Reparative justice for students killed on the Southern University Campus: Too little, too late?
14th November 2022 · 0 Comments
During the Black Power Movement of the 1970s, students wore large Afros, military green jackets, and bell bottoms and, on campuses, demanded to be heard.
Fifty years ago, Denver Smith and Leonard “Doug” Brown, both 20 years old, were murdered on the campus of Southern University in Baton Rouge (SUBR) during a student boycott and protest led by Students United.
Fifty years later, no one has been held accountable or responsible for killing these students.
On November 16, 2022, a commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of their untimely and unnecessary deaths will be held at the Old State Capitol, 100 North Boulevard, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The program, “A Cold Case Investigation: Episode 50,” is hosted by Southern University Law Professor Angela A. Bell, her Civil Rights and Law & Racism students, and the Louisiana State NAACP Conference led by President Michael McClanahan.
According to the hosts, the program is both a restorative and transitional justice effort that seeks to correct the false narrative surrounding the event. The program aims to promote racial healing, truth-telling, narrative change, and First Amendment education and awareness.
The cold case investigation-themed program will examine the circumstances that led to the tragedy and explore the social and cultural contexts which led East Baton Rouge sheriff deputies and the Louisiana State Police to converge on the campus, killing Smith and Brown in the process.
Student leaders from 1972 will speak about their attempts to apply the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution to Black students.
The event includes presentations of facts about the case uncovered by LSU’s Manship School student journalists involved in the LSU Cold Case Project (CCP), which investigates unsolved killings from the civil rights era.
The CCP students interviewed the victims’ families, student protest leaders, and law enforcement officials. They reviewed 2,600 pages of the FBI’s investigation documents that show agents focused on a few deputies but could not prove who fired the fatal shot. The students have published a four-part series on the case.
In the FBI report, the state police and sheriff pointed fingers at each other. Neither law enforcement agency took responsibility for the deaths, and no one was held accountable. Most hurtful was authorities blaming the students and making excuses for the police. The late Governor Edwin Edwards said the shooting was accidental and that the police were “excited’ during the event. The protesting students were called dissidents, and the incident was characterized as a ‘violent confrontation.”
A video of the event shows the opposite. Students were gathered peacefully but ran when a tear gas canister was thrown by police. Smith and Brown were shot down as they ran into the crowd of students. In a pamphlet entitled “Support Our Struggle” (SOS), Students United laid out a timeline of the events, their actions, proposals, and why they boycotted.
The most devastating aspect of the homicides of these young Black men is that they weren’t involved in the Students United group’s organizing efforts to boycott classes, request seats at the table, and have a voice in the university’s decision-making.
Smith and Brown did not participate in the students’ peaceful negotiations with university administrators, the state’s board of education, or the late Governor Edwin Edwards. They were innocent bystanders who became martyrs in the movement for educational justice on Southern University’s Baton Rouge and New Orleans campuses.
By November 16, 1972, the boycott had been going on for at least a month. Throughout the campus protests, students’ requests to have a say in their education and institutional affairs fell on deaf ears.
SUBR President George Leon Netterville Jr. felt he needed the state police and sheriff’s deputies on campus to keep the students from taking over the administration building. Students United leadership denied any attempt to take over the administration building in Baton Rouge, although students at SUNO did.
The students were not violent but peaceful and handled negotiations with authorities professionally and civilly.
None who hasn’t experienced the unjustified murder of a family member could even begin to know the depth of angst, mourning, trauma, and sadness experienced by those left behind.
Denver Smith and Leonard Brown’s family members and Students United leaders must harbor a perpetual desire for accountability. Two years earlier, two students on the Jackson State College campus were killed by police. In that incident, students allegedly threw rocks at whites driving by the historically Black university campus.
Black people had every right to be angry in the 60s and 70s. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were assassinated during these decades. Protests over the right to vote erupted. Dogs and fire hoses wielded by whites firefighters and police were set against Blacks peacefully marching for voting rights.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was challenging de facto segregation and doing sit-ins and touring the south, which led to some being beaten and some killed by vicious Ku Klux Klansmen and police for exercising their constitutional rights.
A half-century ago, Black youth on campuses demanded respect and the right to have a say in their education. They fought and bled for those rights. As such, the tragic deaths of Smith and Brown were not in vain. Netterville was forced out as SUBR president in 1972. However, student leaders who organized the boycott were banned from the campus.
There has been no reparative justice for Brown and Smith or the student organizers. Hopefully, there will be not only a public apology and honorary degrees presented at the November 16 event but a renewed commitment to find Smith’s and Brown’s killers and bring them to justice.
This article originally published in the November 14, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
