‘Southern University Massacre’ victims honored by university
10th April 2017 · 0 Comments
More than four decades after Southern University-Baton Rouge undergraduate students Denver Smith and Leonard Brown were fatally shot by an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy during a 1972 campus protest, the historically Black public university will honor the two by awarding them posthumous degrees.
The Southern University System’s academic affairs committee voted unanimously on March 31 to honor the 20-year-olds for whom the campus’ student union is named.
Smith and Brown were slain during a student protest on Nov. 16, 1972 after then Gov. Edwin Edwards dispatched law enforcement officers to the campus to quell the latest in a series of protests aimed at making the administration more responsive to the needs of the student body.
After a state and two federal probes of the fatal shooting, the students’ deaths remain unsolved and no one has been charged in the incident. Nola.com reported that the shot came from a small group of deputies and that the shooter has never been identified.
Gov. Edwards reportedly blamed the fatal shooting on the students, who he said initiated the action that led to the deaths of Smith and Brown.
The Baton Rouge campus was closed for two months in the wake of the fatal shootings.
Three years after the deaths of Smith and Brown, Southern University President Jesse Stone criticized investigators for failing to identify the deputy or deputies who fired the fatal shots since the incident took place “in broad daylight” and was reportedly filmed.
The Southern University System’s decision to honor Leonard Brown and Denver Smith comes as Baton Rouge residents await the outcome of a federal investigation of the fatal, officer-involved shooting of 37-year-old Alton Sterling on July 5, 2015, which led to a series of major protests in Baton Rouge and across the nation and the fatal shooting of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge.
The last time Ada Smith spoke with her brother Denver Smith, he was in the library getting the bugs out of his computer program, she told The Southern Digest on the 30th anniversary of her brother’s tragic slaying, which many still refer to as the Southern University Massacre.
“He was a quiet natured person,” Ada Smith recalled. “He was never the type to start any commotion. That was more of my style.
“Denver and Leonard didn’t give their life, it was taken away from them,” Smith added.
Josephine Jones, Smith’s sister, told The Southern Digest in 2002 that she can still remember law enforcement officials throwing tear gas into the group of students.”
“We broke cigarettes in half and stuck them in our nose so that we could filter out the harmful fumes,” Jones said.
Jones, a sophomore at that time, had no idea that her brother had been killed.
“I had a feeling that my roommates knew but they didn’t tell me,” she said. “I found out from the news and I went ballistic.”
However, the family of Leonard Brown didn’t find out that he was killed until two days after the incident.
“We called everybody to find out if Doug (Brown) was alright,” Willie Jenkins, Brown’s brother, told The Southern Digest. “We called his girlfriend and we even checked the jails.”
According to Jenkins, as the Brown family traveled from Gilbert to Baton Rouge via Scenic High-way, they stopped a sheriff officer and asked him whether he knew anything about their loved one.
He led them to the morgue of Earl K. Long Hospital.
“All I saw was Doug’s feet and I knew that he was my brother,” said Jenkins.
Jenkins asked the media not to release Brown’s name for a few hours so that he could tell his mother the tragic news.
Nearly 45 years later, no one has been identified as the shooter, prosecuted or convicted in the case.
The official report by State Attorney General William Gust determined that the shots came from a sheriff’s deputy but it couldn’t prove which deputy fired the shot.
Jenkins said his family tried to file several lawsuits but none were successful.
“We didn’t get help from Netterville (S.U. president in 1972) or Governor (Edwin) Edwards,” said Jenkins. “No lawyers would talk to us and the ones who did were ran out of town.”
The student union was renamed the Smith-Brown Memorial Union in February 1973.
Although the old Administration Building was destroyed in a fire in 1991, a memorial stone was placed on campus near the spot (left of the entrance to the Southern University Museum of Arts) where the students were shot.
This article originally published in the April 10, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
