What Happened...
Forty years ago this month, protests against the Vietnam war were escalating across the United States, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and the Women's Movement was getting underway.
The shooting of four students by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970 at Kent State University, a large working-class school in rural Kent, created a chain-reaction across the country and around the world.
Four days earlier, on April 30, President Nixon announced on television that he would be escalating the war by sending American troops into Cambodia. At the time of the announcement Ohio's Republican Governor, James Rhodes had recently hardened his rhetoric against student protests in order to paint a rival as anti-Nixon. He called the students "worse than brownshirts."
The Ohio National Guard was sent in, at the request of Kent's mayor, in response to some loosely organized protest actions that had taken place in the town of Kent over the weekend. On Saturday night, the ROTC (still called "Rotsey" in Ohio) building was burned down.
My dad, Tim Warren, was a student at Kent at the time.
"The ROTC building itself was a joke. It was a wooden shack in the middle of a campus of brick and cement buildings. It should have been torn down years before," he said.
The atmosphere between the students and the Guard was initially genial. Mike Alewitz, a leader of the student protests at the time, said in a talk at CCSU, that students had been hanging around and talking with members of the Guard all weekend. "A lot of them had joined the Guard to get out of going to Vietnam," he said.
Despite the fact that students were warned the May 4th protest could not go on, students gathered on Blanket Hill in front of the burned ROTC building.
"It was somewhere between disconcerting and scary that the Guard was there," said Warren. He continued, "I thought they would just stand in front of the ROTC building, but instead the Guard marched."
The Guard chased the students up over Blanket Hill and inundated them with tear gas. "You couldn't call it a protest at that point," Professor Alewitz said, "We were dispersed."
"A can would land and everyone would disperse. And one person would pick it up and throw it back and everyone watching would cheer," Warren recalled.
The Guard then moved back down the hill, but turned and started up again, stopping at its crest and shooting into the crowd of students who took cover in a parking lot and nearby buildings.
"The concept of the Guard shooting students was incomprehensible," Warren said. Professor Alewitz said it was a "stunning---a dumbfounding experience."
Four students were killed and nine were wounded. Minutes after the shootings, an officer drove around the grass with a bull horn shouting for students to leave campus immediately while sirens wailed. Classes were cancelled and the campus was closed completely until the following fall.
Ten days later two students were fatally shot and twelve (or more) were injured at Jackson State in Mississippi. The protest is widely considered part of the Civil Rights movement.
Professor Butler, who was a student at Jackson, said, "It was unusual what happened at Kent State---people getting killed for what they believed in and voicing their opinion." He continued, "What we were working on, people were getting killed for no more than looking at other people."
"It was a situation where there had been protests, primarily related to GIs, African-American GIs, going to the war, fighting in the war, dying in the war, coming back to the United States and not being able to sit at a counter and eat," Professor Butler said.
Police Officers were called in after reported confrontations between students and white motorists.
"They had opened fire on a woman's dormitory," Professor Butler recalled. Nearly all the windows in the dormitory were shot out and bullet holes remain visible in the bricks of Alexander Hall to this day.
Professor Butler, who gave a talk about Jackson State said that finding materials, especially pictures, was difficult.
"I called my sister who works at Jackson State, to try and see if I could get some images from the library," he said. She couldn't find any.
While Kent State, immortalized by the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song and John Filo's Pulitzer Prize winning photo, has become an increasingly well-known moment in American history, the events at Jackson State remain largely unknown. There are few photographs avaliable and no comprehensive archive exists.
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It was unusual what happened at Kent State---people getting killed for what they believed in and voicing their opinion. What we were working on, people were getting killed for no more than looking at other people.
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