One of the most well-known and infamous student protests was the Kent State University shootings of 1970. The aftermath of the Kent State tragedy gave rise to protests and riots on hundreds of college and university campuses across the nation. In the American South, only ten days after the Kent Sate tragedy, a very similar incident occurred on the campus of a predominantly black college in Jackson, Mississippi. During the early weeks of May 1970, Jackson State University students had been protesting on campus in response to tensions over the draft, the Vietnam War, and the violence that had taken place on other campuses. On the night of May 14, 1970, police officers opened fire on a crowd of more than a hundred unarmed students. The shooting claimed the lives of Jackson State student, Phillip Gibbs, and high school student, James Earl Green, who had been walking home from work that night; eight other students were also injured. This investigative paper seeks to examine, through the use of student and local newspaper articles, the degree to which surrounding institutions of higher education, and their students, responded to the shootings at Jackson State. The degree to which other institutions and their students responded may have been influential in how the memory of the Jackson State tragedy was preserved. In order to illustrate the aforementioned, this paper presents an analysis of literature regarding the nature of student protest; how the Kent State tragedy influenced protest movements, particularly the protest and shootings at Jackson State; how contextual events prompted student protests at Jackson State; and how surrounding college and university student populations responded to the Jackson State shootings.