In his diary today, Othniel asks us to remember Kent State.
I remember. I remember walking past the student union at the University of Texas early that Monday and seeing Jeff Jones and some of the SDS people sitting on the steps planning a protest of the bombing of Cambodia.
On Sunday, students gathered on the Union patio to burn Nixon in effigy. On Monday, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed by the National Guard. . . .
Don’t forget. At a time when most of the American people were sick to death of the Vietnam war, sick of their children coming home in coffins, sick of fighting the draft, sick of napalmed children – Nixon was expanding the war into another country. By the time the bombing was over, 600,000 Cambodians were dead. The devastation of that once peaceful and independent country by American bombs opened the door for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
That’s what the students at Kent State were protesting. That’s what got four of them killed. Saying, stop, stop, stop this madness.
I remember the armed Guardsmen and police lined up shoulder to shoulder along 19th street. I remember the fear.
I remember sleeping on the mall. Years later, when I was a graduate student in the 80’s, every time I passed the patch of grass where I slept those nights, I remembered.
Then the police began firing tear gas. They went absolutely nuts, even shooting off tear gas inside the Capitol as the students retreated toward campus. The state workers who got gassed were outraged. A lot of people were blinded, being led by those who could still see. We were very inexperienced…. The students retreated to the campus; that evening about 10,000 gathered and discussed building an effective strike for the next day.
On Wednesday, an all-day rally brought about 10,000 to demand that the university be shut down Thursday and Friday and in support of the other demands. As helicopters circled overhead, there were speeches on race consciousness and poetry readings.
[Jeff Jones remembers} Protesters had come prepared for violence and more tear gas, wearing long pants in the May heat, and carrying wet rags or gas masks.
The FBI was on top of the Tower and snipers were on top of buildings between the campus and downtown; that night about 200 riot-equipped police lined up along 21st Street. Demonstrators shouted ‘Pigs Off Campus’ and pushed the police back to 19th Street. According to Jeff Friedman, who accompanied police patrols on Wednesday and Thursday nights: I was told they were under orders to shoot and kill anybody who came off campus. I believed it then and I believe it now…. The word was ‘You stop these people. They do not get on the Austin streets period.’ (Third Coast, April 1985, p. 72).
I remembered the power of the march, filling the streets as far as the eye could see.
Over 25,000 took to the streets in a legal march through downtown in protest of the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State murders.
Law students stayed up all night working on legal briefs to sue the City of Austin for the right to peaceful assembly. They won their case just after the march began and spread the word that the march would be legal as the front of the march reached 16th Street. The march was led by a girl dressed in black, flags and coffins were carried. It was about 13 blocks long and lasted over three hours (Daily Texan, May 9, 1970).
Most of all, I remember the hard hats at work on the construction sites downtown cheering us on. Those blue-collar, short-haired guys cheered us on. That’s when I knew that those who opposed the war were no longer just us America-hating, draft-evading freaks.
May 1970. On May 9, 1970, five days after the Kent State killings, 100,000 Americans marched in Washington DC to protest the war.
The first Marines landed at Da Nang in March 1965.
Five years later, in 1970, the majority of the American people wanted our troops home, now.
Soldiers and veterans of the Vietnam War were organizing against the war effort. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was involved in bitter protests, often throwing back their medals in Washington, D.C..
The impact of the May 1970 student strike on the government was great. On May 8, at the height of the strike, officials in the State Department, the Agency for International Development and the Cabinet vocalized their opposition to the escalation of the war, some of them resigning in protest (Katsiaficas, 1987, p. 152).
In September 1970, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest reported: The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of the nation. This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War. The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric, and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying opposing camps. Campus unrest reflects and increases a more profound crisis in the nation as a whole…If this trend continues, if this crisis of understanding endures, the very survival of the nation will be threatened. (Garth Buchanan and Joan Brackett, Summary Results of the Survey for the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Urban Institute, Sept. 1970, pp. 9-10).
The killing and dying continued for five more years.
The last American soldier was killed and the last Americans were lifted off of the embassy roof on April 29, 1975.
Excerpts from History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988) by Beverly Burr. Chapter 4.
