Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
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Date: May 04, 2020 01:39PM
I was tempted to mark this "O/T", but I thought if this doesn't qualify as a reminder of a moral issue, I'm not sure what would.
This is an excerpt from a column a friend of mine wrote on the 40th anniversary. If you are watching Ken Burns' series on the Roosevelts, Clay is one of the talking heads discussing the life of Theodore Roosevelt. He was also in the National Parks series by Burins where the other talking head in that episode is Terry Tempest Williams. So, Mr Jenkinson may have flitted along the edge of your consciousness.
https://bismarcktribune.com/news/columnists/clay-jenkinson/kent-state-forty-years-after/article_890b197a-53b7-11df-ba12-001cc4c002e0.htmlOn 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.