Just to review, for the many among us who weren't even around at that time (hi, Bill and Pete), word had just come out that during the Vietnam War (I look down and spit at the memory), the United States had conducted an "incursion" into Cambodia. This elicited howls of protest on campuses across the country, including Kent State University in Ohio. For reasons too complex to discuss here, the protest at Kent State turned ugly, culminating in a violent confrontation on the university's Commons between protesters and the Ohio National Guard, who had been brought in (nominally) because the city of Kent feared "rumors that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and the university." This paper from a Kent State professor emeritus sheds some relatively objective light (although it is a subject on which no one can be really objective) on what happened next, much of which is still subject to dispute forty years later. The outcome, however, was clear enough: four dead students and nine more wounded, some becoming permanently disabled. Note that according to the Lewis paper, not one of the killed students was within 250 feet of the guardsmen when they were shot; two weren't even part of the protest at all; one, Bill Schroeder, was in fact in the ROTC program and was probably about as unlikely to be throwing rocks at the guardsmen as anyone in the county that day.
I was a high-school senior at the time, and I well remember the wave of campus upheavals that followed. Less than two weeks later, two more students would be killed in "riots" at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and things were still very tense when I headed off to Michigan State that fall to begin my college education. It took years for the tension to die down ... but there came a time when it did, and that is my main subject today. For years now I have found it stunning that when May 4 rolls around, many of our news outlets simply report nothing about what the date is an anniversary of. Others have well-hidden blurbs that relegate the event to a footnote. Very few treat it as a thing particularly worth remembering.
As a comment to my Facebook ruminations on how poorly Kent State is remembered, my wise friend Keith Gatling reminds me that he wrote something in his own blog, "The Word From G," a couple of years ago that he called "The Half-Life of Grief," and like most of the stuff Keith writes, it is well worth reading. This entry was commemorating another senseless loss of life, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which Keith remembers well because there were a lot of people on that flight from Keith's home town of Syracuse, New York. In it he writes about that tragedy, Kent State, and also the Bath School Disaster of 1927, which remains to this day the deadliest mass murder at a school in American history ... and yet, very few people outside Bath Township, Michigan could tell you much about it today. Keith opines that
At some point the memory of our "one terrible day" will fade, except for a few people still directly affected by it, and a few historians. It has to. It will become a historical footnote much like the Split Rock explosion [another tragedy that obliterated a small town, although an accident rather than mass murder -- GB] - something that happened here, but doesn't define us. At some point it will have happened before the parents of the incoming class of SU students were born.
Hmm...maybe you remember every year for the first 10 years. Then every five until you get to 30, and every ten until you get to 50. At that point, most people with any ties to it will have been long gone anyway. Then you have one last observance at 100 years, and you put it to bed. Maybe that's what the half-life of grief is.
As regards the memory of the lives lost, I think Keith's right: such memories not only will fade, they probably must fade, for the sake of the rememberer's sanity. There's more to Kent State than just the body count, however, and that "more" -- the coming of violence to a university campus where it doesn't belong, and equally importantly, the actions of governments at various levels that preceded, and then followed, it (trying to keep this NPOV and not assign blame here, as much as I want to...) -- well, I'm not sure it's a good idea for memories of that part of things to fade. Santayana spoke truthfully: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And I fear that there are futures facing our country right now in which we may repeat those disastrous errors.
For years after I started graduate school, I posted a note on my door every May 4 saying "Remember Kent State." (This elicited some interesting comments that might be a subject of a future blog, but in a nutshell, yes, I agree that we should also remember those who perished in the stinking swamps of Vietnam.) That ebbed out over time, not least when I moved to places where overt political statements like that as part of one's office décor were (ahem) discouraged.. But I haven't forgotten. And now that I'm not working in one of those no-overt-political-statement places, and have this blog, I won't forget again next year, either.
Random link du jour: how could it be anything else?
