Eleven days later, (white) employees of the Jackson, Miss., police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on a protest outside a women's dormitory at historically black Jackson State College (now University).

In the spring of 1961, when students from Tougaloo College were arrested for attempting to desegregate the Jackson library, as many as 800 Jackson State students held a rally on campus, and many students followed up with a boycott of classes and an attempt to march downtown that was viciously halted by the police.

As a state school, too, Jackson State was covered by a law prohibiting student chapters of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP on the campus.

In turn, students at Jackson State had been children during the early years of the civil rights movement and were aware of the countless African Americans slain in Mississippi in recent years, if sometimes for their activism, in other cases for an unwillingness to accept “their place” in the economic, political or social spheres.

That said, students did assert themselves, if not as broadly or visibly as the protest movements that had grown among both black and white students over the course of decades at Kent State University, a history well documented in Thomas M. Grace’s splendid book, Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties.