The state’s apology: 50 years too late?
21st November 2022 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
Surviving members of students united last Wednesday and gathered at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of a life-changing day, November 16, 1972, on Southern University’s Baton Rouge campus. On that tragic day, law enforcement officers gunned down students Denver Smith and Leonard Brown, 20.
The event entitled “Cold Case: Episode 50” was organized by SUBR Law Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell, her Civil Rights and Law & Racism students, and NAACP State Conference President Michael McClanahan.
The purpose of the commemoration was to explore the social context of the month-long student boycott and campus uprising and to promote racial healing, truth-telling, narrative change, and First Amendment education and awareness.
For the past eight months, Professor Bell and her students have worked with Fred Jones Greer Jr., Endowed Chair at LSU’s Manship School’s experiential journalism curriculum, and his students who are part of LSU’s Cold Case Project (CCP), which investigates unsolved killings from the civil rights era. The CCP interviewed the families of the victims, student protest leaders, and law-enforcement officials and reviewed 2,600 pages of files from the FBI investigation.
Professor Bell credits author Keith Medley’s impassionate plea in 2011, on the 39th Anniversary of the campus tragedy, to get justice for Denver Smith and Leonard Brown. ‘I didn’t know the two people who came to my office with Medley, but I learned later they were Fred Prejean and Rickey Hill,” Bell told the audience. She called the Southern students “revolutionaries” and “bold patriots.”
Bell set the social context and legal cases that preceded the November 16 event. “The Garner case in 1951, Lombard v State of Louisiana, and Cox v Louisiana all centered around violating students’ First Amendment rights. She spoke about FBJ Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro Surveillance program and the formation of Louisiana’s Sovereignty Commission to retain segregation.
Bell then gave a timeline of Students United’s efforts to work with the administration to create positive change. In the end, students were punished. Two were killed for exercising their First Amendment rights, and their 14th Amendment rights were violated.
At the event, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, surrounded by students who participated in and/or organized the student boycott and the families of the slain students, Gov. Edwards signed a formal apology for the unjust killings of Smith and Brown.
“Fifty years after the senseless tragedy of November 16, 1972, when officers wielding the power and authority of the state of Louisiana unjustly killed Leonard Brown and Denver Smith, it is time to try to make amends,” said Gov. Edwards.
“In those dark times, Louisiana failed to uphold its highest ideals. And in the aftermath of that senseless tragedy, the harm to our State and to the Southern University community was exacerbated by the punishment of those students who endeavored to stand up against the unjust treatment of the Black citizens of our State. It is only right and just for the State of Louisiana to make amends to those who were victims of injustices perpetrated by the State,” Edwards said in a statement on the governor’s website.
“On the morning of November 16, 1972, after weeks of ongoing protests, students at Southern University and A&M College bravely and peacefully gathered in Baton Rouge to protest the disparity of educational opportunities in Louisiana. That morning, Leonard Brown and Denver Smith, both just twenty years old, were senselessly and unjustly killed when a law enforcement officer, who was never identified or prosecuted, fired into a crowd of students fleeing from tear gas. In the aftermath, the Louisiana State Board of Education unjustly and unduly punished nine student leaders involved in that protest, who comprised the leadership of Students United at Southern University. Although many of them went on to achieve professional success, they still suffer from the trauma of what happened. This formal apology seeks to rectify the historic injustice that was perpetrated that day.”
“For these reasons. the State of Louisiana offers today its Amende Honorahle to the families of Leonard Brown and Denver Smith and all those who hold their memory dear. and to Students United and Louis J. Anthony, Charlene Hardnett. Frederick Prejean. Donald Mills. Herget Harris. Paul Shivers. Willie T. Henderson, Ricky Hill, and Nathaniel Howard. their families and all those who keep their memory, and to the community of Southern University.”
On this day, we recognize the lost potential and promise of the lives of Leonard Brown and Denver Smith, who were so unjustly taken from their community and families at such a young age, as well as those nine leaders of Students United who were unfairly punished for their activism in the struggle for justice.
Several other students who weren’t members of the students’ core organizing team, but participated in the boycott, were Chester Stevens, Ola Prejean (wife of Frederick), Brenda Brent Williams, and Patrick Robinson. He shared their eyewitness accounts and experiences with Professor Bell’s team and the audience.
Also present at the event was Attorney Willie Zanders, who participated in a student protest on Grambling University’s campus. Students at Southern University in New Orleans also protested in solidarity with the SUBR students. According to some accounts, the New Orleans students took over that campus’s administration building.
The real story of what happened on November 16 invokes a nightmare scenario that repeats like3 a loop in the minds of student boycotters who were mislabeled as militants and who, according to the media, engaged in a confrontation with police. None of this was true.
The student boycott began because of the resignation of at least five professors, beginning with the resignation of Psychology Department Chairman Dr. Charles Waddell, 26, known for his progressive approach to teaching psychology.
Students peacefully boycotted classes. They met daily, drew up a list of grievances, and attempted to negotiate with the administration for a better curriculum, facilities, equipment, food, housing, help for the Scotland community, African American studies, and a seat at the table where decisions made impacted them.
Instead, the administration created an atmosphere of martial law on the campus, called the cops on students, and supported the arrest of students. And Denver Smith and Leonard Brown were killed for exercising their First Amendment rights.
The SUBR Students United Nine were banned from the campus “in perpetuity,” according to the judge overseeing their hearings, for ‘obstructing and interfering with the educational process.’ Although the Southern University Board of Supervisors released the bans, the affected students say they didn’t receive formal confirmation of the university’s action.
“We were never in a violent confrontation,” Charlene “Sukari” Harnett told a reporter. “We were always respectful. We were civilly disobedient. We made good trouble,” says the organizer of Student United. Harnett was in jail, and Governor Edwin Edwards refused to allow the student organizers to get bail on the morning of November 16, 1972.
Their lives were changed forever, and the trauma never left them. Some left Louisiana and obtained their degrees elsewhere. They overcame to become engineers, social scientists, mathematical statisticians, psychologists, lawyers, authors, musicians, and civil rights leaders.
“It’s been a sacrifice and a struggle,” says Hartnett, who graduated from Howard University and Antioch Law School. She went on to work at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the leadership of Clarence Thomas and the Urban League in Washington, D.C. She later went into private practice.
When asked what she thought about the release of the bans by the Southern University president. Hardnett says, “That was fine, but legally it had no effect. The State prosecuted us, and the ban is court enforced.
“There’s still a lot of loose ends, and it’s still some work that needs to be done in getting justice for Denver Smith and our family,” Denver Terrance, Smith’s nephew, told the media.
Research revealed that most of the sheriff’s deputies did not have any crowd control training when the shooting happened, and key deputies refused to take polygraph exams about what they knew, Professor Christopher Drew told WAFB’s Reporter Perry Robinson. Drew was one of the leaders behind the Cold Case research project.
“It’s really haunted the Southern community, and the black community, and it’s something that still resonates today,” Drew added.
This article originally published in the November 21, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
