Chronicle 32: "Never Forgotten: The Jackson State Shootings"

This episode is rated a 5 (on my Serious Crime Scale). Eleven days after the shootings at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard, Jackson State College (which is now Jackson State University) in Jackson, Mississippi, faced a similar tragedy, where two young people were killed by Jackson police officers and Mississippi state troopers. The two campus shootings by America’s own were so close together in time, and circumstances appeared so similar (at least in the public eye, that is), that the headline of an editorial piece written for the Indiana Daily Student literally crossed out the words “Kent State” and replaced them with “Jackson State”; and an article in TIME magazine referred to the shootings at Jackson State as “Kent State the II.” But, you see, even though these two events seem strikingly similar on the surface, the driving forces and underlying reasoning of the two tragedies were very, very different.