Kent State commemoration

36th annual Kent State commemoration of the four students killed by national guardsmen on May 4th, 1970. A peace walk into downtown Kent follows the commemoration which is May 4th from noon until 2pm. There's also a candlelight walk around the campus on May 3rd, 11pm.

http://dept.kent.edu/may4/

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Sounds interesting. About 15 years ago, my wife and I were passing through Kent, and took a walk around the campus just to see if there was a memorial or anything. We never found anything. In fact, we were unable to locate anyone who had the foggiest idea where it happened. The best info we could get from students was "I think there was a civil war battle here once or something" or something like that.

I can understand the reluctance of students to have their school recognized only for that event. But students really seemed to have no idea whatsoever, and were either totally clueless, or they acquire stupendously effective acting skills.

We eventually gave up, but did see buildings that were familiar from old photos.

I was just a kid then, but I have a vague recollection of my mother saying "it's just one bunch of goddamn draft dodgers fighting another."

 

There's a number of memorials there now. One is on the hill in the woods on the east side of Taylor Hall that consists of four large granite monoliths. It's a quiet secluded area and not exactly easy to find. There is another memorial stone monument on the north end of the Prentice Hall parking lot. There are also four parking spaces cordoned off at Prentice Hall that have a plaque for each of the four students killed.

Some of these went up around the 90s so you may have missed them. I'd have to look up the dates. There's also a sculpture near another building on campus as a tribute. I don't remember which building right now but it's not Taylor or Prentice.

The football practice field where the guard marched across has been filled with an athletics center. Johnson Hall just north of Taylor was demolished about a year ago. If you look at old pics, you can see a few students standing on the roof of Johnson during the shooting.

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I remember very well that back in the '70s there was a proposed construction site that was controversial. I think some alleged that it was done to "cover up" in the most literal sense the area where it happened, and obscure the fact that several of the people shot were very, very far away.

Thanks for the info re the memorials; I'm not sure if I'll make it up that way anytime soon, but it's good to know people are actively keeping that in memory. I was just a kid when it all happened- but that was about the time my older brother got back from Vietnam, and that homecoming was the event of the year in our family.

But that event was outrageous, and should never be forgotten. What has already been largely forgotten is that the guardsmen nearly fired another volley, and if that had happened, the loss of life would have been extreme.

 

The controversial construction in the 70s was the athletics center. It now occupies what used to be the practice field that the guard marched across. There were protests to stop the construction and arrests but they failed. There was also a group of people that camped out on the proposed site as a protest. It was known as 'tent city'. One of the students shot on May 4th, James Russell, was at a right angle to the line of fire and 375 feet away from the guard in a position on the practice field that is now the athletics center.

Kent Prof. Glenn Frank is often credited with convincing the students to disperse after the first round of shots. His short speech was recorded by Bob Carpenter who worked at the Kent radio station and used to take his tape recorder everywhere with him.

There are now many audio recordings and photos that have been archived and placed in the public domain. Some of the legal issues regarding the materials, such as the audio recordings, have been resolved only in the past few years.

For anyone interested, the Kent State library has an extensive set of photos, videos from news stations and TV shows, and audio clips about the protests and shooting that can be viewed in the library.

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i want to go to that sooo bad. weve gotta keep their memory alive, its all ready faiding away.

 

They dont mention Kent state in our public schools = Part of the keep them dumb programs!.

 

Kent State U. refers to it only as 'Remembrance Day' on their website. When I searched for information about it on the KSU website last year, nothing came up. It's rather strange, because the May 4th Task Force site resides on the Kent server yet searches done on the server show nothing. Also, last year the calendar of events on the KSU homepage showed nothing about it. I haven't checked this year. It seems the university likes to stay as low key about it as possible.

Last year, a number of students in the Princeton Hall were looking out their windows with puzzled looks on their faces at the gathering in the parking lot where the students were shot. I thought that most would know something about what happened at the uni they are attending, but many don't.

There's still a couple hundred people that show up each year for the event.

I didn't know at the time, but in the late 90s, Crosby Still & Nash performed at the commemoration. I missed that one.

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But if Ozy piss on the Alamo is all over the news for weeks and months.

 

Maybe years!.

