Around 9 or 10 p.m. last Monday, an emotional Twitter conversation was brewing, and student Amber Thomas joined the discussion. Earlier in the day, CNN released the video of the June 26 attack and hit-and-run incident that left 49-year-old James Craig Anderson dead in the middle of the night.
"I felt like I had been under a rock. I felt cheated," Thomas said, who before the video was released, like others, thought the incident was a hit-and-run and not what is now believed to be a hate crime. The CNN video shows a group of white teenagers, allegedly from Rankin County, beating Anderson, then getting in a Ford F-250 pickup truck and allegedly running him over.
After seeing the video, Thomas thought of her dad who works late. "That could have been him," she said.
Through the twitter discussion, Thomas and her friend Brentton Jackson, both seniors at Jackson State University, invited others to join a campaign to acknowledge and stop crimes of hatred, including crimes against people based on sexuality, disability and religion.
"It almost birthed itself," Jackson said of the "NoHatred" campaign he and Thomas started that now has Facebook and Twitter pages.
"There was a need to harness that spirit," Jackson said.
He and Thomas are both active in the JSU student government association and have been working as marketing interns for Aramark, the food services company JSU will use starting this fall. Jackson started Fresh Writes, a speechwriting and language-arts tutoring service, and Thomas is president of the Gamma Rho Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.
Last Wednesday, they got a group of 20 people, mostly JSU students, but also including a student from Millsaps College and a recent Princeton University graduate, to come to the JSU student center and talk about the murder of James Craig Anderson as well as ways to stop hatred.
Thomas said the group would like to create a public service announcement and post the video on YouTube sometime in the future, but right now they are trying to get more ideas from the growing number of people who would like to somehow be a part of their initiatives.
"One of the organizers said, 'Hatred is learned,' and that was profound," said Thomas, who said that being able to talk with children might have the most impact. "(Adults are) not as receptive as children are, and children are our future. We need to make sure they're taught the right things."
For information on NoHatred, visit the campaign's Twitter page: @NoHatred or Facebook page: NoHatred.
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