[3 articles]
We Kill Our Own The 40th Anniversary of the Kent State Massacre
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/05/01/we-kill-our-own-%E2%80%93-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-kent-state-massacre/
May 1, 2010
by Chuck Palazzo
On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, in the city of Kent, Ohio,
members of the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds over a period of
13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of
whom suffered permanent paralysis. These were unarmed college
students who were exercising their constitutional rights to speak
their mind, to demonstrate peacefully, and to protest openly against
the then recent incursion by US combat forces into Cambodia.
Richard Nixon had been elected President in 1968. He promised to end
the Vietnam War. Instead of doing so, he was part of the cover-up of
the My Lai massacre and freed Lt. Calley, stating that Calley had
"served enough time." The premeditated murder of over 500 unarmed
civilians, many of whom were elderly, women and children was hushed
up by our government the murderer himself freed after serving only
1 day at the Ft. Leavenworth prison and transferred to serve house
arrest upon orders given by Nixon.
On December 1st, 1969, the Selective Service of the US held a lottery
to determine the order of draft into the Army for the Vietnam
War. This was the first draft lottery instituted since World War II.
On Thursday, April 30th, 1970, President Nixon announced the attack
into Cambodia using the justification of "a necessary response to
North Vietnamese aggression". A promise to end the Vietnam War? A
campaign promise that was yet another lie committed by this
pathological lying and criminal US President. Just one of many that
eventually forced Nixon to resign, the only United States President
to do so, after impeachment hearings had commenced in 1974.
On Friday, May 1st, 1970, a peaceful demonstration with about 500
students was held at Kent State. The Cambodian Incursion, the draft
lottery, the continued escalation of the Vietnam War all issues
being protested against. The crowd dispersed at 1 PM to attend
classes, but not until another rally was planned for May 4th. As
peaceful, symbolic protests continued, one student burned a copy of
the US Constitution. Another burned his draft card.
During the evening of May 1st, 1970, trouble occurred around midnight
as people left a bar and began throwing beer bottles at cars and
broke downtown store fronts in Kent. This crowd was made up of
several outsiders and a handful of students all of whom were indeed
angered by the escalation of the war. The police intervened and they
restored order.
On Saturday, May 2nd, 1970, the Mayor of Kent declared a state of
emergency and asked the Ohio Governor to send the National Guard to
Kent to "help maintain order". The National Guard arrived in town
that evening to find a fire had been started by an arsonist at an
unoccupied and scheduled to be demolished building. The National
Guard made numerous arrests and used tear gas as a large
demonstration occurred at the Kent State campus and near to that same building.
On Sunday, May 3rd, 1970, Ohio Governor Rhodes called the protestors
un-American and referred to them as revolutionaries set on destroying
higher education in Ohio. "They're worse than the brown shirts and
the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes,"
Rhodes said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in
America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained,
militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."
Rhodes can be heard in the recording of his speech yelling and
pounding his fists on the desk. These were students exercising their
right to protest and to be heard. Vigilantes? More of the paranoia
exhibited by our government and its leaders.
During the day some students came into downtown Kent to help with
cleanup efforts after the rioting, which met with mixed reactions
from local businessmen. Kent's Mayor Satrom, under pressure from
frightened citizens, ordered a curfew until further notice.
Around 8:00 p.m., another rally was held on the campus Commons. By
8:45 p.m. the Guardsmen used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and the
students reassembled at the intersection of Lincoln and Main Streets,
holding a sit-in in the hopes of gaining a meeting with Mayor Satrom
and Kent State President White. At 11:00 p.m., the Guard announced
that a curfew had gone into effect and began forcing the students
back to their dorms. A few students were bayoneted by Guardsmen.
On Monday, May 4, a protest was scheduled to be held at noon, as had
been planned three days earlier. University officials attempted to
ban the gathering, handing out 12,000 leaflets stating that the event
was canceled. Despite this, an estimated 2,000 people gathered on the
university's Commons, near Taylor Hall. The protest began with the
ringing of the campus's iron Victory Bell (which had historically
been used to signal victories in football games) to mark the
beginning of the rally, and the first protester began to speak.
Fearing that the situation might escalate into another violent
protest, Companies A and C, 1/145th Infantry and Troop G of the
2/107th Armored Cavalry, Ohio Army National Guard (ARNG), the units
on the campus grounds, attempted to disperse the students.
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 protesters launched a volley of rocks toward the
Guard's line, too distant to have any effect, to chants of "Pigs off
campus!" The students lobbed the tear gas canisters back at the
National Guardsmen, who wore gas masks.
When it was obvious 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 weapons, began to advance upon the hundreds of
protesters. As the guardsmen advanced, the protesters retreated. The
guardsmen pursued the protesters and the protesters showed signs of
retreat, as they waited motionless for the end of the protest. Here
they remained for about ten minutes. During this time, the bulk of
the students congregated off to the left and front of the guardsmen.
