Kent State University, May 4, 1970
When I celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day on April 22, I told students that I remembered the first one well. I was a freshman at (The) Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
I also told them that the first Earth Day was followed shortly by the killing of four students at Kent State University, also in Ohio. I remember a large crowd of students around a TV set in the lobby of Morrill Tower at Ohio State, and the shock of the news.
People who were aghast at the killings in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 need look no farther than the “Buckeye State” in 1970 to see how protesting students are handled in the United States. Ohio National Guardsmen (many of the younger guardsmen I met at Ohio State were only serving as an alternative to serving in Vietnam) fired upon an anti-war protest at Kent State University and killed four students and wounded nine others (one of them with permanent paralysis). Two of the four killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the demonstrations, while the other two killed, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, were merely walking to their next class. The Ohio Governor, James A. Rhodes, who sent the guardsmen to Kent State (and Ohio State), had earlier dropped out of Ohio State after his first quarter, which he attended on a modest basketball scholarship. Rhodes narrowly lost a primary election for a U.S. Senate race, to Robert Taft, Jr., two days before the events at Kent State.
On May 3, the day before the shooting, Governor Rhodes labeled the protesters as un-American and called the protesters revolutionaries set on destroying higher education in Ohio. “They’re worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes,” Rhodes said. “They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”
(On May 14-15, city and state police in Jackson, Mississippi, shot and killed two students and wounded 12. At least 140 shots were fired by a reported 40 state highway patrolmen using shotguns at distances of 30-50 feet. There were no arrests in connection with the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green [both by shotgun] at Jackson State. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded “that the 28-second fusillade from police officers was an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction… A broad barrage of gunfire in response to reported and unconfirmed sniper fire is never warranted.”)
Of those wounded at Kent State, none was closer than 71 feet to the guardsmen. Of those killed, the nearest (Miller) was 265 feet away, and their average distance from the guardsmen was 345 feet. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest criticized both the protesters and the guardsmen, but it concluded that “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.”
The killings at Kent State are forever memorialized in the protest song “Ohio,” written by now Bay Area resident, Neil Young for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, whom I heard live for the first time in San Jose, on my birthday, six years ago.
We will never forget.
-Bill at
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