 

The sister of William Schroeder, one of the students killed, attended last year's event. She said when she visits other countries and mentions the Kent State incident, they know what happened. Sometimes people in other countries know more about what happened.

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Feed them MTV and rap music and great educational programs seems to work .

 

The updated May 4th task force site shows that Mary Ann Vecchio will be speaking at this year's commemoration. Her last appearance was in 1995.

http://www.vietnamwar.com/kentstatekillings.htm


She was a 14 year old runaway from Florida who happened to cross paths with Kent on the day of the shootings. Mary Ann Vecchio:



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It was not just KENT STATE it was fallowed in the 80s by Ruby Ridge massacre and in 90s by the Waco Texas massacre. and in 2000+ Cubans fleeing Castro were told a Key West bridge is not part of the U.S .

 

The other day was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kent State shooting. Hearing the brief mention in the news suddenly took me back to those days with a startling immediacy. Of course we all remember the pictures: the running, gaily-dressed crowd of students; the line of Guardsmen silhouetted on the green hill, rifles leveled; a dark stream of blood running down the neat campus sidewalk. The one I can never forget is of a girl kneeling beside her dead friend, eyes and mouth wide in shock, calling back over her shoulder - as if someone could help, could bring back the living girl-daughter-friend-lover-but-never-wife-or-mother who had been chanting beside her a moment before.

To most people, it was a tragic footnote to a decade full of greater tragedies. For me it was more personal - I felt that the shots had been fired at me. They certainly could have been. I had much in common with those dead students. I was in college at Antioch, another small liberal arts school in rural Ohio. I too had long hair and wore hippie clothes and marched in demonstrations. We were all part of The Movement, a great world-encircling wave of new thinking, a rejection of violence and an embracing of life. We tried to change the world by example, by love. For our efforts we were generally reviled, but we bore the disdain and hostility proudly, for we knew that the world was changing, that the age-old ways of war and greed were dying out. Mankind was evolving before our eyes, and by the time we were adults and in charge of the world, the evil would be gone.

It was a bright and simple dream, and young people by the millions embraced it joyously. We were young, idealistic, and optimistic. Why shouldn't we be? We had grown up in the fifties, in comfort and plenty. We were one of the few generations of the world that had never known war. We couldn't remember the Korean War and World War II was just something our parents talked about or in old movies. They had already slipped into that curious limbo of quaintness before becoming true history.

Then came Vietnam, a war that cried out for opposition. American involvement was ignorant and misguided at best, imperialistic and racial at worst. Millions of Americans who had never considered opposing their country's policies were having trouble justifying this war to prevent a fair election in a tiny country on the other side of the planet. Opposition to the war was growing in every segment of society. There was reason to hope that our efforts would finally result in American withdrawal.

But The Movement had taken some bitter blows. The leaders we admired - Kennedy and Kennedy and King, were shot down before our eyes. When we tried to make our voices heard in the governing of our land, we were locked out of the Chicago convention and beaten through the streets by the police. Authorities everywhere were cracking down hard on demonstrators and alternate lifestyles. The Weathermen and the Black Panthers were hunted fugitives; the SDS was discredited and disorganized. The great musicians, the spokesmen of our age, were dying: Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Brian Jones and Jim Morrison. The psychedelics that had opened our minds were destroying many of them. Disillusion and paranoia was creeping in on all sides. Still, there was the hope that the hard times would pass, only the brief labor pains of a new world view.

Then came the news of the shooting at Kent State. The initial reports were confused. No one knew exactly what had happened or what the casualties were. There was no word on what was happening there now. Had it just been a single event, or was there now a battle raging? It was being called a massacre. A few hours later the first refugees started arriving.

They were terrified. They told stories of soldiers firing repeatedly and purposefully into a close-packed crowd of kids, of scores, perhaps hundreds, of dead and wounded. Kent State had been closed and martial law declared. The Guard and police were rounding people up and taking them away. Many had fled to Antioch as the nearest place where they might find sympathizers among the conservative farm towns of Ohio. They were secreted away in the attics of dormitories and safe houses, waiting like Anne Frank for the gun butts to bash in the doors.

