AJOBO: Remembering Kent State 45 Years Later
For people of a certain age, Kent State University is less about its academics and more about 13 seconds in 1970. It represents the place the 1960s went to die, accompanied by four young college students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard at the climax of an intense weekend of protests, arson, robbery, and rabble-rousing in and around the campus.
It was the moment the turmoil and unrest bubbling under the surface and erupting in places like the deep south, Vietnam, and days before the tragedy, Cambodia, came home and touched the lives of American families perhaps even moreso than the thousands of soldiers in Southeast Asia — many of them the same age as the Kent casualties and the Guard soldiers. After all, college was the safe route, the protective hideaway from the military. Parents trusted that their children would be safe in the confines of academia, and I’m sure that the students, no matter how politically active, never expected their own military to turn on them.
Sound familiar?
Kent, Ohio, is a smallish college town about 45 minutes from Cleveland. I grew up about the same distance away in the other direction; my hometown has a branch of Kent just outside the city limits. Many of my classmates, like their parents before them, earned diplomas there. Had I decided to pursue my original plan of a photography major, I would have probably ended up there, too. For more northeast Ohioans, what happened there follow the fact that it’s a scholastic institution; reminders of the tragedy come in the form of tasteless and somewhat offensive comments, like a friend’s father telling me when I was a junior that if I wanted to go to Kent, I’d need “a shirt with a bullseye.” Not cool.
It was, however, impossible to ignore the events of May 4, 1970, growing up, even though I hadn’t been born yet. My parents hadn’t even met. Even so, I developed a morbid fascination with learning about the shootings. Perhaps it was because literally nothing ever happens in northeast Ohio and May 4 was, by defacto, the most interesting thing in my history-obsessed teenage brain. Maybe it was because the residual shock and anger over what happened on that day so close to my hometown had seeped into the well water; there were, and still are, so many questions, conspiracy theories, and an unbelievable lack of closure for everyone involved, even if it was a hairdresser watching it on the news two counties over (my mom).
If you grew up where I did, you knew someone who was directly impacted by what happened at Kent State. Whether it was your parents, older relatives, friends of the family, or even your teachers, someone had been there, knew someone, or seen something. My uncle’s best friend was pals with Allison Krause and her then-boyfriend Barry Levine. They ran in the same circles around Kent, and though my uncle wasn’t a student there, he remembers meeting them at parties. Later, Allison’s murder would be immortalized by Neil Young asking the question “what if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?” in the CSNY anthem “Ohio.”
In college, I wrote a term paper on Kent. It was a chance to put my unholy stockpile of facts and theories to good use. My ace in the hole was an interview with an eyewitness: my eighth-grade English teacher who, 15 years ago, stopped class and took the time to explain what he saw in detail to an ambivalent bunch of preteens. When I spoke with him for the second time, I expected him to gloss over the details and provide me with a few quotes to confirm my thesis outline. After all, enough time had passed and perhaps Kent had faded from memory.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. He recounted in every gory detail what happened and what he saw. How he’d hitchhiked to Kent in his military uniform for an enrollment meeting at Taylor Hall on Monday, May 4. How, when he came out of the building, the Guard was already in formation perpendicular to where he stood and, as he descended the small, sloping hill into the parking lot directly in front and reached the southwest corner, the soldiers turned and fired. How he’d immediately fallen to the ground behind a red VW Beetle and stood up moments later and watched in horror as folks rushed to the victims; two protesters and two bystanders lay dead. The aftermath of death and blood and sirens and a nation arrested in anguish.
After three hours of recounting every detail he so crisply remembered about the events of May 4, he sat in front of a computer screen staring at a photo of James Rhodes, then the governor of Ohio and the man who called in the National Guard, his eyes brimming with tears of anger. Many, including my former teacher, still blame him for the murders of the four. For him, it was the moment he stopped trusting that the government was there to serve and protect. And he was only one of an entire generation that remembers Kent State as being the dead-end of their youth, the split-second in which everything changed. No one expected such brutality, or for Rhodes and other government officials to defend such an indefensible crime.
As much as I know and have learned and have heard about Kent State, I don’t know if I could ever accurately express what it was like to live through the terror of that day, in that place, even though I’ve met many of the flag-waving protesters antagonizing the young soldiers sent by Rhodes to restore order, the families of the students who were killed, and even a few of the other nine students who were injured by bullets.
But I do know what it was like on April 20, 1999, when two students massacred their classmates at Columbine High School. I remember how everything afterward seemed like a 180-degree turn, where school wasn’t safe and my peers were sent home when their pants were too baggy or they came to school in black trench coats. I remember the sense of pervading tragedy in a city hundreds of miles away in much the same ways as my neighbors and family felt for a city minutes up the road on May 4, 1970. It’s how many of us feel now when we turn on the news and see Ferguson or Baltimore.
So, today, take a moment and remember the “Four Dead in Ohio”: Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer, Allison Krause, and Bill Schroeder. Think of those in countries around the world squaring off with corrupt authorities. Think of those in your own hometowns who are affected by tragedy or discrimination in any form, facing forces bigger and more powerful than themselves. And think about what can be done to achieve a peaceful solution and conclusion to this bloody chapter of American history. Because, unfortunately, Kent State isn’t ancient history. It’s alive and well.
(Cover photo via popularresistance.org.)
