Phillip Gibbs, James Green, and the colors of Resistance.

Those of us who know Vietnam protest history at all know about the white kids murdered by the Ohio National Guard while protesting  at Kent State in 1970. Look again at all our history books: the anti-war movement is usually given a righteous young white face - despite the fact that the black community was in overwhelming opposition to the expanding  war, since their young men made up most of the US Army's front line fodder. In fact, Martin Luther King was beginning to vociferously challenge both the racism of the war and US imperialism when he was assassinated two years earlier.

So, today the story is about the kids killed in Mississippi at Jackson State College during their own uprisings just ten days after Kent State - the kids that even our leftier history teachers often forget to mention. They were 21-year old Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, and 17-year old high school senior James Earl Green. I was going to post the Democracy Now transcript on it - which isn't bad - but you'll have to Google if that's what you want. Here's the link to Jackson State College's Gibbs-Green Memorial page instead. Like the pages missing from our history books - the whole chapters left out - this school's page was strangely hard to find.