His birthday was 14 days after Denver Smith’s.īrown’s girlfriend, Rosie Taylor, ate breakfast with him the morning of the shooting-before Brown wandered to the Southern administration building to see why a crowd had gathered.
16, she always said, “It’s my baby’s birthday,” Turner said. Brown grew grim each year around the date of her son’s death, according to Evelyn Turner, Brown’s younger sister. She “went to her grave still suffering about that,” Wallace said. We were so young, and it messed us up.”īrown’s mother, Elizabeth Fay Brown, did not like to speak of her son’s death. “We tried to even dismiss that it happened because it was so awful. “Maybe a couple of years ago, we sat and we cried about it, because we hadn't talked about it at all,” said Glover, sitting in a New Roads church pew beside Josephine recently. She and Josephine were 19 when Smith was killed. Her roommate, Brenda Glover, never returned after the shooting. Josephine returned to Southern to finish her degree only because her mother made her. “When I came home, I couldn't speak, couldn’t talk,” said Josephine. “All of this work awaits us.”Īlex Tirado/LSU Manship School News Service Family members of Denver Smith–(left to right) Denver Terrance, Erma Smith, Nelson Smith and Josephine Smith Jones–visit the memorial to Smith and Leonard Brown at Southern University. "We can seize the opportunity to learn the lessons that this tragedy holds,” said Angela Allen-Bell, a professor at the Southern University Law Center who organized the event. 16, at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge. Nearly 2,700 pages of FBI documents reveal how agents narrowed their search to a handful of deputies but could not prove who fired the fatal shot.įamily members and former protest leaders will gather to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the shooting at 5 p.m. Amid a haze of tear gas, one deputy fired a single buckshot blast that killed Brown and Smith, 20-year-old juniors who had been more interested in their studies than the protests. The deputies were there that day to disperse at least 200 students who had gathered after the arrests of campus protest leaders. The shooting came after several weeks of protests and class boycotts over what the students saw as poor funding, dilapidated buildings and little response to their concerns. And the shooting brought to the fore questions about excessive police force that still haunt Baton Rouge and the nation today. But the protests also helped produce some of the changes that the students wanted to see. In the aftermath of the shooting lay a future marked with grief for family members of the victims and a period of uncertainty for protest leaders, who were expelled from Southern. “And I tell people all the time, something was taken from me at a very early age that was senseless.” “I tell people, don't ever say you don't miss something that you didn't have,” she said. Courtesy of Shunda Wallace Leonard Brown’s daughter Shunda Wallace (left) and his sister Evelyn Turner (right).
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