LOOKING BACKWARD

"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming;
We're finally on our own.
This summer, I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio."

--Neil Young, "Ohio," 1970

"Find the cost of freedom,
Buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you;
Lay your body down."

— Stephen Stills, "Find the Cost of Freedom," 1970

On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced on national television that American troops were being sent into Cambodia to destroy National Liberation Front (Vietcong) strongholds and thereby shorten the Vietnam War. Many Americans, especially students on college campuses, saw Nixon's decision not as a legitimate and necessary act to wind down a worthwhile, if awkward, war, but as an illegal invasion of a neutral country that would inevitably widen an illegitimate war. As a result, the campus-centered antiwar movement, which had been relatively inactive for the several months following its local and national marches and rallies of the previous fall, burst into action again by the next morning.

At Kent State University in Northeastern Ohio, a group of graduate students in history calling itself World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (WHORE) organized an anti-Nixon "bury the Constitution" rally for May Day. The students buried the document they said Nixon had murdered by his unilateral and illegal decision, demanded that the KSU administration condemn Nixon's behavior, and pledged to meet again in front of the Liberty Bell on the campus commons at noon on Monday, May 4, to discuss the administration's response.

That night, a combination of warm weather, visiting motorcycle gangs, and alcohol led to the decision of the Kent mayor to close all bars for fear of a raucous downtown crowd. The result of this was to add hundreds of drinkers and sports viewers to the already-large numbers of indignant and restless young people in the streets. This and continued student outrage over Nixon's Cambodia decision led to the confrontation of perhaps a thousand young campus and "street" people with local police and the breaking of windows throughout much of the business district of downtown Kent. By the afternoon of the following day, the Kent mayor was nervous enough about continued unrest to set a curfew in town and assent to the suggestion of Ohio governor James A. Rhodes that the Ohio National Guard be called in. The Guard arrived in Kent early on Saturday night, May 2, just as an old World War II barracks used as a campus ROTC building was set afire (and burned to the ground), apparently as an antiwar statement.

The following morning, an angry Governor Rhodes came to Kent to inspect the damage and hold a press conference, at which he delivered a strongly worded warning to student protestors. Later in the day, a group of Kent State faculty members met and drew up a resolution expressing distress with President Nixon's invasion announcement, condemning Rhodes's inflammatory statements, and questioning the morality of teaching as usual while the campus remained under armed occupation by an outside military force, the Ohio National Guard. That evening, Guardsmen dispersed a peaceful sit-in near campus with tear gas and bayonets. Governor Rhodes's comments and the Guard's behavior combined to produce growing hostility between students and Guardsmen, the latter already tired and tense from patrolling highways during a truckers' strike. The explosion came the next day, Monday, May 4.

Some students recalled that there was a rally scheduled for noon on the fourth. Others were reluctant to attend classes while the tanks and bayonets of the Guard remained on campus. Many had seen the "injunctions" banning all rallies, signed by the dean of students and the student body president and posted around campus overnight. Some students may have seen such a ban as an unconstitutional act. Others returning from weekends at home had neither seen the "injunctions" nor perhaps had even heard about them and the weekend's excitement. But all could see the Guard occupying the campus, and that sight apparently motivated many previously indifferent students to come to the planned rally. Therefore, the rally intended originally as a simple continuation of the protest of the Cambodian invasion decision became, by noon of May 4, a widespread and more immediate student protest against the presence of the Guard on campus. This protest only intensified when the troops tried to disperse the crowd gathered by noon on the campus commons.

When the students ignored dispersal orders delivered by megaphone by a Guard officer, the Guard moved in with tear gas and scattered the crowd, marching in the process over Blanket Hill and down to a football practice field behind Memorial Gym. This maneuver first resulted in a standoff, with the Guard backed up against a chain-link fence while some students screamed insults and threw rocks, many standing in Prentice Hall parking lot. At one point, some of the troops huddled; and at another, some actually half knelt facing the students with their rifles aimed. Neither activity altered the behavior either of those students in the parking lot engaged in harassing the Guard or of the main crowd of students regrouped on Blanket Hill to observe the confrontation. (A few students played "catch," picking up smoking tear gas canisters thrown at them by the troops, but against the wind, and throwing them back to the troops with the wind at their backs.)

Then perhaps twenty minutes after the start of the troop movements, the Guardsmen began to march back toward Blanket Hill, presumably returning to the commons. They climbed past their harassers in the parking lot and ignored the crowd of students on Blanket Hill itself. However, when they reached the crest of the hill near a structure known as the Pagoda, the troops suddenly swung around to form a line between the Pagoda and Taylor Hall, Kent State's journalism and architecture building, faced the students they had just passed, and raised their rifles to firing position. Some Guardsmen did not fire at all. Others fired into the air. Still others, however, particularly some members of Troop G, fired downhill in the direction of Prentice parking lot.

The fusillade lasted thirteen seconds. It ended when a Guard officer ran up and down the troop line, hitting the men over their shoulders to make them stop firing. The troops then turned again and marched back down to the commons. They left behind one dead, three dying, one paralyzed, and eight less seriously wounded students — almost all of them in the parking lot.

Shortly after the shootings, students regrouped on the commons, and the Guard commander threatened another attack if the students did not disperse. They finally did, but only after a tiny group of faculty, led by geology professor Glenn Frank, pleaded with them to do so, assuring the students that justice for the...