know, sometimes I think about how little we know anymore about death and rebirth. When one of our brothers, when one of our children is taken from us, all we can think about is our loss. We're selfish, aren't we? We're thinking about ourselves. We're thinking how much we'd like to see that person again. But why are we not thinking about them? ... Hasn't Jesus made it plain? Didn't he say it when he gave his life on the cross for you, and for me; don't we know anymore in this age of scientific wonders that when we lose someone we haven't lost them at all, that they are reborn in his glory? Didn't even ancient people know, who didn't have any of our great scientific knowledge, that when a brother passed on, it was a great day in heaven? ..."

As the sermon went on, the crying became open and sobbed "Amens" were rising from here and there. The microphone screamed and then went off and then came back on and the preacher talked through it all.

"And to James's mother I say, involve yourself in the troubles of others. Give yourself at this time. Put your grief right out of your mind by doing God's work among your neighbors. ..." Newsmen took the half hour he spoke to relax, and check their equipment, and whisper to each other. To the black community in the hall, the sermon was comfortable and familiar. And from close to the apron of the stage, if you looked up toward the catwalks among the ropes and sandbags a young black man in a dashiki sat perched on a railing, head bowed, hands together, not moving, looking very much like a statue cast there to mourn forever. When the preacher sat down, nearly all the women and some of the men were weeping.

The principal of Jim Hill High School spoke, and so did the black girl who was president of the student council. "We'll miss you, James," she said, and looked down at the coffin.

Then a classmate and friend of Green's, Tyronne McCall, stepped to the stage apron to sing a solo. He had a rich baritone voice, strong and good except for a tremble in it. A minute after he began, he collapsed behind the podium in tears. A wailing swept the hall as he was helped to his seat. One of the news cameramen began to film and his director signaled him quickly to stop.

The choir began to sing again, and six young pallbearers came forward to roll the casket through the crowd out onto Lynch Street, where the hearse waited next to the three big buses that nearly filled the road.

The crowd followed the boy, slowly, through the double doors and out into the now hotter afternoon sun. After shaking a few hands, the official party made its way offstage, looking for a side door. After one wrong turn, the large group, with Muskie walking at its point, stepped out the rear of the hall into a well-kept shantytown. There were two blocks to walk, on Cleary Street and St. Louis Avenue, two corners to turn before they would be back on Lynch. No one could have anticipated this, and there was a slight hesitation as the group tried to figure out where they were.

Muskie, with a black aide walking next to him, set a quick, nervous pace for the 60 or so officials behind him. The front yards they were passing now were strewn with rusted metal garden furniture, sleeping dogs and old auto seats and parts. The porch people were out: old black faces and young children, smiling at this man they'd seen on television. Muskie and his aide were smiling, and nodding, and the aide was talking like a ventriloquist out of the corner of his smile, "I'm sorry, Senator, we tried to pull the buses around here but there just isn't room."

Muskie was waving and smiling, "It's all right," he said as he strode along, unaware of how fast he had begun to walk. "Slow your pace, Senator," said the aide in a hushed voice, "slower." They turned the first corner, and an old man began to make his way slowly and painfully off his porch, as if he wanted to shake the Senator's hand. Muskie was still moving quickly, so that he waved instead and smiled nervously. As the group neared Lynch, a rooster, frightened and confused, ran halfway into the street, crowed nearly at the Senator's feet and then scrambled back toward the front yard from which it had come.

In front of the hall now, and moving toward the buses, they were stopped by some of the mourners who were waiting on Lynch for the procession to form. Two students approached Muskie and asked him if he would help them get justice, please. Newsmen with cameras and notebooks crowded around to hear the Senator tell the boys that he would certainly be looking into both sides of the problem, and then the aide told the students that the Senator really did have a plane to catch. Muskie then climbed onto the lead bus and watched through tinted windows as the rest of the Washington party began climbing aboard. The same two students stopped Adam Clayton Powell, who took their brief entreaty with ease, telling them that he had made a career out of helping black people and then he asked them to give their names to his aide (a white man).

Then, as quickly as they had come, the buses with the dignitaries and the captive press corps moved east down Lynch Street, toward the airport and their chartered plane. The hearse began moving west on Lynch, and the 3000 black people formed a march to move after it. The hearse pulled off slowly until the bunched mourners stretched in a line of march a half mile long. The police had cordoned off the streets and were stationed all along the distance to the graveyard. Some of them stood casually, and others menacingly in pairs and in groups, all with riot guns.

