The movement collapsed.
What made Kent State so significant when there had been so much violence over the previous decade? It was white college students that time.
The Orangeburg Massacre is rarely mentioned.
While most people know that students were killed at Kent State in 1970, very few know about the murder of students at Jackson State (1970) and even less about South Carolina State College in Orangeburg (1968).
On Feb. 8, 1968, 28 students were injured and three were killed — most shot in the back by the state police while involved in a peaceful protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina. One of the by-standers, Cleveland Sellers, was arrested for inciting a riot and sentenced to a year in prison. Later serving as president of Voorhees College, he was the only person to do time.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/orangeburg-massacre/Nor do we hear much about the Jackson State Killings.
On May 15, 1970, the police opened fire shortly after midnight on students (and passersby) in a May 14 protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Twelve students were wounded and two (21-year-old law student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and 17-year-old high school student James Earl Green) were killed.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jackson-state-killings/The assassinations of Black Panther Party members deserve more attention.
On Dec. 4, 1969, Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, were shot to death by 14 police officers as they lay sleeping in their Chicago apartment.
While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant, evidence later emerged that the FBI (as part of COINTELPRO), the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/black-panther-party-assassinated/Dozens of people were killed by police and the National Guard in Detroit in 1967 and the pattern was repeated in many cities across the country.
During the 1967 Detroit Uprising, civilians, civil servants, and even children and teenagers lost their lives due to the ever-heightening fear and violence that ensued during those dark days in July. The official total is 43 dead, a number produced by the Detroit Police Department's Homicide Bureau and accepted by the city's mainstream newspapers. Our additional research in African American media sources and government documents resulted in a death toll of 47, as found on this page and in the interactive map on the previous page, which is probably still an undercount.
https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/deathsMost Americans are aware of the urban rebellions of the 1960s that exploded in places like Harlem, Newark, Watts, and Detroit. Such uprisings are widely assumed to have peaked in the days and weeks following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. I
n America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, Elizabeth Hinton corrects this misconception. A professor of history and African-American studies at Yale, Hinton not only documents the rebellions that continued to proliferate with astonishing frequency and bloodshed between 1968 and 1972 — often in smaller cities that flew beneath the radar of the national media — but also reveals how fundamental this forgotten “crucible period of rebellion” was in defining “freedom struggles, state repression, and violence in Black urban America down into our own time.”
Hinton persuasively argues that these rebellions — 1,949 of them in three and a half years, resulting in forty thousand arrests, twenty thousand injuries, and at least 220 deaths — were nearly always precipitated by an unwarranted act of police overreach against Black people who were simply pursuing their everyday lives or committing minor infractions (violating a park curfew, for instance). Victims’ responses would be met with outsize force from the police (often aided by white townspeople), and a rebellion would escalate from there in a vicious, all-too-predictable cycle of violence that could sometimes persist for years.
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/untold-history-protest-and-police-violence
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