There were many anxious meetings and discussions that night, all over the little town of Yellow Springs. Had it been a few wild shots, or was it more sinister - the first battle in a long-feared violent crackdown? Hippies were almost universally despised by mainstream America, and especially by the famous military-industrial complex, those who would lose their power if our policies prevailed. There was debate in Congress advocating the curtailment of civil rights to stop the demonstrations. Perhaps the Bill of Rights itself would be repealed. The Underground might have to really go underground, The Movement become The Resistance. The more paranoid of us believed a pogrom was not outside the realm of possibility. The CIA and the FBI had infiltrated our organizations, spied on our leaders, perhaps engineered the murders of the Kennedys. They had destabilized Latin America and arranged assassinations of democratic leaders. It had happened in Germany and in Chile, why not in America?

So was the gunfire at Kent State the next shots heard round the world? Was this to be our Krystallnacht? Rumors were flying. Were the student leaders that had been arrested being questioned, or being executed? Was a column of tanks even now rumbling toward Yellow Springs from the National Guard Armory in Xenia? Some people left town, bound for Canada or to "the mountains," wherever that was. Others started plans for defending the town if the attack came. Most of us thought these were extreme reactions, but we all at least gave thought to what we would do, how we would react if we were attacked. How does a non-violent movement resist violence? We were in a conflict against conflict, how could we throw up barricades and take up arms? And if we did not resist, would we simply be marched into the woods and shot, like the Polish army that surrendered to the Russians to avoid bloodshed?

Eventually, of course, the facts came out. Frightened young soldiers, unclear orders, confusion, uncertainty, inexperienced officers. There were investigations, reprimands. The massacre became an incident, then stale news. Kent State reopened and the students returned. There was to be no pogrom. But the last vestiges of innocence, of hope that we would prevail against the establishment, faded and died. Disheartened, disillusioned, The Movement withered away, replaced by the discos and leisure suits of the Seventies.

And yet the four students are still dead, their lives forever unlived. They remain frozen in the memories of their parents and friends, and of old hippies. It is as if they are still there, back in the sixties, still eighteen years old and full of idealism. They've never heard of AIDS or terrorism or eco-collapse. They still don't know that The Movement was a failure, another minor twist in the thread of history. In a strange way, I can almost envy them.

What was it really like to be there that day? I have been to so many demonstrations I can feel again the press of the crowd around me, the warmth of our solidarity, the mixture of anger and defiance as we shout out our chants. There is a freedom, a pride, a mischievous sense in the air. But there is an element of carnival too. It is a social gathering where young hip aware kids may see and be seen. And there is much to see. People are dressed in every imaginable style from military surplus to Victorian lace, from beads and fringe and leather to diaphanous robes. And so many pretty girls, braless and careless in their enthusiasm for The Cause.

And if armed authorities appear, the demonstrators know what to do. There was a well-known poster that showed the technique. You walk up with a smile to the nearest soldier and stick a flower in the barrel of his gun. The symbolism cannot be missed by even the most dense. Who could shoot someone who had just given them a flower?

One thing I have always wondered about the Kent State shooting: when the first teenaged Guardsman aimed his rifle at the chest of a chanting girl and squeezed the trigger to blow a red hole through a tie-dyed shirt and through an ideal, did he sight the shot over the petals of a daisy?

 

And yet the four students are still dead, their lives forever unlived. They remain frozen in the memories of their parents and friends, and of old hippies. It is as if they are still there, back in the sixties, still eighteen years old and full of idealism. They've never heard of AIDS or terrorism or eco-collapse. They still don't know that The Movement was a failure, another minor twist in the thread of history. In a strange way, I can almost envy them.

 

The boyfriend of one of the two girls killed in 1970 said much the same thing at last year's commemoration. He said it seemed to get more difficult as the years went on, as he had a career and children and yet he never knew how his girlfriend's life would have turned out. The sister of William Schroeder who was one of the four killed said much the same thing.

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On May 4th, 1970, John Filo was a young undergraduate working in the Kent State photo lab. He decided to take a break, and went outside to see students milling in the parking lot. Over the weekend, following the burning of the ROTC building, thousands of students had moved back and forth from the commons area near to the hill in front of Taylor Hall, demonstrating and calling to an end to the war inj Vietnam. John decided to get his camera, and see if he could get an interesting picture. He saw one student waving a black flag on the hillside, with the National Guard in the background. He shot the photograph, and feeling that he now had recorded the moment, wandered to the parking lot, where a lot of the students had gathered. Suddenly, G company of the Ohio National Guard opened fire. John thought they were shooting blanks, and started to take pictures.

