While today was a Star Wars holiday and also a Free Comic Book Day for those who geek out, this was also an anniversary for one of the darker days of the civil rights/antiwar protest movements in our nation's history: the Kent State shootings.
By 1970, the Vietnam War had become an obvious quagmire that more Americans - especially the younger generations who were getting drafted to serve - wanted to exit. While Richard Nixon got elected in 1968 with a promise for "a secret plan" to get out of Vietnam "with honor," nothing had changed much.
On May 1st, Nixon gave a speech that he was escalating matters in Southeast Asia by sending troops into neighboring Cambodia (trying to cut into North Vietnam's supply lines and trying to stop "the Domino Effect" of communism spreading).
For the college-attending Americans growing up through the early half of Vietnam's escalation, it seemed like they - or their younger siblings - were going to become fodder - once they graduated and were eligible for the draft - for a perpetual war. Protests erupted across college campuses across the United States.
In Ohio, the governor James Rhodes agreed by May 2nd to send in 1000 National Guard troops to pacify the Kent State campus after the ROTC building got hit with a firebomb. Accusing the protestors of "being the worst type of people we harbor in America" - even though he's talking about our families' own sons and daughters at the time - Rhodes declared martial law and that no further gatherings or protests be held.
The students refused to stop.
May 4th, the escalation and anger and frustration led to this:
Defying the ban, people begin gathering on the Commons around 11 a.m. on Monday. By noon, some 3,000 people are there, including a core group of some 500 demonstrators around the Victory Bell, and many more onlookers. The target of their protests shifts from Nixon, Cambodia and the Vietnam War, to the National Guard and its occupation of Kent State.
After the demonstrators refuse to disperse, some 100 of the National Guardsmen begin to march across the Commons. They push the crowd up a slope known as Blanket Hill and down the other side into a parking lot.
Following the crowd into a nearby practice football field, the Guardsmen find themselves blocked in by a fence. They throw tear gas canisters and point their guns at the demonstrators, who yell and throw rocks and other debris at them. After about 10 minutes of this, the Guardsmen begin to move back up Blanket Hill. The crowd cheers their retreat and continues throwing things at them.
At 12:24 p.m., just after reaching the top of the hill, the Guardsmen turn back and fire their M1 rifles and pistols, some of them aiming directly into the crowd. In 13 seconds of shooting, they fire between 61 and 67 shots. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheur are killed, and nine other students are injured, including Dean Kahler, who is shot in the back and left permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
There had been numerous protests from the early 1960s onward that had ended in violence. The Civil Rights marches tended to end with police - and angry white mobs - pummeling marchers, unleashing dogs, or knocking them over with high-powered water hoses. The antiwar riots from 1967 onward tended to go the same way, culminating in the "police riot" violence that engulfed the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
But never before had the police - or the National Guard - just opened fire like that. Nobody expected it. Eyewitnesses would later note how they and the other students present - even the ones not protesting - didn't think the Guard would fire with real bullets. The reports included how even some of the Guardsmen were stunned by what happened.
The chaos and confusion of that moment - the only emotions everyone seemed to have between student and soldier alike were fear and rage - led to tragedy. Scheur and Schroeder weren't part of the protest, they were separately walking between classes. Krause and Miller may have been protesting, but they didn't deserve to get killed like that. No one should have gotten shot.
Kent State essentially shut down right after the shooting and wouldn't reopen for months. Across the nation, outrage was immediate. Over 650 universities and high schools saw protests and walkouts by students, not only raging against the war but now raging against a nation's military willing to shoot their own citizens.
The counterculture scene - filled with antiwar activists especially the musicians - produced artwork decrying the shootings and memorializing the dead. The act Crosby Stills Nash and Young crafted a protest song "Ohio" within weeks of the incident. The song attacked Nixon by name - who had directly created both the Cambodian crisis and the authoritarian environment of state/federal agencies being brutal towards protestors - and is considered to this day one of the more impactful protest songs of that era.
In the short term, the outrage over the Kent State deaths led to little change. Nixon and his allies arranged counter-protests in favor of the war to continue harassing the antiwar crowds. Most college students - even the ones not from Kent State - returned home over the summer to find family members and neighbors arguing that the protestors were at fault. The investigations into the shooting led to arrests for around 25 student and faculty protestors, but only a few pled to lesser charges, one was acquitted, and the charges dropped for the rest for lack of evidence. For the Guardsmen, five of them faced murder charges and two more on misdemeanors, but they argued for "self-defense" as they feared for their lives. The judge agreed on that point, dismissing the charges but admonishing the National Guard that their actions that day were "deplorable."
Nixon won re-election in 1972. He resigned two years later due to his mishandling of the Watergate scandals, and it was only years later we learned how callous he got towards the antiwar students.
The war the students originally protested didn't end well, either. Nixon's efforts to control Cambodia - honestly, to bomb it into rubble - only served to destabilize it more to where the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. While Nixon was able to secure a "peace with honor" treaty with North Vietnam by 1972, all it did was delay the inevitable of South Vietnam falling to the Viet Cong by 1975 as well.
Nobody won anything at Kent State. Just four dead students, and a nation that still hasn't come to terms with how we should handle student protestors more than 54 years later.
We're seeing police and National Guard getting called in again across dozens of universities and colleges trying to contain - and brutalize - the antiwar protestors rising up against the violence in Gaza towards Palestinian civilians. We have campus administrators overreacting to where escalation towards the students is creating the same kind of confused, fearful environment that built up at Kent State. Instead of using Soft Power tactics - of placating and isolating the protestors to minimize conflicts - we have heavy-handed tactics by the cops, and demonization of the Arab/Palestinian protestors as "terrorists" with a New York deputy commissioner holding up a single textbook (which is about the History of it, not a How-To like the Turner Diaries you morons) as evidence.
It's ironic how a history book underscores how our law enforcement and national leaders keep forgetting the lessons of history.
