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 approp

However, the forces of change started to overcome this cultural mind set. Kent Stat’s expanding student enrollment from five thousand in 1954 to over twenty-one thousand by 1966, and the construction of more dormitories signalled Kent’s transformation from a commuter and teacher’s college to a residential and academically comprehensive institution. The only public university in the area until the mid 1960s, Kent’s student body was mostly dominated by the sons and daughters of Akron, Cleveland, and Youngstown blue-collar workers and business people. Standard works on the white student movement of this time assert that activists clustered at prestigious universities that had a large proportion of middle and upper-class students. Although Kent State seemed an unlikely place to have a student movement, one did develop there.

As at many Campuses across the country, the announcement by President Nixon late thursday night, April 30, that American and South Vietnamese troops had invaded Cambodian territory provoked an immediate response from the political activists at Kent State. At noon on Friday about 500 students attended an antiwar rally and called for the abolition of ROTC on campus, which had become the most visible sign of university “complicity” in the war. The rally ended peacefully, with a call for another rally the following day.

Some topics in this essay:
South Vietnamese, President White, Cleveland Youngstown, Chicago Throughout, University Killing, Sandy Scheuer, Kent Stat’s, Michigan Wisconsin, Ohio Wherever, Richard Nixon, tear gas, kent committee, student body, percent student body, mayor satrom, wounded dead, public university, peace activists, spring 1970, percent student, crowd tear gas, antiwar protest,