Kent State shOOTING: May 4, 1970
"The firing stopped. I lay there maybe 10 or 15 seconds. I got up, I saw four or five students lying around the lot. By this time, it was like mass hysteria. Students were crying, they were screaming for ambulances. I heard some girl screaming, "They didn't have a blank, they didn't have a blank," No, they didn't. |
"Suddenly, they turned around, got on their knees, as if they were ordered to, they did it all together, aimed. And personally, I was standing there saying, they're not going to shoot, they can't do that." In April 1970, President Richard Nixon declared that he had ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia to assault guerrilla positions there. Student antiwar activists reacted with unsurprising immediacy. Students at sixty colleges across the United States went on strike, and activists at at least three dozen institutions mounted militant protests against the "widening" of the Vietnam War.
College students all over the country were rising up against "the Man" and were getting involved in many protests against racism, war, and other destructive activities/movements that were rampant in every corner of the United States. They were banding together, forming organizations like the SDS. It was a speeding train, attracting more passengers and picking up speed at an alarming rate. But in May 1970, that train came to a screeching halt. At Kent State in Ohio, there was no shortage of student activists. In fact, in early May of 1970 they held a myriad of demonstrations. One even involved the burning of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) main building. On May 3, Governor James Rhodes traveled to Kent State and held a press conference that described the student activists and agitators as "brownshirts and communist elements". Amid this tumult, the first National Guard troops arrived and took up positions on campus and in town. May 4th, 1970: The students defiantly held a campus rally at noon, adamant at having their voices heard about the outrageous widening of the Vietnam War. pproximately two thousand students gathered on campus, and 113 National Guardsmen took up positions with their weapons "locked and loaded." Efforts to disperse demonstrators by use of bullhorns failed. Tear-gas canisters were launched by guardsmen only to be thrown back at them, along with some rocks. At 12:25 P.M., the guardsmen marched in a line up to the crest of a hill, turned around, and fired their weapons into a group of students approximately one hundred yards away. It took thirteen seconds and sixty-one rounds of ammunition for four students to be killed and nine to be wounded. Of those killed, two students had been participants in the rally, one was an ROTC student, and the fourth had been walking to class. The tragedy that was the result of this movement angered future protesters because it was that particular kind of violence that they were adamant about stopping in Vietnam. If their opinions were shot down so nonchalantly in their own country, was there really any chance that the American government would pull out of Vietnam. It was most infuriating to most that the guardsmen shot at the crowd in the first place. A few months later President Nixon's Commission on Campus Unrest would conclude that the National Guardsmen's use of lethal violence and the resulting student casualties were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." Kent State shut down their university for the remainder of their spring semester. Activism spiked dangerously high after the Kent State incident. Nationwide, the Kent State killings catalyzed student protest and violence. From May 5th to May 8th, more than one hundred major student demonstrations per day took place; violence occurred on at least seventy-three campuses nationwide; students went on strike at more than 350 institutions; and 536 schools were shut down, fifty-one for the balance of the academic year. During the month, bombing and arson incidents hit ninety-five college campuses, and dozens of ROTC buildings were damaged, burned, or bombed. On 14 May the Kent State tragedy was repeated, with a racial twist, at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) in Mississippi when white policemen and state patrolmen opened fire into a crowd of black students. Two students were killed and twelve were wounded. How much more hysteria was it going to take for the government to pull the troops from Vietnam? Unfortunately, that day did not come for a couple more years after Kent State. |