PREMIERE: Blood on the Bluff (Spoken Word Documentary on 1972 Tragedy at Southern University)

50 years ago Southern University students Denver Smith and Leonard D. Brown were killed in an act of state-sanctioned violence at the tail end of a semester's worth of student protest.

I cannot remember the first time I visited the Smith and Brown Memorial Student Union at Southern University and A&M College, but I know I was in single digits. When my father was not cutting my and my brother's hair in the kitchen, he would bring us to the union where three brothers ran a barbershop. Back then, the student union held no significance to me outside of it being near the area where Southern kept its live mascot, the jaguar, Lacuumba.

I was mostly oblivious to the fact that I was getting my haircut in a setting where ‘big kids’ in college cycled in and out on the regular, and I certainly was not versed in how the union got its namesake at that time.

Both of my parents went to Southern University (SU), and later my older brothers and I would also become students at what was once one of the most populated historically Black colleges in the nation. I remember my parents being in possession of SU yearbooks from the 70s and one of those yearbooks had a theme that was centered around remembering the legacy of two students that had lost their lives. It was not until I was a student at Southern that I truly made the connection between the two young brothers who were memorialized in my parents’ yearbook and the union bearing the name it had.

The fall semester of 1972 was a tumultuous time at Southern University for a number of reasons. Several students who were in school back then had legitimate complaints about the campus's conditions and the curriculum they were being taught. So they did what many young people who came of age in the era of the Civil Rights movement did — they protested, fiercely.

For over a month, a collective of student activists known as Students United boycotted classes on the campus and their boycott drew the attention of local and state elected officials as well as various factions of law enforcement. And on November 16, 1972, fifty years to the date, their civil unrest resulted in one of the worst cases of state-sanctioned violence in Louisiana history.

Former Louisiana governor, the late Edwin Edwards, received a false report that then-Southern University president, Dr. George Leon Netterville was being held hostage by student protesters that had occupied the administration building. In reality, Dr. Netterville was away from the campus dealing with students who had been arrested prior to the catastrophic moment that occurred on November 16th. In response to the intel he received, Edwards ordered a small ‘army’ of Louisiana law enforcement officers as well as actual members of the actual National Guard to descend on the campus to disrupt the alleged hostage situation.

And all hell broke loose.

A military tank named “Big Bertha” made its way onto a college campus and weapons of war were used on college students. When the smoke from launched canisters of tear gas cleared, two students, Denver Smith and Leonard D. Brown were left dead after law enforcement opened fire on those who were in proximity to where the fictitious hostage situation was taking place.

I learned of the intricate details that led to this horrendous moment several years after I became familiar with the reason the student union was named after Denver Smith and Leonard Brown. In many ways, the incident felt like one of the biggest open secrets in Louisiana's history, and certainly one that my alma mater appeared to struggle with settling on what version of the narrative they were comfortable with acknowledging.

Yes, the union was named in honor of the slain students, and there have always been annual events to commemorate that specific loss. But who exactly was responsible and the domino effect of how things transpired always seemed a bit hazy.

The 2017 documentary, Tell Them We Are Rising which chronicled the rich history of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities dedicated a segment to the 1972 student protests at Southern and subsequently piqued my interest in creating a project that would tell the story of the tragedy from a different lens — through poetic verse and interviews with university alumni that were either my peers that learned about the incident as students on campus or elders I knew who lived through the experience as it happened.

I began working on Blood on the Bluff in the quarantined fall of 2020 conducting interviews with multi-generational alumni via Zoom, and today, on this 50th-year commemoration of the tragedy, I am on Southern’s campus to present the project at the request of the university. The piece is voiced in the personification of the student union trying to make sense of its origin while simultaneously requesting a measure of justice that would prevent anything similar from ever happening again here or anywhere else.

Blood on the Bluff was written, edited, conceptualized and designed by me — admittedly, there are points when it is not the most pristinely edited, but this history is not neat by any stretch of the imagination.

I am just another vessel sharing additional insight on a story that we should all know, in hopes that future generations of Black college students never have to encounter similar violence in the name of higher education.

Blood on the Bluff can be viewed here or at the top of this post.