What was being protested at kent state

The national guard had been on campus for a few days. They would shoot tear gas into the middle of the crowd and people would throw it back at them. But the young student at Kent State University in Ohio was mistaken. Fifty years ago today, 28 soldiers opened fire on anti-Vietnam war demonstrators, letting loose 67 bullets in just 13 seconds.

Four students were killed, nine wounded, and a fissure exposed in American society that shaped politics into the Trump era. To large parts of the country, the Kent State massacre was a shocking and seminal event — American soldiers gunning down white students was unthinkable until it happened. We were completely shocked. It just never occurred to anyone that they would actually have bullets to shoot people. It was naive. In other parts of the country, the police were killing African Americans protesting for equal rights, including on college campuses before and immediately after Kent State with little attention from the television cameras that gave saturation coverage to the deaths of the white students.

There was a second shock to come for Capecci and other anti-war protesters. Fairly or not, the students were increasingly seen as allied with violence in an age of riots and revolutionary groups including The Weathermen and a faction led by Sam Melville that, between January and the Kent State massacre, committed 4, bombings against federal buildings and corporations in the US, killing 43 people.

Some of the protesters threw the canisters, along with rocks, back at the soldiers. Some of the demonstrators yelled slogans, such as "Pigs off campus!

Eventually seventy-seven guardsmen advanced on the protesters with armed rifles and bayonets. Protesters continued to throw things at the soldiers. Twenty-nine of the soldiers, purportedly fearing for their lives, eventually opened fire. The gunfire lasted just thirteen seconds, although some witnesses contended that it lasted more than one minute.

The troops fired a total of sixty-seven shots. When the firing ended, nine students lay wounded, and four other students had been killed. Two of the students who died actually had not participated in the protests. These shootings helped convince the U. They also included middle and upper-class people, as well as educated people. Rather than causing a decline in protests, the Kent State Shootings actually escalated protests. Many colleges and universities across the United States cancelled classes for the remainder of the academic year in fear of violent protests erupting on their campuses.

Other Ohio institutions followed suit. They found one standing alone, a lilac sprouting from his gun barrel, placed there by another student. While talking a superior officer berated the guardsman for the "silly flower" in his rifle muzzle and took it.

As the officer turned to leave, Allison snatched the flower from his hand. Jeff Miller abhorred violence, at times even criticizing anti-war demonstrators who went too far. But he needed to express his deep opposition to the war in Vietnam. The least he could do, he told a friend, was to be another body at rallies, marches and sit-ins.

His weapons were his voice, his defiance and, on occasion, his middle finger. In a volley that had lasted 13 seconds, four unarmed students were killed, and nine were wounded. Now it was time to trace each of the 67 rounds that were fired. Who shot it? What did it strike? Why was it fired at all? Our 50th anniversary coverage included companion series of stories examining the impact of May 4 on a wide range of important topics such as support for the Vietnam War.

In the half-century since the shootings, Kent State has evolved from distancing itself from this defining moment for the university, to focusing on it and ultimately embracing it fully. While the short-term effects of May 4 were clear, there were long-term effects for Ohio universities and for the students who populated them.

It changed the way universities and their communities interacted. Means, the historian, said he believes the message of Canfora and his fellow students was received. Kent State, he said, "unmoored Nixon," who just days before the shooting had called anti-war protesters "bums," to which a parent of one of the students killed that day famously replied, "My child was not a bum.

When the president's intelligence officials couldn't find evidence that the protest was stirred by outside agitators, Nixon was frustrated. The anger was coming from the students themselves — and it was only growing.

After the shooting, there was a nationwide student strike that saw 4 million turn out in response to the tragedy. As many as , students marched on Washington. Then, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young released their protest song "Ohio" a month later, with the chorus "four dead in Ohio," after seeing the photos of the shooting.

With lyrics that directly called out Nixon, the song was heard by the nation loud and clear. A year after Kent State, the 26th Amendment was ratified, lowering the voting age to 18, which was seen as a massive win for students who until then were too young to vote for politicians who wanted to end the war but were old enough to be drafted.

Canfora, who was shot in the wrist that day 50 years ago and returns to the campus every year to mark the anniversary, is proud to have been there despite the tragedy.

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