The most iconic picture of the incident showed a girl kneeling over a student who had been shot. Ironically, she was not a student, but a 14 year old runaway from Florida who was hanging out on campus enjoying the demonstration activity.
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.
Naaah, really....how shocking.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that they had trashed the downtown area, too.
The most iconic picture of the incident showed a girl kneeling over a student who had been shot. Ironically, she was not a student, but a 14 year old runaway from Florida who was hanging out on campus enjoying the demonstration activity.
If this demonstration was anything like the ones that I attended, in those days, the shooting was exactly what the radicals wanted to happen. They relentlessly bait the authorities, hoping for a violent reaction that they can point to as proof that they are right about America. The Kent State affair succeeded perfectly for them.
I was in high school about twenty minutes drive from the KSU campus. They burned down the friggin' ROTC building and threatened to do the same to the town. And the guardsmen, most of whom were themselves around the same age as the rioters, had for the most part not slept for the preceding 72 hours as they were guarding truck convoys, and being shot at from highway overpasses, during a wildcat Teamster strike.
Marching downhill toward and throwing bricks at helmeted guys in gas masks holding loaded M-1 Garands led to a predictable result. In the local area there was shock but far less sympathy for the rioters than was true nationally. If the campus had been evacuated and classes cancelled the only casualties would have been the screaming idiots who apparently felt they were bullet proof. Oh, and Neil Young can still kiss my a**.
I lived in Akron at the time...Bath Twp, and was 16 miles away. I was home sick with the flu that day. And I listened to the news as it all unfolded.
A fellow I worked with was a member of the Ohio National Guard and shared some first hand experiences. Businesses in Downtown Kent were under mob attack by the ‘students’. Guardsmen in the street were attacked, not just with rocks, but also with clubs and pipe-wrenches. At least a couple of them were kneecapped. This was a day or so before May 4.
A number of the agitators were not students, but came into Kent to stir up trouble. The girl pictured at the time putting a flower in the barrel of a guardsman’s rifle was not a Kent student, and did not live in Kent.
I have always believed that Gov Rhoads did the right thing by sending in the Guard.
That being said, it is long past time for the Gov’s of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona & California to use their respective National Guard’s to protect the southern border.