Others were scattered between Taylor Hall and the Prentice Hall
parking lot, while still others perhaps 35 or 40 were standing in
the parking lot, or dispersing through the lot as they had been
previously ordered.
The guardsmen generally faced the parking lot which was about 100
yards away. At one point, some of the guardsmen knelt and aimed their
weapons toward the parking lot, then stood up again. For a few
moments, several guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be
talking to one another. The guardsmen appeared to be unclear as to
what to do next. They had cleared the protesters from the Commons
area, and many students had left, but many stayed. At the end of
about ten minutes, the guardsmen began to retrace their steps back up
the hill toward the Commons area.
At this point, at 12:24 p.m., a number of guardsmen at the top of the
hill abruptly turned and fired their M1 Garand rifles at the
students. In all, 29 of the 77 guardsmen claimed to have fired their
weapons, using a final total of 67 bullets. The shooting was
determined to have lasted only 13 seconds, although a New York Times
reporter stated that "it appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for
perhaps a full minute or a little longer." The question of why the
shots were fired remains widely debated.
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 regarding 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."
The shootings killed four students and wounded nine. Two of the four
students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated
in the protest, and the other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox
Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of
their deaths. Schroeder was also a member of the campus ROTC chapter.
Of those wounded, none was closer than 71 feet to the guardsmen. Of
those killed, the nearest (Miller) was 265 feet away, and their
average distance from the guardsmen was 345 feet.
This week, we continue to seek the truth of exactly what happened at
Kent State. Noted filmmaker and activist, Michael Moore will be
broadcasting live, via his website, the Kent State Truth Tribunal
which started yesterday in Kent, Ohio.
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/30-6
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Another very sad chapter in American History. No matter what the
tribunal uncovers, absolutely nothing will bring back the students
who were killed. America and its National Guard murdered innocent
students that day in 1970. American citizens who were merely
exercising their constitutional rights to express their concerns
regarding our involvement and escalation of the Vietnam War.
--------
Kent State Truth Tribunal To Open its Doors to Witnesses of 1970
Student Killings at Protest Over Invasion of Cambodia
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/30-6
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2010
CONTACT: Kent State Truth Tribunal
Karmen Ross, [email protected] 707-813-0226 or
Riptide Communications 212-260-5000
Michael Moore to Broadcast First American Truth-Seeking Initiative
Livecast on Internet
KENT, Ohio - April 30 - On May 1, 2010 the Kent State Truth Tribunal
will launch a four-day truth-seeking initiative that will examine the
deaths and injuries of student protestors at a 1970 campus rally over
the invasion of Cambodia. Dozens of witnesses and participants are
scheduled to share their accounts over the first four days of May,
some for the first time. The testimonies will be videotaped and
broadcast live on filmmaker Michael Moore's website.
On May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed
students protesting America's invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam
War. In a day that changed America, four students were killed and
nine wounded as they demonstrated against the land invasion. The
incident triggered national outrage in a country already divided. In
response to the Kent State shootings, more than four million students
rose up in dissent across 900 campuses, generating the only
nationwide student protest in U.S. history. Fearing civil unrest,
President Nixon was taken to Camp David for his protection.
The Ohio National Guard has never publicized the findings of its
investigation of command responsibility for the shootings. And
importantly, there has never been a public inquiry to hear, record
and preserve the stories of those directly impacted by Kent State.
"Kent State figures prominently in recent American history yet there
has never been a full account of what took place on the day of the
shootings," said Laurel Krause who was 15 years old when her older
sister Alison was cut down by a Guardsman's bullet. "We hope the Kent
State Truth Tribunal will provide an opportunity for the many
individuals affected by the shootings to share their truth and come
to a collective understanding of what took place on this day that
changed America," she added.
Forty years later, family members of those killed have initiated the
Kent State Truth Tribunal to preserve and honor the stories of those
whose lives have been touched by this tragedy. The Truth Tribunal
will generate the only comprehensive historical record and live
archive of the Kent State massacre. The archive will be housed at the
prestigious New York University Tamiment Library for viewing by the
public http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/.
The tribunal will take place on four consecutive days, mirroring the
events of 1970, and held at Franklin Square Deli Building, corner of
Water & Main Streets, 110 S. Water Street, in downtown Kent, Ohio on
May 1, 2, 3 & 4, 2010. The video accounts will be recorded by
award-winning filmmaker Emily Kunstler. The livecast is the first
real-time broadcast of a truth-seeking initiative of this kind and
will air on www.MichaelMoore.com from 10am-7pm daily.
Organizers have invited participants and witnesses to the events of
May 4th 1970 and others who were present on campus and in the
community including protesters, Ohio National Guardsmen, Ohio State
officials, local residents, students, family members and others who
were affected by the shootings.
For more information, visit: http://www.truthtribunal.org
--------
Kent State: Forty Years After
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/news/columnists/clay-jenkinson/article_890b197a-53b7-11df-ba12-001cc4c002e0.html
By CLAY JENKINSON
April 29, 2010
(This is the first of two columns about Kent State and its aftermath.
