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The Kent State massacre by the national guard killing students protesting against Vietnam war
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The Kent State massacre by the national guard killing students protesting against Vietnam war
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Four dead in Ohio
As I recall, after the killings, the majority of Americans supported the government and believed the students got what they deserved.
TIL the girl in the photo (Mary Ann Vecchio) was only 14. Makes the photo even more impactful.
4 dead in Ohio
An iconic, but dark image, hard to image it was only 50’ish years ago
Novelist James Mitchener was shocked at the lack of horror at the shootings among the general public.
And this account of the shootings:
“Across the nation four million students participated in protest activities after the Kent State shootings. Shaken by the wave of protests, Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Cambodia. The rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young quickly released a protest song “Ohio” about the Kent State activities and shootings. Despite the massive student reaction against the shootings, however, campus protest evaporated. Moreover, public opinion came down on the side of the forces of law and order. Nixon won a landslide reelection in 1972, and Ohio governor James Rhodes served an additional two terms.”
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/kent-state
The defining event the [catalyzed the band DEVO](https://www.kent.edu/art/news/remembering-may-4-interview-devos-jerry-casale).
This happened before my time, but this is what I bring up when the folks who are against any kind of gun restrictions go off about defending the people against tyranny. Most of them hate to be reminded that when the Government actually starts shooting citizens historically they’d be cheering the Government on, not defending against tyranny.
I’m 5 miles away. My wife and kids go/went there. My BIL was taking a test on campus when this happened. I even know a national guardsman who was on duty on campus when it happened.
Only two of the students who were killed were actually involved in the protest. Many people don’t realize that 13 students total were shot, and one of these was permanently paralyzed.
Good ole days – says the magas…
Fun fact: it is very likely you’ve seen the above picture with the post behind the girl removed. It really ruins the picture and even the original photographer was ok with that alteration.
I was in high school. I went to a lot of protests against the war. Hell I was getting close to my eighteenth birthday.
After Kent State I was thinking I could just as easily get killed protesting the war as I would participating in it.
https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/kentstate50yearslater/wp-content/uploads/sites/293/2020/05/Miller-and-May-4-jeffrey_bird-KSUPIC.jpg
That’s Jeff Miller in the two tone shirt to the far left. Giving them two handfuls of protest. They shot him in the mouth.
Shouldn’t have happened and was terrible.
Every time I see this, I have to wonder if people realize the national guard is not the regular US Military.
The shooters were mostly normal people who received very little training.
Of course they either got scared or mad and shot people.
I am regular military. I would be very cautious around Guardsmen with guns and live ammo. I would go as far to say, I would actively avoid any area that this is even a possibility. At best some kid is going to get scared and start shooting, and at worst, they are shit heads with little dick syndrome waiting to let off live rounds. (Not all Guardsmen mind you of course, but it only takes one to kill you.)
NO ONE was ever held accountable. NO ONE.
I learned recently that Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo were there when this occurred. The start of De-volution.
Quote from Jerry Casale
“I had always been making art and music but the events of May 4th and beyond galvanized my creativity, infusing it with an existential anger and urgency that would otherwise not have happened. In short Devo and the idea of De-evolution as a manifesto would not exist without that defining historic trauma I experienced.”
https://www.kent.edu/art/news/remembering-may-4-interview-devos-jerry-casale
The day after the Kent State shootings in 1970, a Gallup poll showed that 58 percent of respondents placed blame for the students’ deaths on the protesters, while just 11 percent blamed the National Guardsmen who shot them.
Tinanmerica square
Would someone mind clarifying the chronology of this photo please? I understand the context and generally the events that unfolded that day, but for all the times I’ve seen this photo I never understood where it stands in time. Had the guardsmen and protesters largely dispersed? Everyone but Vecchio seems to milling around. Was this student’s body just left and the guard bailed or is this immediately following the shot(s)? Always struck me as strange that she appears to be the only one reacting. Thanks in advance.
The photographer that captured this won a Pulitzer prize for this, but the submitted winning photo had the pole above her head manually removed with photo alteration techniques. This birthed the debate, “Should edited photos be eligible to win a Pulitzer?”, which ended up being yes, as long as the fabrication isn’t outright deceptive and serves to enhance the quality and emotion captured. Since then, many Pulitzer winning photographs have been photoshopped for quality, though the best ones use skillful knowledge and application of aperture and exposure to capture the desired effect prior to editing.
Jeffery Miller is the name of the dead young man. May he rest peacefully.
[Eleven people were also bayoneted at the University of New Mexico](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_University_of_New_Mexico_bayoneting_incident)
I’ve seen this photo a thousand times and never noticed the word “Slave” on her T-shirt
**Killed**
* Jeffrey Glenn Miller (age 20): pictured in the OP
* Allison Krause (age 19)
* William Knox Schroeder (age 19)
* Sandra Lee Scheuer (age 20)
**Injured**
* Dean R. Kahler (shot in the back: paralysed for life)
* Joseph Lewis, Jr (shot twice, once in the abdomen)
* John R. Cleary (shot in the chest)
* Donald Scott MacKenzie (shot in the neck)
* Thomas Mark Grace (wounded)
* Alan Michael Canfora (wounded)
* Douglas Alan Wrentmore (wounded)
* James Dennis Russell (wounded)
* Robert Follis Stamps (wounded)
**National guard who fired in “fear for their lives”**
* Sgt. Lawrence Shafer, treated for a bruised arm
In all, 61 shots were fired at students by 28 different guardsmen. In a Gallup poll taken days after the killings, 58% of respondents said that the unarmed students were to blame for being shot during their protest. Just 11% said the National Guard were to blame.
There are millions of right wing voters, and a lot of Congressmen(women) who would look at this as acceptable. Stop wringing your hands, get off your asses, and vote.
People talk about how bad the country’s doing today,and it is. But the sixties and early seventies were no picnic. Riots, war, cities burning,assassinations etc. I was in elementary school but I remember pretty clearly.
It’s strange that this is blurred out when it was in my HS history book.
Just to add, the parents of one of the victims, who personally had no involvement in the protest whatsoever and was just walking to class, got hordes of hate mail from across the country accusing their son of being flagrantly unpatriotic, saying he deserved worse, or accusing them of raising a traitor to their country.
The moral of the story is: American Conservatives have always been hypocritical pieces of human trash
Star Trek actor John de Lancie was a key witness and pushed for accountability. He made it all the way to the White House demanding justice.
He talks about it at 33:00 minutes in this video:
https://youtu.be/NbwXI5vlyJw?si=CH1XsvrdAiwdLpTJ
Less than two weeks later, another mass shooting took place on a US college campus. At Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) , an HBCU, local law enforcement and the highway patrol fired over 400 rounds at a dormitory following a series of protests. Law enforcement killed 2 people and injured 12 others. There’s no iconic photo, and the incident receives very little attention.
I had a coworker say that if the government turned tyrannical that the national guard would side with the people, I pointed to this, the Ludlow massacre and the battle of Blair mountain, he still was adamant the guard would protect us 🙄
I remember that… I was graduating from high school in 1970 and thought the world was falling apart. JFK, Robert Kennedy, MLk, Kent State massacre, and I was being classified as 1A. My cousin had been killed in action in Vietnam in 68. Scared the shit out of me.
I’ve met and spoken with the young women in the photo and she told me that her reaction at that moment was from realizing the the guy on the ground (who she had been seeing) no longer had a face. Apparently the shot went in the back of his head and came out the front.
She left her home (I guess at that age she would be classified as a runaway) and was kind of hanging out in the Kent area, living where she could find space and just kind of chilling with the scene.
Many of the guardsmen involved in the shooting came from a small town just up the road where I lived for a number of years, Garrettsville, Ohio (and the surrounding area). Some of them still live there. Their sentiment at the time was that the kids were “commies” that deserved it and many of them have no remorse to this day. Unsurprisingly that town became Trump central.
His name was Jeffrey Miller. He lived off campus in a house with his friends. He played the drums and loved rock music. He had a little brother who is still alive today. Most of all, Jeff seemed like a person who really cared about other people. He was part of the protests because he wanted young people to stop being forced to kill strangers overseas. He gave a shit. [Here is a photo taken 3 weeks before he died, taken by girls who gave him a ride home from a concert in Cleveland.](https://www.kent.edu/today/news/jeffrey-miller-snapshot-time) I like to remember him like that.
[one of the most haunting works of art ever was produced in response to it.](https://youtu.be/YdVMGKOFIwY?si=lIOCStkgXWoNND9U)
I went to Kent. One day (around 2002), during our Sociology 101 class, we knew we were going to watch a documentary on the massacre. It was a large class in an auditorium. So many of us expected to be multitasking while watching it (we were all pretty young and that’s where a lot of our mentalities were during that time).
You could’ve heard a pin drop in the auditorium by the end of the film. Our professor was one of the ones in the documentary responding to one of the first shot. What a horror.
*ETA year for clarity
Just remember that 60 percent of the public supported the troops and blamed the students for their own massacre.
That happened the day I was born