Kent State remembers shootings May 5, 2005
By MARILYN MILLER Knight Ridder Newspapers KENT, Ohio � Most Americans old enough to remember President John F. Kennedy's assassination can recall what they were doing or where they were when it happened. But the sister of one of the four students slain at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, told about 500 onlookers Wednesday that probably only a handful of people remember what they were doing when those shootings occurred during a Vietnam War protest. Nancy Tuttle remembers. She was in Lawrence, Kan., with a month-old boy. Her brother, William Schroeder, was one of the four killed. Barry Levine, who was the boyfriend of Allison Krause, also remembers. She died in his arms after being shot while running through a campus parking lot. The Victory Bell at the Commons at Kent State University rang 15 times at 12:24 p.m. Wednesday in honor of the students killed and wounded at Kent State and 10 days later at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Killed at Kent State were Schroeder, Krause, Jeffrey Miller and Sandra Scheuer. Nine others were wounded. At Jackson State, two students were killed: James Earl Green and Phillip Gibbs. Turnout Wednesday for the 35th anniversary of the Kent State shooting was relatively light. People drifted into and out of the audience that listened to speeches delivered over three hours. Banners were displayed on the side of a fenced-in area that blocked off a construction area. The signs included: "Carry On the Struggle, March On" and "Casualties of War; The Cost of Freedom" and "Kent State, unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable and unforgettable." The theme of this year's commemoration was "Tell Me Father, Did They Aim?" � a quote from a telegram sent by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary to then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover the day after the shootings. An anonymous poem, Who killed Allison and Why?, was read aloud. It laid out the positions of townspeople, teachers, the mayor, guardsmen, Gov. James Rhodes and President Richard Nixon on the shooting. In the poem, no one took the blame: The townspeople felt the protesters were bums and needed to be taught a lesson, the teachers thought the students' opinions should be written and not heard, the governor said "not on my watch," and the guardsmen said they were "just doing what they were told." Family members and friends of the four slain Kent students shared their views. "Stay home, Billy, stay home," Tuttle said she had pleaded in her last conversation with her brother. "He never did listen to me anyway," she said of her 6-foot-2 younger brother. "My brother's life was taken away � all his creativity, ambition and intelligence was lost. I lost him to history, and his history became mine." Russell Miller, Jeffrey's brother, talked about the insight his brother had even at age 16, and he urged today's students to maintain balance in their lives. He described war as senseless and said the May 4 protest contributed to shortening the Vietnam War. Mike Alewitz, Scheuer's friend, said he came not to mourn but to honor his friend. "When we act together, human solidarity can defeat corporate greed," he said. "Don't let them trivialize what we did at Kent State and Jackson State." A former guardsman, Chad Salamon, 25, of Ravenna, Ohio, spoke out against the war in Iraq. He spent six months in Iraq and said he learned firsthand that it is a "pointless conflict.'' When they approve a policy that replaces debt and destruction, then I will support our leaders." The May 4 Task Force, which organizes the annual commemoration, ended the event with a performance by the Waterband, a local band, singing the May 4 anthem "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. An anti-war protest sponsored by the Portage Community Peace Coalition and the Kent State Anti-War Committee followed the commemoration. About 200 people marched peacefully from the campus site to downtown Kent. http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050505/NEWS/505050393/1024 ===================================================================== The Kent State Shootings, 35 Years Later [FOTO: Detail from the cover of 'Thirteen Seconds.' The iconic photo was splashed across U.S. newspapers after four students were killed by National Guard members at a protest on campus in 1970.] May 4, 2005 � Writer Philip Caputo returns to Kent State, 35 years after he covered the shootings there as a young Chicago Tribune reporter. His new book, Thirteen Seconds, searches for meaning in the violence. - - - C U T - - - C U T - - - C U T - - - In the spring of 1970, I was a 28-year-old general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, three years out of the United States Marine Corps, with which I had served a tour of duty in Vietnam. In March, the paper had sent me to cover a student protest at the University of Illinois in downstate Champaign-Urbana. The campus demonstration had become a fixture of American college life, replacing the pep-rally and the panty-raid. Compared with those that had occurred in previous years at such incubators of anti-war rage as the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Columbia and Berkeley, the one at U. of I. was fairly tame. A leftist student group calling itself the Radical Union staged a sit-in to protest military recruitment on campus as well as recruitment by corporations with ties to the defense industry, most notably General Electric. The demonstrators were also expressing their disagreement with a decision by university authorities to bar William Kunstler, the celebrity lawyer who'd defended the "Chicago Seven" after the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago in 1968, from speaking at the school. On March 2, some eight hundred students ranged through the campus, breaking windows in the armory and the electrical engineering building, and then proceeded to the business district of Champaign-Urbana, where more windows were sacrificed to the cause. On a scale of one to ten, damages rated about a three: $15,000 to $20,000. Richard Ogilvie, Illinois' governor at the time, ordered National Guard units on standby, state police were called in to assist the campus and city law enforcement departments. A curfew was imposed. Over the next two days, two to three hundred members of the Radical Union and their followers occupied the third and fourth floors of the Student Union building, where the corporate recruiters had been extolling the virtues of their companies to prospective graduates. National Guardsmen were then summoned to the campus, while state troopers cleared the floors of protestors, who marched out peaceably to chants of "Power to the people," though a few took a moment to kick the doors of the rooms in which the recruiters had barricaded themselves. There was a night-time demo at the armory and in front of the home of David Henry, the University president. Police arrested a hundred and forty seven people, all but two for curfew violations, and University chancellor Jack Pelatson later announced the suspensions of nine students. - - - C U T - - - C U T - - - C U T - - - Read the article in full at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4630596 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? 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