Kent state
On May 4, 1970, The Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd on the campus of Kent State University, Killing four students and wounding nine others. In thirteen seconds of gunfire, Kent State became an international symbol of antiwar protest and government repression. As the wounded and dead lay upon the ground, the strike movement initiated to protest the American military invasion of Cambodia immediately increased. Students at 1,350 universities and colleges participated in demonstrations against the shootings and the escalation. In the aftermath of this unprecedented upheaval, which compelled President Richard M. Nixon to reconsider futur escalations, Kent State administrators and faculty, as well as the national news media, made great efforts to convince the public that the university had always been a quiet place, untouched by students radicalism and antiwar protest. The shootings, the insisted, were an aberration in tranquil Kent, Ohio. The image they sought to project, however, was inaccurate. In Ohio there was sustained resistance to funding higher education and an ingrained suspicion of liberalism. In the early 1960s, while other Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin led the nation in appro
Peace activists also found an outlet for their energies in Kent’s developing counterculture arena. The city’s proximity to the Ohio Turnpike and other major highways made it a convenient way-station from points east to Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Throughout the 1960s the fame of Kent’s bar and musical scene spread throughout the Midwest, making the city a magnet for student revelers, teenage runaways, and activists. The city’s residents, however, became increasingly torn between their desire to make a profit from their student “tourists” and their fear that the “pot-smoking communists” would corrupt law and order. Saturday night brought another demonstration at the ROTC building, but this one did not end in peace. While nearly 1,000 chanting students approached some through rocks and ignited flares which struck the building. When firemen arrived, demonstrators slashed the hoses and threw rocks until the firemen were forced to retreat. As the building continued to burn, campus police arrived in riot gear and dismissed the crowd with tear gas. Informed of the situation, Mayor Satrom Called in the National Guard. Kent State president Robert White, who looked back upon an era when the school had been smaller and the students conformed to Cold War political and social mores, declined to take disciplinary action against the conservative assailants. Nevertheless, the Kent Committee continued to demonstrate on the campus while the university community and the townspeople lashed out against them. In April, President White described the Kent Committee’s Organizers as publicity-seeking martyrs and argued that the goals “are distasteful to the overwhelming majority of us. Similarly, the mass of students within a true university process will come to see the shallowness of its arguments.” Even though this anti-activist sentiment was echoed by the student newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, protests against the war and the ROTC grew larger. In some ways the domi
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Approximate Word count = 1345
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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