Edge City, MS: Radical Youth Confront Jackson’s Racist Establishment During the Counterculture Revolution

Knowing the violent history of the racist cops, the young radicals knew they were risking everything. Their creation of a biracial community center in 1970 Jackson, Mississippi was simply against all odds, and good sense. Especially coming just a few weeks after the machine gun murders of 2 Black students and wounding of 12 in an attack on Jackson State College by more than 70 White, uniformed police and highway patrol officers, the community center was sure to draw the wrath of official forces.

The Center was called Edge City, and the official forces of Jackson did everything they could to close the place to prove that there could never be racial unity, peace, and brotherhood in Jackson. But the magnolia revolutionaries would not be stopped.

I was a 16-year-old high school senior who was elected to the Board and then voted President of the non-profit corporation.

Edge City was a gathering place, where Black and White kids could get together and do what all kids like to do – groove to good music always on the turntable or played live, buy some radical books and decent used records, shop for inexpensive hip clothes, play chess, cards, or checkers, have a cold soft drink, or just chill and rap. Simply get to know each other. A key factor was that admission would have to be at no cost or low cost. That place was named Edge City.

The name Edge City was taken from Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their acid-laced trip in 1964 across the U.S in their psychedelic bus, Further. Their quest on the bus was to achieve Edge City. Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future. Edge City, where it’s scary, but people are whole people; a community of intelligent, very open, out front people. A hell of a scene out here in Edge City, where you can break out of your own world, your own reality and achieve synchronicity with the universe!