The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State

At the end of April 1970, students at Kent State University in Ohio began to demonstrate against the US invasion of Cambodia, the subsequent deaths of US soldiers, and the massacres of Vietnamese men, women, and children. For many people, the bombing of Cambodia, conducted to defeat Vietnamese rebels who were positioned there, suggested that the war in Vietnam was continuing rather than ending. Moreover, students were also protesting the draft, which mandated military service for the Vietnam War and by and large selected young men from economically and racially disfranchised backgrounds. By May 3, almost one thousand National Guard soldiers had been dispatched to the campus; in retaliation, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps building was set on fire. When Ohio governor James A. Rhodes visited the campus and observed the demonstrators, he said,

We are going to eradicate the problem. ... These people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the Brown Shirts in the communist element and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say that they're not going to take over a campus.

On May 4, students continued with their demonstrations, defying orders to cease, and the day ended with National Guard soldiers firing on them. In a matter of seconds, sixty-seven bullets were unleashed on the protesters; nine people were wounded, and four people — Jeffrey Glen Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer — were killed.

On May 14, 1970, just ten days later, local law enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi, received word that students at Jackson State University, a historically black college and university, were pelting rocks at white motorists on one of the main roads on the campus, a road that was often the site of racial harassment of students by whites. A rumor that Charles Evers, a local civil rights leader and politician and the brother of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and his wife had been killed spread through the campus as well. A dump truck was set on fire, escalating the situation. The police came and were met with rocks and bricks thrown by angry students and locals. They responded by riddling one of the women's dorms with a barrage of bullets — about four hundred, according to an FBI investigation. Two young black men, Philip L. Gibbs, a junior at the school, and James Earl Green, a high school student, were killed in the confrontation.

What happened at Kent State and Jackson State is usually told as examples of the tragedies and the turbulence of student protests in the 1960s and '70s. But they were also important junctures in the history of the American university and indeed of American society. After the killings at these universities, dozens of college presidents in the United States petitioned their state legislators not to curtail but to augment police powers on their campuses. This chapter ponders the irony, then, of how an institution presumably dedicated to the education of young minds could produce the conditions for their possible annihilation. As I will show, the events at Kent State and Jackson State set in motion a series of interrelated processes — including the criminalization of students, the extension of university administration, the use of ideologies of diversity and tolerance against social insurgencies, and the expansion of police forces on campus yards — all of which created this peculiar institution of the current American academy and its particular view of student protest, an institution and a view that have helped to authorize ideological forces and repressive powers that shape our present day.

DEMANDING NEW INSTITUTIONAL AND SOCIAL ORDERS

Think back to the 1960s and '70s student movements and how large the word demand loomed in radical manifestos that called for widespread social change then. In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front of San Francisco State College issued its "Notice of Demands," listing the establishment of "a School of Ethnic Studies" as the number one demand. In 1969, the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition, a student group at the University of California at San Diego, on hearing of the institution's plans to build a new — "Third" — college, responded, "We demand that the Third College be devoted to relevant education for minority youth and to the study of the contemporary social problems of all people." In that same year, African American and Puerto Rican students at the City College in New York issued their "Five Demands," intended to change the university's institutional and intellectual structure to speak to the histories and realities of Puerto Rican and African American students at that institution.

The lists of demands put together by students at San Francisco State, UCSD, and City College inspired similar campus movements across the United States. The SF State demands signaled an interest in the reorganization of institutional life and in the reorganization of knowledge on college campuses and in American universities. Student activists on other campuses followed suit, recognizing that changing the social climate of the university meant admitting more students and faculty of color as part of an effort to change the intellectual climate of the university. Hence student activists called for greater numbers of people of color in universities, along with the creation of curricula that would be relevant for a world riddled by war, racism, sexism, poverty, and colonialism. For the students, to "demand" meant that it was time for a new social and epistemological climate to emerge at American universities and colleges.

As student activists worked to assert their demands as the means to change the university and the larger social world, other social forces responded by trying to reassert authority over the transformation of the academy and the larger world. The US government and university administrations worked to convince campus communities and people outside the university that the administration could best manage the progress and the direction of the university. One strategy was to deploy the category "diversity" against the students and their visions of social justice.

For instance, on June 13, 1970, President Richard Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest in response to the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. Its account of these incidents, titled The Report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, begins by arguing, "The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of our nation." While it locates the causes of campus unrest within the racial divisions at the heart of the nation, the report is overwhelmingly dedicated to constructing students as potential criminals, who — if unchecked — could...