A second later, he saw Mary Vecchio crying over the body of one the students who had just been killed. He took the picture.

A few hours later, he started to transmit the pictures he had taken to the Associated Press from a small newspaper in Pennsylvania. The photograph won him a Pulitzer.

 

[size=+3]1970[/size]
April 30President Nixon announces the invasion of Cambodia, triggering massive protests on many of the nation's campuses.May 2Ohio National Guardsmen are sent to Kent State after the University's Army R.O.T.C. building is burned down.May 3Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes personally appears on campus and promises to use "every force possible" to maintain order. Rhodes denounces the protesters as worse than brownshirts and vows to keep the Guard in Kent "until we get rid of them."May 4Four students are killed and nine others are wounded when a contingent of Guardsmen suddenly opens fire during a noontime demonstration.July 23Key portions of a secret Justice Department memo are disclosed by the Akron Beacon Journal. The memorandum describes the shootings as unnecessary and urges the Portage County Prosecutor to file criminal charges against six Guardsmen.July 31Attorney General John Mitchell says that both students and Guardsmen apparently violated federal laws and hints that a federal grand jury may be convened "if Ohio authorities do not act."August 3After consulting with top Guard officials, Governor Rhodes orders that a "special" state grand jury be empaneled.October 4The President's Commission on Campus Unrest concludes: "The actions of some students were violent and criminal and some others were dangerous, reckless, and irresponsible." The shootings are branded as "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."October 16The "special" state grand jury exonerates the Guardsmen, but indicts 25 individuals, mostly students, for a variety of offenses that occurred on campus before the shootings.Late October-NovemberDemands for a federal grand jury mount after it is revealed that the "special" state grand jury ignored key evidence and that one of the "special" prosecutors told a newsman he felt the Guardsmen should have shot more students.November 30Assistant Attorney General Jerris Leonard confirms that the Justice Department is reviewing the evidence to determine if a federal grand jury should be convened. Leonard promises a decision before the year is over.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1971[/size]
January 28A federal judge upholds the state's indictments of the students, but orders the state grand jury's report to be expunged from the record and physically destroyed due to its bias.April 30The first major book on the shootings, Kent State: What Happened and Why, by James Michener, is released. Michener says he was unable to uncover proof that there was a conspiracy to fire. However, Michener writes: "It seems likely that some kind of a rough verbal agreement had been reached among the troops" to fire.June 22A conspiracy report written by Peter Davies is submitted to the Justice Department. Davies alleges that there definitely was a conspiracy and that a sergeant, Myron Pryor, started it all by firing a pistol as a signal.August 13Attorney General John Mitchell closes the case, dismissing the conspiracy allegations as not credible and claiming "there is no likelihood of successful prosecutions of individual Guardsmen."October 20A 10,000-signature petition urging President Nixon to overrule the decision is submitted to presidential aide Leonard Garment at the White House.December 8The "special" state grand jury is even further discredited when Ohio officials dismiss charges against 20 of the 25 individuals indicted by the grand jury. Ohio prosecutors claimed they had insufficient evidence to convict any protesters.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1972[/size]
May 4The second anniversary of the shootings passes without any response to the petition.July 6In a letter to the parents of the slain students, Garment says that the new attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, will not reverse Mitchell's no grand jury decision.October 12The parents of the slain students file suit in U.S. District Court in Washington. They ask for a court order compelling the Justice Department to conduct the grand jury investigation.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1973[/size]
April 30The spreading Watergate scandal shakes up the Nixon administration. Elliot Richardson becomes Nixon's third attorney general and Garment is elevated to the position of Nixon's counsel.May 1The parents of the slain students renew their grand jury demands. The students at Kent announce they will resubmit the petition.May 10In a meeting with the student petitioners, K. William O'Connor, a high-level Justice Department official, admits that the Justice Department already has sufficient evidence to prosecute six Guardsmen.May 25In an apparent attempt to pre-empt a reversal of the no-investigation policy by incoming attorney general Elliot Richardson, the White House closes the case a third time.June 13Richardson reopens the case anyway, by announcing the Department is reviewing the Kent State file.June 15The Akron Beacon Journal confirms reports that a House Judiciary subcommittee is quietly investigating the Justice Department's handling of the Kent State investigation.August 3Assistant Attorney General J. Stanley Pottinger announces that the Justice Department will officially conduct a new inquiry. Senator Birch Bayh follows Pottinger's announcement by releasing a letter he received from one of the Guard's company commanders. On the basis of that letter Bayh charges that armed FBI informant Terry Norman may have been "the fatal catalyst" for the tragedy.October 20-November 1Richardson resigns during the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon nominates Ohio Senator William B. Saxbe, a former colonel in the Ohio National Guard, to be his fourth attorney general. Saxbe promises to terminate the new investigation if his nomination is approved by the Senate.November 1-7The parents of the slain students, the student petitioners, and others demand that Saxbe disqualify himself because of several conflicts of interest.December 11In an unusual 8:30 announcement on the eve of Saxbe's confirmation hearings, Pottinger announces that a federal grand jury will be empaneled in Cleveland.December 12Saxbe cryptically promises to keep his hands off the investigation "if they have, as a result of this grand jury, further proceedings."