As the procession passed Alexander Hall, the 20 students standing on the lawn at the base of the bullet-torn stair well raised the black-power salute. The marchers--women, little children, businessmen, students--returned the signal as they went by. It was incredibly quiet and for the first time I was aware that with the departure of the Muskie buses, nearly all the white faces had gone. There were a few news cameramen left, photographing the salute as foreground for the dorm again, and except for them a single long-hair with a Red Cross bag was the only other white man I could spot. (Later at the gravesite I saw three middle-aged white couples, a half-dozen long-hairs, and finally--including my own white face--I counted 17 white people.)

Quietly down Lynch, past the student union on the right, police along the curbs in unmarked cars, by the science building on the left, and Stewart Hall (there'd been a fire set in the street here on the night of the 14th). Then left onto Valley Street where the sidewalks disappeared and were replaced by weedy parking strips. The asphalt was soft underfoot, and the porches were filled with families. Past Bailey's Grill, and the New Deal Super with empty wooden crates and watermelons stacked against its side. More houses, families staring, little children playing near the edge of the march, the community shoe store (a converted frame house), and one cop on a motorcycle passing up and down the length of the march drowning out the sound of birds. On by the Delta Cotton Oil and Fertilizer plant (a hot, heavy smell), then a Purina plant with its checkerboard water tower and across the railroad tracks that fed gondola cars to both plants. Now a short cut through the parking lot of the Lewis Dairy Bar, through a gas station and onto Hill Street; a short jog onto Isable Street and a grassy area opened before the march. There were no fences, and the graveyard might have been a park or a school playground. Directly across the street are Jim Hill High School and Emmalee Isable Elementary. Beyond this, the outer edge of the city, open fields and then woods. The mourners stepped carefully around the old grave mounds, with their plastic marigold, and chrysanthemum and iris offerings, toward the canopy and the open grave on the far side of the cemetery.

The family and 50 or so others crushed under the tent for the short service. The rest of the crowd stood scattered across the grass, listening to the country silence in place of the words of burial. When the fresh red Mississippi dirt had been piled into the grave, the canopy was removed, so that the cameramen would have the sunlight to film the laying on of the flowered wreaths. Then as the newsmen piled their gear into their station wagons to leave, the mourners began to drift out of the graveyard and back along the route they had come, toward Stringer Hall and their cars.

I needed a ride downtown. It was almost five o'clock, the National Guard would be patrolling soon, and there'd be no taxis in the ghetto. I approached one of the white long-hairs. He wore a black arm band with the word KUDZU on it, and when I asked, he said that it was Jackson's underground newspaper. (Later, in the paper's cluttered second-story offices downtown, I saw a copy of the current issue. The entire front page was a picture of the shattered dorm, and inside there were eyewitness accounts of the shooting, the demonstration, along with articles on how to grow pot and which cops to watch out for in Hinds and Rankin counties. "Lloyd 'Goon' Jones" a caption read under a picture of the biggest cop I'd ever seen. As underground papers go, it was tough and handsome.) I told him I thought it was hairy to be publishing an underground newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi.

He offered me a ride downtown and we started the walk back toward his car, which was parked on campus. On the way he told me the rumors that always grow out of a week like Jackson had been through. He named some of the state police who'd been involved in the "massacre" and recited the grapevine dossier of the brutalities they were said to have perpetrated on young black and white people over the years. He said that all the large-gauge shotgun shells in Jackson had been sold out to frightened citizens early in the week, and that Governor Williams had 1300 National Guardsmen on stand-by alert and another 10,000 he could call, and that he expected there could be more trouble, perhaps tonight. He said also that the hip community in Jackson was very transient, and that most of the kids with long hair eventually moved to New Orleans or Texas or California. He said he'd been in Jackson six years and that six years was a long time. He said that kudzu was a vine that grew wild all over the South. He told me that in the previous week's bombings and burnings several white-owned stores in the ghetto had been destroyed, that police on night patrol routinely shot up black stores. As we passed a laundromat with bullet holes in the window, he asked a man inside if it was black-owned. When the answer was yes, he took out his camera, photographed the three shatter marks and said that he was sure these were police bullets.

We rode downtown in an old Peugeot with a young black boy who he introduced as one of his best vendors. A normal issue of the paper sells barely enough to make printing costs, but this issue was selling very well, said the young salesman, and a lot of white people were buying it.

When I asked where he got the balls to publish a tough underground paper in Jackson he told me, "Oh well, they harass us, the police and some of the locals. Beat us up, take our papers, that kind of thing, but really there are some papers in Texas that have had a much harder time than we have. They haven't shot us up or anything. It's not so bad." And, as his words seemed to be trying to hold out a kind of humanity for the people of Jackson, it occurred to me that the Los Angeles Free Press had been bombed more than once.

