May 05, 2006

Four Dead in Ohio

kent_state.jpg

Thirty-six years ago yesterday four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. I don't have precise memories of that day, but I certainly have memories of the trip back to Guam via Air Force transport jet a couple of weeks later. At the time, if you were a college student and your family was stationed overseas, you were allowed to fly space available to and from the college you were attending back to the place your parents lived. I was attending the University of Arizona in Tucson. At the end of the spring semester I flew to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Ca. north of San Francisco to wait for a seat on a plane to Guam. There were a lot of other college students doing the same thing; many of them had had their campuses shut down in the wake of the Kent State shootings.

Many many stories were told around cafeteria tables that weekend; what I remember is disbelief. You have to remember that we were all military kids, stuck on a military base, waiting for a military flight. We were collectively a lot less radicalized than the students who had been demonstrating against the presence of ROTC on their campuses, against the Vietnam War, and for free speech. Still, we were all shocked and subdued. The US military (the one we'd grown up around!) had fired on and killed kids just like us, for no more than making a loud statement of disapproval about US government policy. If you don't want to read Michener's contemporaneous book, read the three blog entries below for a sense of the events of that week. There may be a part 4 upcoming; if it shows up I'll post a link.

Updated with additional links

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Here's the story behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo:

On May 4th, 1970, John Filo was a young undergraduate working in the Kent State photo lab. He decided to take a break, and went outside to see students milling in the parking lot. Over the weekend, following the burning of the ROTC building, thousands of students had moved back and forth from the commons area near to the hill in front of Taylor Hall, demonstrating and calling to an end to the war in Vietnam. John decided to get his camera, and see if he could get an interesting picture. He saw one student waving a black flag on the hillside, with the National Guard in the background. He shot the photograph, and feeling that he now had recorded the moment, wandered to the parking lot, where a lot of the students had gathered. Suddenly, G company of the Ohio National Guard opened fire. John thought they were shooting blanks, and started to take pictures.

A second later, he saw Mary Vecchio crying over the body of one the students who had just been killed. He took the picture.

A few hours later, he started to transmit the pictures he had taken to the Associated Press from a small newspaper in Pennsylvania.

Posted by Linkmeister at May 5, 2006 04:19 PM | TrackBack
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