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1974[/size]
February 8Word leaks out from the grand jury that at least seven Guardsmen invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self- incrimination and refused to testify.March 28The federal grand jury indicts eight Guardsmen on charges they deprived the students of their rights to due process. No conspiracy is alleged, and no indictment is returned against Terry Norman or any Guard officers.April 17The U.S. Supreme Court overturns a series of lower court decisions dismissing civil damage suits filed by the parents of the dead students and the nine surviving victims. The ruling paves the way for a civil trial to be held after the criminal proceedings.October 7-17Attorneys for James A. Rhodes unsuccessfully try to block the release of Rhodes's deposition in the civil case until after the Ohio gubernatorial election. The deposition reveals that Rhodes's attorney, in a move reminiscent of the Watergate cover-up, offered into evidence an incomplete transcript of Rhodes's May 3, 1970, press conference. Among the remarks deleted was a comment by an official that the Guard would resort to shooting if necessary.October 29Opening statements are delivered in the prosecution of the eight Guardsmen.November 5Rhodes is elected governor of Ohio again.November 8Federal Judge Frank Battisti dismisses the criminal charges against the Guardsmen, ruling that the prosecutors failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Battisti suggests the Guardsmen should have been tried instead by state officials.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1975[/size]
May 28A three-month-long wrongful death and injury trial begins. It provides the first opportunity to consider the evidence, five years after the killings.August 27After hearing highly conflicting testimony--and after considerable controversy over rulings excluding and including certain evidence--the jury decides not to award damages to the parents of those killed and the nine surviving students.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1977[/size]
July 29Ignoring pleas from the families of the victims and current KSU students who set up a makeshift Tent City on the practice football field, Kent State proceeds with the construction of a gymnasium annex over a large part of the site of the May 4 confrontation. 192 protesters are removed from the site and arrested. Subsequent protests are similarly unsuccessful.September 12The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati overturns the decision of the 1975 civil jury on the ground that Judge Donald Young mishandled an incident involving jury tampering.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1978[/size]
December 9The second civil trial begins amid rumors that there might be a compromise out-of-court settlement.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1979[/size]
January 4The victims settle out of court. The state of Ohio awards them a total of $675,000, to be split 13 ways, and the defendants sign a "statement of regret." Some victims claim the statement is an apology, but the defendants and their attorneys dispute that.

Bottom of Page[size=+3]1982[/size]
October 4The major litigation officially ends with a Supreme Court decision paving the way for the release of court documents sealed seven years earlier at the request of KSU and Ohio officials.Bottom of Page[size=+3]1990[/size]
May 4KSU dedicates a memorial to "the events of May 4" (not the victims). At the dedication ceremonies, Ohio Governor Richard Celeste apologizes to the families of the four slain students and the nine surviving victims.

 

At a party about 20 years ago I met someone who said that she had been a personal friend of one of those killed, but I forget who it was- I recognized the name when she said it, though. I forget what brought up the subject... heck, this was probably 15 years after it had happened... but she was extremely bitter, almost to the point of tears, talking about it. I don't recall much of the conversation, but she called Rhodes a murderer, and regarded him as the one primarily at fault.