There is no mystery....the press just doesn’t want to tell the whole story.
This small college town had a couple of cops. As things were getting fairly peppy and a lot of weird stuff was happening down on the streets of the town (not even the university)....the mayor got pretty worried. He wanted protection. The campus cops were non-existent, and the local cops could do nothing. The governor? He did the only thing possible....he sent the national guard in.
The punks? They were all being pushed around and led by people who felt they’d just continue to challenge authority and get away with just about everything.
So the day finally came....the challenge authority crowd met up with the state national guard. Some dead students on the ground. Some journalists write a fifty-percent story because they really can’t tell the whole thing.
What happened in the year or two after that? That’s the interesting part. A lot of parents got real scared and felt their kids were in the wrong kind of campus. The state and the administrators were all fearful of a massive curtailment of students.
So all of the trouble-makers were identified, and sent packing. They kept names and when other colleges asked about records....some comments were made. The trouble-makers weren’t going to get free tickets elsewhere.
Campuses across the nation? They all added more cops. Cities with colleges? They went and added more cops. Any hint of trouble? You got lectured and given one chance to straighten up. No college in America today will allow this kind of trouble to repeat. It would be massive destruction if you had twenty kids killed today....with hundred of millions in lawsuits possible....and few colleges could recover from a situation like that.
Hillary: “What difference does it make now?”
I grew up 35 mile from there.
It did not go down the way journalists have painted it.
The Kids were totally out of control. They were attacking the ROTC and then the National Guard when Gov Rhodes called them in..
When they ran out of rocks to throw they commenced to mixing redi crete and pouring it into dixie cups to huck from the dorm windows at the guard.
It was cacophonic chaos.
At some point while under heavy assault the Guard fired warning shots over the heads of the mob.
Sadly what goes up must come down and 4 kids that were not part of the mob were hit with the stray bullets.
One of them Sandra Lee Scheuer grew up just a few mi from me.
National Guard 4, Kent State 0: Final
I've debated with others on this forum whether or not US troops would fire on American citizens if ordered to do so by the 0bama regime. Kent State always comes to mind. Even if troops have no intention of doing so, when armed confrontation occurs in tense situations, the outcome is never certain.
15 60 75~The New Matchbox Blues
I was a college student in May 1970.
I joined the national guard in May 1971.
Those were some strange days, indeed they were.
I am surprised that nobody ever notices that "protests" of whatever nature or extent are never really "peaceful" They inevitably become a riot.) (Look at Seattle's recent Commie Day celebration.)
Many more should’ve been shot and taken out this world. they were violent, unreasoning, anarchist thugs - PERIOD. They had been terrorizing the campus and the town for days, destroying property and threatening school administrators with the vilest obscenities imaginable. They doused trees on campus with gas and torched them and fired bombed the ROTC building, gutting it.
There is not a better example of domestic terrorists, and there is only one thing to be done with them in the interest of self-preservation.
I was in Vietnam in May 1970, and I remember thinking:
U.S. Army Special Forces is killing Communists in Vietnam while the U.S. Army National Guard is killing Communists in the United States. Maybe we’re killing the wrong Communists in Vietnam and should return to the U.S. and assist the National Guard in killing the right ones.
Yes, we should have stopped the on going American Communist Revolution right then and there in 1970. It’s probably too late now, as the Communists have already elected themselves a Marxist Communist President of these United States.
I’ll see you in the Gulag.
The reaction at my school (located on Fiji Hill) was crazy. The college president, who was a leftie himself, ordered the flag to half-mast in honor of the students killed. That wasn’t enough for some students, who set out to burn it. However in trying to cut it down, one of them slashed himself with a knife and had to go to the hospital. Old Glory waved on.
Two students set off a Molotov cocktail at the ROTC building—they didn’t seem to care that the ROTC was being phased out, and the building was to be used for the new Urban Studies program, a future center of liberal-left thought and activism. However, the bomb caused only minor damage.
The campus was finally closed for four days—and a good many students used the opportunity to take off for the beach, to the consternation of the radical leaders.
My father grew up in that area, a generation earlier.
A lot of the losers, screw-offs and dumb-a$$es he went to high-school with went to Kent State.
He was off at a different college, breaking his butt, getting a double-major in Physics and Chemistry; word got back that all the losers who went to Kent State were getting all A’s and B’s.
Doesn’t say much for the Kent State crowd.
Who gives a f***?
The media COMPLETELY IGNORED/BLACKED OUT any coverage of the 40th anniversary of Bill Ayers’ bombing of the Pentagon.
Give this a rest already. Dead is dead.
Bump for later reading. My wife is a late 70s Kent State alumnus, been to the campus a number of times. Pretty bucolic when she was there, hard to comprehend all the stuff that went down on that weekend 43 years ago.
IMHO, what happened at Kent State was exactly what the communist and Marxist “professors” there wanted to happen.
Bill Ayers defends Weather Underground bombings
Ayers said (yesterday): "I’m against violence.” ... "Property damage. That’s what we did."
Excerpt from article:
In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died – they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.
That there had been *professional agitation* for the days prior days, was not in the news.
The liberal media were then obsessed with jamming a camera into any face, meeting, or movement, that would support its attacks against the USA. (I certainly did not yet understand the extent to which, the liberal media would position and stage actors for the news; I was still too naive about the extent of communist agitprop. Later, during Watergate, when the liberal media show-trialed and attempted to impeach President Nixon on TV, then their act was exposed.)
Americans watching the TV in May 1970, if they had a TV with a remote (back then, many remotes used sound waves, not infrared nor radio waves), were flipping channels because IT WAS OBVIOUS that the “campus unrest” aka “the unrest” was being managed and produced by the left and liberal media.
You could *at best,* find only *some* actual students on campus - any campus - who were part of a protest ... all the rest were “student immigrants” bused in or somehow made their way to these events, whipped up by the leftists’ field expedient riot command structure: It consisted of a few representatives from the “coordinated ‘non-violent committees.’
So the first 3 days of the “unrest” in Kent, Ohio, was mostly greeted with a, “we’ve seen this before; will somebody please change the channel?”
The 4th day was a major change, for the families of the students.
Many families did not learn *anything* as they waited into the night and following early morning of the 5th, for their daughters and sons to return home.
We DID NOT know who was alive or dead, until these students checked in, overnight.
In some cases, the kids either managed to make a call from the campus, to let the parents know that the kids were headed home; in some cases, kids called home from a roadside gas/park.
Friends of mine, where I went over to visit and wait ... waited until near midnight, when some students returned home to southwest Ohio.
One friend of mine (their son) had observed most of the activity re the National Guard and “students” from his dorm room on May 4th. He recalled step by step what he had seen, which you have probably read, but just before the firing by the Guard began, some noise “instinctively” caused him and his friends in that dorm room, to duck below the window frame ... so they only *heard* thereafter, the Guard firing.
He and the others in the room, *all* promptly scrambled to grab some personal items and leave town immediately. He had actually managed to call home from a phone in the dorm, just before they hit the road.
We did not yet, though we knew something about, how in-depth the communist activites were. The national network of campus community organizers, we mostly DID NOT *get* in the news and especially from students. BECAUSE for *many students* and many families, we were not in opposition to fighting against the communists.
“Unrest” was *on only some campuses* and staged for the news media.
The liberal media have been working ever since, to make those instances seem to be “the case, overall,” but it was not.