Next week, Clay Jenkinson will contrast Kent State with Gov. William
L. Guy's handling of the ABM Missile Site protest in North Dakota on
May 16, 1970, less than two weeks after the shootings in Ohio.)
Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State incident. On May
4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired directly into a crowd of
students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The Guard was on
campus in response to student anti-war protests. On April 30, 1970,
in a televised address to the nation, President Richard Nixon had
announced that he had authorized the invasion of Cambodia, Vietnam's
southwestern neighbor. More than a 100 American campuses erupted in
protest at the widening and deepening of the war in Vietnam.
Kent State was unique only in the mayhem that followed.
The shootings at Kent State began at 12:24 p.m. Guardsmen fired 67
bullets in 13 seconds. Four students were killed, nine wounded. The
students were unarmed. Two of the four students killed, Allison
Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest, but the
other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, merely had been
walking from one class to the next when the mayhem occurred.
Schroeder, in fact, was a member of the campus ROTC chapter.
In the dark and eerie aftermath of Kent State, the largest student
strike in American history overwhelmed the nation's college and
university campuses. More than 4 million students and faculty members
joined the strike nationwide. 450 college campuses closed, some of
them for the remainder of the spring semester. On May 9, more than
100,000 angry protestors marched on Washington, D.C., partly in
response to Kent State. Nixon speechwriter Ray Price said, "The city
was an armed camp," and the atmosphere felt like civil war. In one of
surrealist moments of the national crisis, Nixon, sleepless and
haunted by the unrest, ventured out alone into the streets at 4:15
a.m. on May 9. The president wandered into a vigil being held by 30
dissident students at the Lincoln Memorial. There, according to
Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow, Nixon "treated them to a clumsy
and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward
attempt to display his benevolence."
Many good Americans of all political affiliations felt that the
country was coming apart in May 1970.
The most potent and enduring symbol of the Kent State Massacre is a
photograph taken just after the shootings. It is one of the great
photographs of the 20th century. John Filo, a senior photojournalism
major at Kent State, was working in the darkroom when he heard rifle
shots. He rushed out in time to take a black and white photograph of
14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio, kneeling over the body of
Jeffrey Miller, her arms outstretched in agony. James Michener called
her "the girl with the Delacroix face." The photograph was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize.
My parents were so upset over the Kent State shootings that my father
never really got over it. I was 15 years old. As soon as it was
published, we ordered James Michener's outstanding "Kent State: What
Happened and Why?" and took turns reading it. Although Michener makes
it clear that there was fault and provocation on both sides, my
father just couldn't understand how firing live bullets into a crowd
of students could ever be justified period. It is clear from all
subsequent studies of the incident, official and unofficial, that the
Guardsmen were in no danger. The protestors were armed only with
epithets and a few rocks, and they were so completely mingled with
innocent university students moving from one class to another that it
was impossible to determine who was a threat to public order and who
was just trying to get to chemistry lab. The four slain students were
standing at an average distance of 345 feet from the nearest
Guardsman, and the closest, Jeffrey Miller, was fully 265 feet away.
The Vietnam War had come home to the American heartland. Now, as my
father saw it, we weren't just killing an enemy we didn't understand
in a faraway jungle on the other side of the world, but gunning down
our own college students who were observing their First Amendment
rights to protest what they regarded as a pointless and unjust war.
Forty years have passed.
I don't blame the individual Guardsmen who fired those rounds from
their M-1 rifles that day. They were young, frightened, poorly
trained, and exhausted. They had been redeployed to the campus
directly from Cleveland, where they had spent the previous days
trying to restore order during a tense and bloody Teamster's strike.
Their nerves were jangled and what they needed more than anything
else was sleep. They were put into an impossible situation by their
superiors, including a strategically impossible situation at the
bottom of a hill on the Kent State campus, from which any retreat
looked like ... well, a retreat.
But I do blame the officer(s) who gave the order to shoot, and who
put bullets in those guns.
And I blame Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes for ordering the National Guard
to the Kent State campus and then enflaming an already volatile
situation by publicly calling the protesters "un-American." At a news
conference on May 3, Rhodes declared that the protestors were bent on
destroying higher education in Ohio. "They're worse than the brown
shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the
vigilantes," he said. "They're the worst type of people that we
harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest,
well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled
in America."
At the time of these incendiary and patently absurd
pronouncements, Rhodes was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. He
had decided that his best prospect for winning the Republican primary
on May 6, 1970, was to take a hard line on the anti-war movement. Had
there been no pending election, Rhodes might have responded to the
disorders at Kent State with good sense rather than inflammatory denunciations.
Just a few weeks ago, on Feb. 23, 2010, a 17-acre portion the Kent
State campus was added to of the National Register of Historic Places
as the Kent State Shooting Site.
Some time this year I'm going to visit the site.
--
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt Center scholar at Dickinson
State University, as well as Distinguished Scholar of the Humanities
at Bismarck State College. He can be reached at [email protected] or
through his website, Jeffersonhour.org.)
.
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