Kent State University, 1970
‘Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/we’re finally on our own/this summer I hear the drumming/four dead in Ohio’. So Neil Young immortalized the most notorious campus shooting in the history of the United States. The US public had discovered that they had been misled by President Lyndon Baines Johnson about the scale of the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and students were infuriated when the policy allowing college students to defer being drafted until after university was ended. In May 1970, students from Kent State University, Ohio, joined widespread protests against the Vietnam War, and specifically America’s bombing of Cambodia.
Richard Nixon had been elected president in 1967 on the promise that he would end the Vietnam War, so news of the My Lai Massacre and the bombing of Cambodia was met with fury. Kent State had been protesting the war since 1966, and on May 1st 1970, 500 students met for a rally. Rocks and bottles were thrown at the police and bonfires were lit. The National Guard were called in, as protests continued, a building was burnt down, and fire-fighters disrupted. The Governor of Ohio called the students ‘the worst type of people that we harbor in America’.
On May 4th, the National Guard used tear gas against the protestors, which proved ineffective and merely encouraged students to fling rocks at the aggressors. The National Guard advanced on the group with rifles and bayonets, but when the protest would still not be quashed, they opened fire for 13 seconds, unleashing 67 bullets which killed 4 and injured 9. The National Guard, and Nixon by proxy, were widely condemned, and the killings served to make the Vietnam War yet more unpopular. In the aftermath, Nixon began withdrawing troops, and increased protests and strikes closed many universities across the country.