“Unreasonable, Unjustified Overreaction” (2025) - Unfinished

Artist:

Kim F. Hall

Machine pieced & hand appliquéd, hand embroidered

Dimensions:

12H x 18W

Kim F. Hall: Shortly after midnight on May 14, 1970, city and state police opened fire on Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Located on the incredibly named Lynch street, which allowed white drivers to traverse the campus and hurl racial abuse at students, the dorm was a particular site of ongoing racial strife. This was 11 days after students were killed at Kent State. After troubles at the ROTC building, the administration called the local police who arrived with submachine guns loaded onto Thompson's Tank, built to quell Civil Rights protests. Even after protests were contained, local and state police remained: following a rumor (most likely started by law enforcement), that there were student snipers on the roof of Alexander Hall, the police broke their own protocols and fired more than 460 bullets at the students who seemed mostly to have gathered to decompress and flirt after a long week. They wounded twelve students and killed James Earl Green, a high school senior on his way home from work and Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a Jackson State junior. Despite law enforcement attempts to clean up the evidence immediately after the shooting, Richard Nixon’s President’s Commission on Campus Unrest found their response an “unreasonable, unjustified overreaction.”

I was disturbed that I had not heard of this event until its 50 year anniversary and haunted by the photos from that day: students standing with Black Power salutes outside the bullet ridden dorm, and an upside down American flag (a distress call) in the windows. I have been wanting to learn how my mother makes the architectural features in Baltimore Album quilts, so I mocked up a design to get advice from her. Nancy Bristow’s Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College inspired some of the imagery. The flags are “Freedom of Speech” (1990) by Faith Ringgold and “African American Flag” (1990) by David Hammons.