Laura Atkinson  

The day was May 4, 1970. At Kent University in Kent, Ohio, it was a sunny, beautiful day weatherwise. However, the campus atmosphere was frighteningly tense. All day there had been a standoff between Ohio National Guardsmen and over two thousand students. At noon, the two factions began hurling rocks, teargas, and obscenities back and forth, while the Guardsmen tried to disperse a group of protesting students. The seventy or so Guardsmen turned and seemed to be retreating, when, at 12:25 p.m., twenty-eight of them abruptly pivoted and in less than fifteen seconds, fired sixty-seven bullets into the crowd below. Four students were killed, one paralyzed, and nine others wounded [1].

The campus had been involved in antiwar activism for over a year, and in the first few days of May 1970, many incidents had taken place. Students had burned down the campus ROTC building, which led police chief Roy Thompson to convince mayor LeRoy Satrom to call in the National Guard. In a confrontation the night before the shootings, several students received bayonet wounds from Guardsmen. Others were clubbed. Most of the troops had had little food or sleep for days, and many of them had no experience [2]. Afterwards, no one was willing to accept responsibility for ordering the men to fire. Brigadier General Robert Canterbury, who was present but dressed in civilian clothes, said, "I was there--but I was not in command of any unit," and, "no one gave an order [3]". However, many who witnessed the massacre and many experts who sought to reconstruct the incident are convinced that an order was given. It was also commonly believed to be a mistake first to try and break up a peaceful gathering, and second to equip the Guardsmen with live ammunition [4].

When the firing ended, Jeffrey Miller lay dead in a large pool of blood from a massive head wound [5]. Although he had been involved in the demonstrations, he was no militant activist. He had transferred to Kent to escape the fraternity life of Michigan State, which he called "adolescent nonsense". Also dead was William K. Schroeder, the second-ranking student in Kent State's Army ROTC unit, who had been angered by the burning of the ROTC building. Allison Krause had peacefully protested the war and the Guard occupation of the campus, placing a flower in the barrel of a Guardsman's gun, saying, "Flowers are better than bullets". But perhaps most tragic of all was the death of Sandra Scheuer, who was not very interested in politics or protest at all [6]. She was walking to her next class when a bullet ripped through her jugular vein [7].

The events leading to this fatal confrontation, which "widened the national gap between pro- and antiwar sentiment [8]" are hard to trace. At colleges and universities all over the country, students were protesting American involvement in the Vietnam War, both peacefully and violently. On Thursday, April 30, President Richard Nixon further aggravated antiwar activists by announcing an American- backed incursion into neutral Cambodia by South Vietnamese forces [9]. Then, on May 1, he added more fuel to the fire by saying, "You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue...". Two of the students who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, had expressed anger at having been called "bums" by Nixon, while Joe Lewis, who would also be shot but not killed, said, "I was not a bum. I was an eighteen-year-old American fully aware of how lucky I was to be going to a university in America where your freedoms are guaranteed"[10]. Thirty-percent of students at California's Whittier College, Nixon's alma mater, angrily protested Nixon's policies, and at the Duke University Law School which Nixon had also attended, his portrait was temporarily removed [11].

The war in Vietnam was met with far greater dissent than any other American war. One of the most powerful causes of this was the still young medium of television[12]. The American people could see on their screens what was happening on the other side of the country. This helped the antiwar movement to congeal, and gave its participants a sense of confidence to engage in more violent demonstration. A student may have been standing with a rock in his hand, but until he saw someone else throw one at a cop or Guardsman, he would be afraid to do anything. After the Kent State shootings, "dissent against the U.S. venture into Cambodia suddenly coalesced into a nationwide student strike. Across the country 441 colleges and universities were affected [13]". At the University of New Mexico, protesters argued that the flag should be lowered to half-staff to honor those slain at Kent State. Three of the dissenters sustained knife wounds [14].

References

"At War with War", Time , May 18, 1970, Vol. 95, No. 20, pp. 6-14. [3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 14]

"Four Dead in Ohio",  American History Illustrated , Wischmann, Lesley, May 1990, pp. 24-33. [1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10]

The "Uncensored War" : the Media and Vietnam, Hallin, Daniel C., University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1986, p. 11. [12]