May 4, 1970 - Kent State. Never Forget

[lastlib]

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Yes. I was on Ohio State's campus.

[marble falls]

2. I was at Akron U's campus about 10 miles away. I will never forget May 4th.

[Diamond_Dog]

3. NEVER FORGET.

My alma mater.

[keithbvadu2]

4. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Four dead in ohio

[electric_blue68]

24. That was an Intense song!

[Bernardo de La Paz]

33. Neil Young wrote that

Young wrote the lyrics to "Ohio" after seeing the photos of the incident in Life Magazine.[3] On the evening that the group entered Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles, the song had already been rehearsed, and the quartet—with their new rhythm section of Calvin Samuels and Johnny Barbata—recorded it live in just a few takes. During the same session, they recorded the single's equally direct B-side, Stephen Stills's ode to the war's dead, "Find the Cost of Freedom".

The record was mastered with the participation of the four principals, rush-released by Atlantic and heard on the radio with only a few weeks' delay (even though the group's hit song "Teach Your Children" was already on the charts at the time). In his liner notes for the Decade retrospective, Young termed the Kent State incident as 'probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning' and reported that "David Crosby cried when we finished this take."[4] In the fade, Crosby's voice—with a tone evocative of keening—can be heard with the words "Four!", "Why?" and "How many more?".[5]

[JT45242]

5. Took history of the Vietnam war at Kent state in 1990

The twentieth anniversary of the shootings made it even more powerful.

The national guard led by a resentful bully whose glory days from high school had passed him by acted as a militarized police force to execute people they didn't like.

Not much has changed in the 53 years. We still don't talk about the massacre at the HBCU that occurred a week or later, Jackson State.

[electric_blue68]

10. I remember that, too. The Then Still Liberal NY Post had it on their Front Page.

[raccoon]

6. Thank you! I was looking to see if someone had posted about this.

That day sticks in my mind more than 9/11/2001.

[jpak]

7. I was in high school dreading the draft when I graduated

This was a true "True Reign of Nixon Terror"

Yup

[electric_blue68]

8. I've been hazy on the actual date But Not The Event itself. I was a HS

Senior in more liberal minded school. So yeah...

[wnylib]

17. The date stays in my mind for 3 reasons.

May 4th was my father's birthday.

A good friend of mine, who was a student at Kent, avoided the shootings by going home a couple days earlier when tensions built up.

My sister later taught at Kent and talked about the memorial recognition given on campus on that date.

[electric_blue68]

20. Well, woah! Those are (particularly the two actually there) darn "good" reasons to remember!

[wnylib]

26. They weren't actually there on the

day of the shootings. May 4, 1970 was a Monday. My friend had gone home to her parents on Friday evening because tensions were building up on campus. The protests were against the news that Nixon had just escalated the war with carpet bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country. My friend knew that the anger and protests would get worse after local law enforcement were called and the governor announced a call up of the Guard. So she went home to her parents for the weekend. News reports from Kent and word from friends of hers still on campus indicated that things were getting much worse, so my friend's parents insisted that she should not go back for classes on Monday. She was not on campus when the shootings happened. But, she knew 2 of the dead students and never went back. She transferred to another school.

My sister was still a college student herself, in PA when the shootings at Kent happened. It was years later, after graduation and then graduate school, that she taught at Kent. So she was not there on the day of the shootings, either.

[FraDon]

30. I was 21 and at Penn State. I was very active in the protest

and drama of the era. Later that week my mother called from Florida in a panic. She'd seen some news and horrific visuals. She was sure if I were among the four dead they would have called her. She was so worried I was among the wounded.

[wnylib]

34. Did she think that you travelled from

Penn to Kent for war protests? It's not like Kent State was a well known school to attract people for protests. Kent is only well known today because of the shootings.

The news about Kent overshadowed so much of what went on across the country in reaction to the bombing of Cambodia, so I don't know if Penn State had its own local protests, but it seems more likely that you would have participated in protests on your own campus or at locations closer to you than an obscure (at the time) college like Kent.

[FraDon]

38. I forgot the punch line.

Mom was hard of hearing. I had to clarify, "not Kent State, Mom, PENN State". It became a family meme for years.

There was total protest at PSU. We were one of over 500 colleges across the country shut down by student protests.

[wnylib]

39. Oh. I can see the confusion.

She must have been really worried.

[Ptah]

9. I was a student at Northwestern.

[murielm99]

31. I was at Valparaiso University.

I tried to explain things to my parents. They thought the students got what they deserved. It was the beginning of the end of my relationship with my parents. They were Democrats, too.

[GreenWave]

11. I. F. Stone was a true investigative reporter

https://kentlink.kent.edu/record=b1632359~S9
His book The Killings at Kent State, How Murder went unpunished is a must read.

Students had walked through a tennis court with the armed National Guard in pursuit. One of the students had a lock and locked the tennis court exit door, so our "defenders" had to go back and around having been outsmarted. THAT is when they started shooting.

Hateful RWNJs started flooded the papers with the students deserved to be killed, and other pre-Faux News hateful rants.

