Just watched this on PBS. Excellent show. http://youtu.be/jyyYmWXAtLM Four dead - nine wounded at Kent State, two dead - twelve wounded at Jacksonville State. Four million students protest across the nation. 100,000 protestors mass in Washington D.C. A defensive barrier of commercial buses is formed and the 82nd Airborne is bivouacked in the basement of the Executive Office building next door to the White House....... President Nixon wakes his butler at 4:15 AM and announces he is going to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to students holding a vigil..... It repeats locally tomorrow at 1:00 AM.
When that happened, I was a senior in high school. It was a strange feeling to know that I was heading into all that chaos in Boston.
My ex-wife went to Kent State, but she didn't get there until Sept. 1970. She tells me the campus was ultra-conservative at that time. Perhaps kids were too scared to protest anymore.
That's what I noticed... It came down to "they are shooting to kill" and things just sort of fell apart. I was to young to be involved but was watching all this develop because I was going to be "next"... Same with the war... I was going to be "next".
I distinctly remember. At the time I was in my 2nd year at a small PA college about 100 miles away, as the crow flies. I believe this was about the time the PA state police descended in force on our little Pontiac's War battlefield park (not at the college); where all the freaks would gather. Also the time of the demonstrations at the college and riots on main street. We all knew that things had changed.....most Americans had no regard for the student's lives...as they deserved what they got.
How can four people dyeing be related to the civil war? That was like my high schools anual suicide rate
It was a time of internal strife that pitted family members against family members and large segments of the population against other large segments. It was a very polarizing time. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, George Lincoln Rockwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were all assassinated in the sixties. George Wallace was shot in 1972.
I was a first grader. My parents kept me away from the TV while the news story was on. I didn't see the footage until many years later. Growing up in small Southern towns (3), it seemed that in almost every family, all the older people were for the war, and all the young people were against it. This led to a significant loss of respect for older people, especially authority figures of all kinds. I was much too young to understand all the complex causes and impacts of the war, but I was against it mostly because everybody around me was against it, including my parents. They didn't talk about it outside the house. The South always lags behind the rest of America, so as the sixties were winding down in other places, in many ways social and political, they were just getting up to full speed down here.
