The dormitory still carries the evidence. Alexander Residence Hall at Jackson State University is a women’s dormitory in Jackson, Mississippi, and its bricks still bear marks from the night of May 15, 1970, when Mississippi Highway Patrol officers fired 460 rounds toward a crowd of students. Two young men died: Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a 21-year-old Jackson State junior, and James Earl Green, a 17-year-old senior at Jim Hill High School who was watching from nearby. This month the building became a preservation project with federal money behind it.
The National Park Service has awarded $21.8 million in African American Civil Rights Preservation and History Grants to 54 projects across the country, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported on Wednesday, October 28. Jackson State received two of the grants, $750,000 each, one for Alexander Residence Hall and one for Stringer Grand Lodge. No other college or university in the round received two.
What the money protects at Jackson State
James “Lap” Baker, who witnessed the 1970 shooting, returns to campus for the annual commemoration at Gibbs-Green Plaza, named for the two men killed. “History has the proneness to repeat itself, and we have to be very careful not to forget,” Baker said at the commemoration. Dr. Evelyn J. Leggette, the university’s provost, put the teaching obligation plainly: “This is important to us. This is covered in many of our classes. We are dedicated to talking to our students about this tragedy.”
The Park Service splits this grant program in two. Preservation grants pay for repair work on historic properties. History grants pay for research, documentation and interpretation. The program is competitive, and it asks for no matching money from the grantee, a term that matters for institutions and congregations holding irreplaceable buildings on modest budgets. The money itself comes from the Historic Preservation Fund, which the Park Service says is funded by federal offshore oil and gas lease revenue rather than tax dollars and has invested more than $2 billion in communities since the early 1970s.
Three other campuses in the round
Four of the 54 grants went to colleges and universities, and together they total $2,981,200. Wiley University in Marshall, Texas, received $750,000 to rehabilitate the President’s Home on its campus. Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, received $731,200 to stabilize and rehabilitate the Chestertown Colonial Custom House. The remaining 50 grants went to the kinds of places that hold the movement’s geography: churches, museums, lodges and neighborhoods whose names rarely lead a funding announcement.
The Park Service has not published a project-by-project schedule for the work, and none is asserted here. What the award list already shows is where the federal preservation dollar is pointed this year: at buildings that were standing when the history happened, including one dormitory in Jackson whose bricks make the argument without a plaque.
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