I met IF Stone's granddaughter at Mizzou. Mizzou later got caught in a scandal where the had invested $400,000,000 (several decades ago) in the Apartheid regime of South Africa. The students set up a shanty town in protest. During a cold November night, Bulldozers rolled in and demolished the town. They went across the monuments to the students killed at Kent State, Jackson State and the Orangeburg Massacre. The next day impromptu protest which started out as 1 , eventually became over 90 % of the University population. They were made to fix the monuments, rebuild the shanty town which they could eliminate once they had withdrawn their ill-gotten investment. I am happy to report that all the demands were met. Victory over the RWNJs, Victory!

[wnylib]

19. I remember the comments of people who said

that the students got what they deserved for protesting.

I also remember hearing and reading that some of the students thought the Guard had rubber bullets until they saw people drop to the ground bleeding.

And NONE of the 4 dead students were participating in the protests.

[electric_blue68]

21. Oh, THAT is some story! My dad introduced me to I. F. Stone's writings.

[lastlib]

36. I'll have to look into that book. Thanks for the tip!

Your bit about Mizzou hits close to home for me. As a Missourian,I almost went there for undergrad and did get accepted to their law school after college.

[FakeNoose]

12. An old friend and former classmate of mine was there the day it happened

He was a freshman at Kent State and he took part in the anti-Vietnam protest. A large part of the undergrad enrollment was participating that day. My friend always says it could easily have been him who got shot.

[electric_blue68]

23. Yikes. 🕯️

[bluescribbler]

13. I never will.

I was somewhere in the Pacific, serving aboard a US Navy destroyer when I heard the news. I remember hearing a senior petty officer say, "We should just kill them all," and thinking, wait, what about the right peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances? I think that really was the beginning of my radicalization.

[WhiteTara]

25. It was my eye opening moment as well

I believed that our parents still loved us and that notion was shattered on the spot. I became anti war and that began my first protest march. I've been to so many since then. When * started the Iraq War I was in SF demonstrating and in the crowd, some of my early protest marching friends appeared. We held each other and cried all the way to the end.

Nothing has changed except I am now an apostate.

[lastlib]

41. It was the beginning of mine as well...

...and I was only 12. Later, in high school I read James Michener's book Kent State: What Happened And Why, and together with Nixon's criminal acts in the news, I became even more so.

[bluescribbler]

42. I read that book, too.

I thought he did a fine job, presenting the facts in a balanced way.

[wnylib]

14. A friend of mine was a Kent student at the time.

She went home the Friday before the shootings because tensions were building up. She kept in touch, through friends who had stayed, on what was happening all weekend and missed the shootings on Monday because she stayed home.

I still remember how surprised I was the first time I heard Four Dead in Ohio on the car radio. I was surprised because it was so soon after the shootings, and because the mood and tone of the song were so direct, a firm line in the sand. Anti war protests had been largely a counter culture thing, but now they had gone grimly main stream on radio stations across the country.

[ashredux]

15. I will never forget. This was a turning point in my life.

I was a college student, and during the protest we had after the shootings. The state police formed a line just behind a large gathering on our mall. You could feel the electricity in the air. Before it was over, there was no shooting, but quite a bit of teargas. You don’t forget those thing.

[Paladin]

16. THAT'S the horrifying photo I was expecting to see again, today.

The screaming young lady, kneeling in the dead student's blood.

Godawful incident that helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War.

[H2O Man]

18. Recommended.

[JohnnyRingo]

22. Thank you for remembering.

I was about to post, but you spared me the trouble. It does my heart good to hope the tragedy will not fade away when we're gone.

May 4th 1970 in 24 seldom seen pictures:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/kent-state-massacre

[Kid Berwyn]

27. Four Innocent Lives Lost. The Guilty Murderers Walked Free.

The Howard Zinn Education Project is an excellent resource:

https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/kent-state-massacre/

[MyOwnPeace]

28. I knew the photographer.......

He was a member of the ‘Yearbook Staff’ in high school and NEVER was seen without a camera i his hands at school. He then became a student at Kent State and took those iconic pics. He scrambled from there with the film, took a taxi 150 miles to go to his ‘hometown’ newspaper and get the pics out ‘on the wire’ nationally.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work and ended up with a career with the Associated Press.

[yardwork]

29. I will never forget. The date means more to me than any other date in US history.

[McKim]

32. That Changed Me!

That changed me! I learned something valuable and the nice mask was off the face of “our” government. I became a Leftist Activist and I am still going strong.

[flying_wahini]

35. Nixon was a vile piece of crap, wasn't he?

Still remember this day too.

[lastlib]

37. So touched to read all of these memories!

It profoundly affected me, as it did so many of you, though it took awhile to take hold. I remember seeing Cronkite reporting it on the evening news; I was 12 at the time, in junior high.I think I was a high school junior when I read a Reader's Digest account from James Michener that really turned me, and then a high-school teacher further educated me--I've been a flaming liberal ever since.

"Four Dead in O-Hi-O! How many more?"

for Bill
for Alison
for Sandy
for Jeffrey
for the wounded
for American freedom and justice.

[quaint]

40. Survivors see echoes in today's campus protests (AP)

Kent State is planning a solemn commemoration Saturday, as it does every May 4, with a gathering at noon on the commons, near where troops killed students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder in a 13-second volley of rifle and pistol fire.

Kahler, meanwhile, is keenly watching this new generation of college students demand an end to military action, and wondering if colleges are making some of the same mistakes.

“I question whether college administrators and trustees of colleges have learned any lessons from the ’70s,” Kahler said in an interview at his home outside Canton, Ohio. “I think they’re being a little heavy handed, a little over the top.”

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