‘A way we resist’: Quilts honor victims of racial violence

Gloria Green-McCray, the younger sister of James Earl Green, who along with Phillip Lafayette Gibbs were killed by Mississippi Highway Patrolmen in 1970 on the campus of Jackson State, reacts to viewing a section of one of two hand crafted quilts adorned with more than 115 cross-stitched portraits honoring African Americans who lost their lives to racial violence, Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021, on the university's campus in Jackson, Miss. The quilts are part of the Stitch Their Name Memorial Project, on display at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Gloria Green-McCray, the younger sister of James Earl Green, who along with Phillip Lafayette Gibbs were killed by Mississippi Highway Patrolmen in 1970 on the campus of Jackson State, reacts to viewing a section of one of two hand crafted quilts adorned with more than 115 cross-stitched portraits honoring African Americans who lost their lives to racial violence, Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021, on the university's campus in Jackson, Miss. The quilts are part of the Stitch Their Name Memorial Project, on display at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

By LEAH WILLINGHAM Associated Press/Report for America December 13, 2021 5 min read

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – Long after he was killed, Myrtle Green-Burton wouldn’t let anyone wear her 17-year-old son’s high school track team jacket.

James Earl Green, an aspiring Olympic runner, was supposed to receive the green and yellow coat at his graduation in Mississippi half a century ago. It became a symbol of his life – and her loss, said his sister Gloria Green-McCray.

“She just kept it until it dry-rotted because that was all she really had to remember his dream – his vision,” Green-McCray said of her mother.

A cross-stitch portrait of Green wearing his track jacket is now included with 115 others in a quilting project dedicated to memorializing lives lost to racial violence in the U.S. The two quilts are open for public viewing on weekdays through Dec. 17 at Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center.

James Earl Green and 21-year-old Jackson State student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs were fatally shot on the Jackson State campus during a violent police response to a protest against racial injustice in 1970. Green was not a student at the historically Black university, but was walking through the campus on his way home from his grocery store job.