I left their office and turned the corner onto Capitol Street. At the east end stands the simple and imposing Old Capitol Building, now a museum, built in 1833 by slave labor. It was five o'clock and the temperature sign above a bank read 90 degrees. There was almost no traffic in the street and the sidewalk carried only shopkeepers on their way home for the day.

Two young white long-hairs, each with an armload of Kudzu, stood on the corner of Capitol and North Lamar. I smiled as I passed, and showed them that I had a copy. They said "Right on!" and gave me the peace sign. The traffic light at the corner was red for the traffic on Capitol and the single car waiting at it was a cherry-colored 1970 Plymouth Duster. It had its rear end hiked up and a wide yellow racing stripe that ran up the driver's side of the hood, over the roof and down the trunk. The mufflers kept it loud even when it was standing still. There were three teenagers inside listening to the Theme from "Midnight Cowboy," by Ferrante and Teicher, and the girl in the passenger seat leaned her head out the open window and said "Pssssst!" as loud as she could in the direction of the paper sellers. One of them ran over to the car, handed her a paper, took a quarter, and she and her friends (another girl with teased hair and a boy with short slick hair driving) pulled slowly and noisily away.

A block down, I passed the governor's mansion. It sits on a square block in the center of the city; it's a park most of the time. But today, as for the past week, pairs of state patrolmen sat in folding chairs on the rolling lawns that sloped to the sidewalk. There were 20 of them in all, with riot shotguns across their laps, sitting under the shade of old oak, huckleberry and pecan trees. They watched me as I passed.

As I reached the far corner of the block, I saw the hopped-up Plymouth again, stopped at a red light, waiting to make the right turn onto Capitol. When the light changed this time, the young driver pulled slowly along in the right-hand lane as the girl who had bought a Kudzu held the front page at arm's length out of the window. The guards watched quietly as the full-page picture of the dorm's shattered glass and devastated concrete passed with the car. And then the straight kids were gone.

I walked the rest of the way to the Old Capitol Building. I was nearly at its steps when a National Guard jeep, with four laughing soldiers on it, passed west, toward Lynch Street.

• • •

Now it's over a year since James Green was buried. Nine months after the shooting, in winter, I went back to Jackson, to check carefully the story I'd written then, and what might have changed since.

The President's Commission on Campus Unrest was in town August 11-13. The commission took testimony from those who had been shot at and from those who did the shooting, from city officials and college administrators. Then they published a report that put the brutally confused evening together on paper. And gently, they made some recommendations.

Jackson in the winter looks only a little different from the summer there. The air is cool but has no bite to it. Again I was surprised to feel that, despite its size (it's Mississippi's largest city), it's a quiet town. Some of the trees are deciduous and stand bare this time of year, but there are enough evergreens in the fields and in town, so that the winter landscape doesn't quite have the stripped look that it does in the North.

You can't drive through Jackson State on Lynch Street anymore. They've closed it off with Cyclone fences at Dalton and Prentiss streets (approximately where the National Guard closed it off in May 1970). Even before the fences, it was a front line. Spring trouble on campus has always started here when it got too hot to study and when raiding whites would speed past Alexander Hall, laughing and cursing. Now the pavement in front of the girls' dormitory is a parking lot, where students sit in their cars between classes to talk and smoke. The campus is very quiet.

The windows and metal paneling in the dorm's stair well have been replaced, and young girls move routinely up and down the stairs on their way to classes. The cement façade that the black guard wanted to bear the bullet marks of May 1970 in memoriam is still unpatched. Machine-gun tracks still run from the ground to the roof.

The governor's mansion on Capitol Street has a wall around it now. While I was there, workmen were just finishing the 12-foot-high barricade. I asked one of the workers, a black man who was scraping the efflorescence from the freshly set bricks, what he thought. "They're going to paint it white," he said, "try and make it look nice, ya know. But it ain't gonna work. There's no way to make it look anything it ain't."

Little brick guardhouses flank the entrances to the curving driveway, and huge iron gates were waiting to be set in place. Along Capitol Street the brick is interrupted by heavy iron bars and along here the wall sits on the exposed roots of the lovely big trees that will surely die because of the construction.

The people don't like it much: The Southern sense of space and grace has been offended. The wall cost around $133,000 and the citizens have nicknamed the grand old mansion Fort Williams.

City police chief Rayfield was fired after the commission investigations. Highway patrol inspector Lloyd Jones, however, still rides his beat in Hinds and Rankin counties.

And there is a marble headstone on James Green's grave now. It's simple, two-feet high and it bears his mother's words:

James E. Green

Nov. 19 1952

May 14 1970

My Love Goes With You

And My Soul Awaits To Join You.

The marker cost about $150 and the words on it were hand cut, with great care, by a 29-year-old stonecutter named Larry Parker, who is white and who seemed pleased that anyone had noticed his work.