Series in development about black student killed by Mississippi police

Nicholas G. Sims is set to direct a television series based on Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, one of two Jackson State College students killed by Mississippi police in 1970.Nicholas G. Sims (pictured) and Desmond Jackson of BVC Films have signed a deal with the Gibbs family to adapt the little-known civil rights story into a film.

They are now developing a pilot for a six-part miniseries titled Blood on the Books, which will also star Amari Bacchus (Adolescence) as James Earl Green, a high school student who also died in the incident.



The story describes the events of May 15, 1970, when Mississippi police opened fire on the dormitories of Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), killing two unarmed students and wounding twelve others during a peaceful protest against racial injustice.

Gibbs, a 21-year-old law student, husband and father, and Green, a 17-year-old high school athlete, were shot to death. At the time, police maintained that they were threatened by a sniper, but an investigation found no evidence to support that. In 2021, the mayor of Jackson—the Mississippi state capital where the university is located—and a state senator publicly apologized for the shooting.

The incident came just days after National Guard members shot and killed four students at Kent State University during an anti-Vietnam War protest. The Jackson State shooting received little press at the time, and no convictions were forthcoming. Producers say Blood on the Books "seeks to reclaim the legacy of those killed and wounded" and "shed light on a moment in history that lay buried—not because it wasn't important, but because it was inconvenient."

Sims has guest-starred on Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga and CBS’s East New York. He’s also part of the returning cast for season three of P-Valley, which debuts soon on Starz.

Bacchus played the son of DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) in Netflix’s gritty crime drama Adolescence, which almost immediately became one of the streamer’s most popular original series ever after it launched in March.