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I cannot believe that our Guardsmen, our Americans, shot down those kids at Kent.
rallies were growing bigger and more dangerous
the guard wasn't called in until the ROTC building was burned
Steve19;832032; said:I was a high school sophomore at Brookhaven and four of us took a car down to campus to see what was happening. My memories are not as clear as the others posting here but I do clearly remember watching Ohio Governor James Rhodes on the news appealing to people to stop rioting on campuses"someone is going to be hurt badly or even killed".
We must have arrived only at about 4 in the afternoon. I remember the aggression of the protesters and the over-reactions of the Guardsmen to it on some occasions.
My memory is just being overwhelmed by it all. I really used to like coming down to Pearl Alley and going through the hippie shops. It was cool and lots of fun. They were laid back and welcoming.
The protesters that day were not. They were ridiculing the Guardsmen and shouting at them. Were it not for the Guard busing in units from other cities, these drafted Guardsmen could have been their high school classmates.
The Guardsmen were not without fault on the day and also escalated some of the abuse by over-reacting.
For me, the peace movement lost its innocence that day although it really had lost it much earlier.
The next day, none of the people in my classes at Brookhaven could believe that kids had been shot at Kent State. It was shocking and surreal. That day was the first time that I had ever really observed groups in conflict in America or people in America unwilling to talk to one another.
When I arrived on campus as a student two years later, the peace movement was well and truly over. Long hair was still in fashion, but the peace movement seemed almost to have never occurred. For all intents and purposes, it died on that day in 1970.
Years later, my students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg figured out that I had been a student during the Vietnam War era and used to come and ask me to watch them demonstrate against Apartheid. They had seen a Vietnam War era demonstration glorified in some movie and were acting it out in their own anti-Apartheid demonstrations.
The Apartheid-era army would not come on campus, but soldiers waited with batons, guns, and dogs at the borders of the campus and, unlike the US, they were quite prepared to hurt and even kill protesters. We enrolled black students in defiance of race laws and our gifted black students often disappeared for months on end in prison and sometimes for good. I used to remind them all that they did not enjoy the rights Americans enjoyed and that troops here were far less patient.
We did not experience violent protests on campuses. Then, during one particularly bad patch in 1990, about fifteen agitators broke into my classroom and started singing banned ANC songs and slogans (e.g., no education without liberation, pass one-pass all, etc) intimidating the students to leave the class. When a white student stood up and pulled a gun to defend his right to an education, I must admit to being very frightened that these kids would kill each other.
As some protester punk yelled slogans behind me, I asked told the class of my experiences as a 16 year old on that day in 1970. About its hollowness and disappointment for all that were involved. As I told them about my friends, once hippies and now stockbroker yuppies, you could see that they knew that "movements" encourage personal sacrifices and actions that people later regret.
I asked them what memories they wanted to take into a nonracial South Africa that would one day come? What would they want to tell their children that they did on this day? How would uneducated people run a country?
A black student sat down and refused to leave. The protesters left about ten minutes later, threatening to return the next day but never to be seen in one of my classes again. The hot-head with the gun sat down and promised to never bring a gun into my class again, a promise that I think he did not keep. He did later do a Masters degree and still contacts me whenever he reads something about me somewhere.
To me, the memories of both days are welded together across time and space. Eventually, we got on with our class and I'd like to think that something good came out of that day in 1970 much later and halfway across the world. But, my memories are of that disappointment and hollowness I felt.