4 Dead in Ohio – The Kent State Massacre

The Ohio National Guard had killed four students at Kent State on May 4th ‘70. LC3 (the community college I was attending at the time) organized an assembly in the school’s outdoor mall area to discuss the event.

I was on the stage as one of the representatives of our student government. There were several speakers, and a trip to Washington DC was organized and scheduled for that weekend. It was organized in cooperation with Oberlin and Antioch Colleges. Many of us would ride their buses to the demonstration. Yes, Nixon was president, and Rhodes was the guilty governor of OH at the time.

There’s a lot of political misinformation and propaganda concerning the events that prompted the OH National Guard being called in. I’m not going to get into that. There’s been plenty of ‘history’ written on the subject since then. Study it and form your own opinions, remembering that those in power will always try to cover their own asses, blaming the victims wherever they can get away with it.

I didn’t ride out on any of the schools’ chartered buses. I rode to DC with Patty Z. (who I knew from high school) and her friend Val. We slept on the mall at the base of the Washington Monument, surrounded by DC cops and military units.

The demonstration went off as scheduled and without a hitch… that I could see. I don’t know how many demonstrators were there, but I heard that it was at least a hundred thousand, which sounded about right to me.

Afterward, we returned home. Did it do any good? It must have as the antiwar movement was gaining a lot of steam at the time. But much more had to happen before our government gave in and withdrew from Vietnam with its tail between its legs… so to speak. But that didn’t happen for a couple of more years.

Except from My Memoir

–LE