Refresher course on Kent state:
Kent State protest activity, 1966–1970[edit]
During the 1966
Homecoming Parade, protesters walked dressed in military paraphernalia with gas masks.
[12]
In the fall of 1968, the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a campus Black Student Organization staged a
sit-in to protest police recruiters on campus. Two hundred fifty black students walked off campus in a successful amnesty bid for the protesters.
[12]
On April 1, 1969, SDS members attempted to enter the administration building with a list of demands where they clashed with police. In response, the university revoked the Kent State SDS chapter charter. On April 16 a disciplinary hearing involving two of the protesters resulted in a confrontation between supporters and opponents of SDS. The
Ohio State Highway Patrol was called and fifty-eight people were arrested. Four SDS leaders spent six months in prison as a result of the incident.
[12]
On April 10, 1970,
Jerry Rubin, a leader of the
Youth International Party (also known as the Yippies), spoke on campus. In remarks reported locally, he said: "The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. They are the first oppressors." Two weeks after that, Bill Anthrell, an SDS member and former student, distributed flyers to an event in which he said he was going to
napalm a dog. The event turned out to be an anti-napalm
teach-in.
[12]
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City officials and downtown businesses received threats, and rumors proliferated that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and university. Several merchants reported they were told that if they did not display anti-war slogans, their businesses would be burned down. Kent's police chief told the mayor that according to a reliable informant, the
ROTC building, the local army recruiting station, and post office had been targeted for destruction that night.
[15] There were unconfirmed rumors of students with caches of arms, plots to spike the local water supply with
LSD, and of students building tunnels for the purpose of blowing up the town's main store.
[16] Satrom met with Kent city officials and a representative of the
Ohio Army National Guard. Because of the rumors and threats, Satrom feared that local officials would not be able to handle future disturbances.
[9] Following the meeting, Satrom made the decision to call Rhodes and request that the National Guard be sent to Kent, a request that was granted immediately.
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There were reports that some Kent firemen and police officers were struck by rocks and other objects while attempting to extinguish the blaze. Several fire engine companies had to be called because protesters carried the fire hose into the Commons and slashed it.
[19][20][21] The National Guard made numerous arrests, mostly for curfew violations, and used tear gas; at least one student was slightly wounded with a
bayonet.
[22]
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Companies A and C, 1/
145th Infantry and Troop G of the 2/
107th Armored Cavalry, Ohio National Guard (ARNG), the units on the campus grounds, attempted to disperse the students. The legality of the dispersal was later debated at a subsequent wrongful death and injury trial. On appeal, the
United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that authorities did indeed have the right to disperse the crowd.
[28]
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The dispersal process began late in the morning with campus patrolman Harold Rice
[29] riding in a National Guard Jeep, approaching the students to read an order to disperse or face arrest. The protesters responded by throwing rocks, striking one campus patrolman and forcing the Jeep to retreat.
[9]
Just before noon, the Guard returned and again ordered the crowd to disperse. When most of the crowd refused, the Guard used
tear gas. Because of wind, the tear gas had little effect in dispersing the crowd, and some launched a second volley of rocks toward the Guard's line and chanted "Pigs off campus!" The students lobbed the tear gas canisters back at the National Guardsmen, who wore
gas masks.
When it became clear that the crowd was not going to disperse, a group of 77 National Guard troops from A Company and Troop G, with bayonets fixed on their
M1 Garand rifles, began to advance upon the hundreds of protesters. As the guardsmen advanced, the protesters retreated up and over Blanket Hill, heading out of the Commons area. Once over the hill, the students, in a loose group, moved northeast along the front of Taylor Hall, with some continuing toward a parking lot in front of Prentice Hall (slightly northeast of and perpendicular to Taylor Hall). The guardsmen pursued the protesters over the hill, but rather than veering left as the protesters had, they continued straight, heading toward an athletic practice field enclosed by a chain link fence. Here they remained for about 10 minutes, unsure of how to get out of the area short of retracing their path: they had boxed themselves into a fenced-in corner. During this time, the bulk of the students congregated to the left and front of the guardsmen, approximately 150 to 225 ft (46 to 69 m) away, on the veranda of Taylor Hall. Others were scattered between Taylor Hall and the Prentice Hall parking lot, while still others were standing in the parking lot, or dispersing through the lot as they had been previously ordered.
While on the practice field, the guardsmen generally faced the parking lot, which was about 100 yards (91 m) away. At one point, some of them knelt and aimed their weapons toward the parking lot, then stood up again. At one point the guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be talking to one another. They had cleared the protesters from the Commons area, and many students had left, but some stayed and were still angrily confronting the soldiers, some throwing rocks and tear gas canisters. About 10 minutes later, the guardsmen began to retrace their steps back up the hill toward the Commons area. Some of the students on the Taylor Hall veranda began to move slowly toward the soldiers as they passed over the top of the hill and headed back into the Commons.
Map of the shootings
During their climb back to Blanket Hill, several guardsmen stopped and half-turned to keep their eyes on the students in the Prentice Hall parking lot. At 12:24 p.m.,
[30] according to eyewitnesses, a sergeant named Myron Pryor turned and began firing at the crowd of students with his .45 pistol.
[31] A number of guardsmen nearest the students also turned and fired their rifles at the students. In all, at least 29 of the 77 guardsmen claimed to have fired their weapons, using an estimate of 67 rounds of ammunition. The shooting was determined to have lasted 13 seconds, although John Kifner reported in
The New York Times that "it appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for perhaps a full minute or a little longer."
[32] The question of why the shots were fired remains widely debated.
Photo taken from the perspective of where the Ohio National Guard soldiers stood when they opened fire on the students
Bullet hole in
Solar Totem #1 sculpture
[33] by
Don Drumm caused by a .30 caliber round fired by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970
The
adjutant general of the Ohio National Guard told reporters that a
sniper had fired on the guardsmen, which remains a debated allegation. Many guardsmen later testified that they were in fear for their lives, which was questioned partly because of the distance between them and the students killed or wounded.
Time magazine later concluded that "triggers were not pulled accidentally at Kent State." The
President's Commission on Campus Unrest avoided probing the question of why the shootings happened. Instead, it harshly criticized both the protesters and the Guardsmen, but it concluded that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."
[34]
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In 2007
Alan Canfora, one of the wounded students, located a static-filled copy of an audio tape of the shootings in a Yale library archive. The original 30-minute
reel-to-reel audio tape recording was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dormitory window overlooking the campus.
[69] At that time, Canfora asserted that an amplified version of the tape reveals the order to shoot, "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!". Lawrence Shafer, a guardsman who admitted he fired during the shootings and was one of those indicted in the 1974 federal criminal action with charges subsequently dismissed, told the Kent-Ravenna
Record-Courier newspaper in May 2007: "I never heard any command to fire. That's all I can say on that." Referring to the assertion that the tape reveals the order, Shafer went on to say, "That's not to say there may not have been, but with all the racket and noise, I don't know how anyone could have heard anything that day." Shafer also said that "point" would not have been part of a proper command to open fire.
[69]
en.wikipedia.org