Kent State shootings were a national tragedy that occurred in the United States in 1970. During a student demonstration against the Vietnam War (1957-1975), members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a group of protesters at Kent State University in Kent, northeastern Ohio. The shots killed four students and wounded nine others. The incident, which sparked further protests and dominated news coverage, helped turn American public opinion against the war.
Background.
In his successful 1968 campaign for United States president, Richard M. Nixon suggested that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. The war had sharply divided Americans. As president, Nixon increasingly turned the conduct of the war over to the South Vietnamese and began a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops. On April 30, 1970, however, Nixon announced on national television that he had ordered U.S. and South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese bases, weapons, and supplies.
Kent protests and shootings.
The invasion of Cambodia sparked protests on college campuses across the United States. During the day on Friday, May 1, Kent State students gathered for two small, peaceful rallies to protest Nixon’s expansion of the war. That evening, unplanned student antiwar protests began in a downtown section of Kent. The protests started peacefully, but some people in cars were harassed and shop windows were broken as the young crowd moved through the center of Kent. The city’s mayor heard rumors of destructive plots apparently to be carried out by militant students, and he declared a state of emergency. Riot police dispersed the crowd. The following day, Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in the National Guard—the reserve militia of each state of the United States.
On the evening of Saturday, May 2, about 300 students attended an antiwar rally on campus. The protesters began to march, and the crowd increased to more than 1,000 people. The crowd surrounded the abandoned former campus headquarters of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) . The ROTC trains students in schools, colleges, and universities to become officers in the United States armed services. Some in the crowd broke windows or attempted to set the building on fire. Some demonstrators scuffled with police and firefighters. Later, the building caught fire and burned down. Hundreds of National Guardsmen arrived during the protest. The guardsmen fired tear gas into the crowd. Investigators never discovered who set the fire.
By Sunday, May 3, nearly 1,000 Ohio National Guardsmen had arrived on the Kent State campus. Governor Rhodes held a news conference blaming the unrest on student revolutionaries. He pledged to drive the troublemakers out of Kent. About 8 p.m., antiwar and anti-Guard demonstrations began anew at the Kent State Commons. Shortly before 9 p.m., Guard officials declared an immediate curfew and ordered the crowd to disperse. When the students did not leave, guardsmen fired tear gas into the crowd. Some protesters moved to other locations, and later guardsmen on the ground and in helicopters used tear gas again. Some guardsmen used their rifles as clubs to disperse the protesters.
By noon on Monday, May 4, some 2,000 people gathered at a planned rally to protest the war and the presence of the National Guard on campus. Later estimates suggested that more than half of this crowd were spectators and not active participants. The National Guardsmen told the crowd to disperse, but they were met with jeers. The guardsmen then put on gas masks and attached bayonets to their rifles. They fired tear gas canisters into the crowd and marched toward the protesters. The guardsmen forced the demonstrators down Blanket Hill to a field used for football practices. The guardsmen then retreated to the top of the hill, where 28 of them began to shoot. The guardsmen fired 67 shots over a span of 13 seconds. Four students— Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer —were killed and nine were wounded. One of the students was paralyzed by his wounds. Over the course of four days of unrest in Kent, dozens of protesters suffered injuries. A number of police and guardsmen suffered minor injuries, but only one guardsman required medical treatment. Soon after the shootings, university officials canceled classes through the end of the spring semester. Members of the Ohio National Guard withdrew from the campus between May 6 and 8.
Further protests.
Antiwar demonstrations and riots occurred on scores of other campuses throughout May. On May 15, state highway patrolmen shot and killed two demonstrators at Jackson State College, a primarily African American institution in Mississippi. Classes were temporarily suspended on hundreds of campuses, and several institutions suspended normal operations from early May until graduation time in June. The shocked reaction of the nation to such campus unrest was one of the factors that led Nixon to cut short the U.S. military campaign in Cambodia in June.
Investigations and other developments.
In the weeks and months following the shootings, the state of Ohio, Kent State University, and the U.S. Department of Justice conducted separate investigations of the events of May 1 through 4. Some details in the official reports of these investigations differed wildly. For example, some National Guard officers asserted that many students had surged toward them and that there was a hail of rocks just before the shooting began, but a report compiled by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discounted their claims. Ohio officials had stated that few guardsmen had fired their weapons. FBI ballistics reports, however, showed that the number was higher, though many guardsmen had only fired warning shots.
Among the American public, opinions about who was to blame for the Kent State violence often fell along political lines. Many people with conservative politics believed the accounts of the Ohio governor and Guard officials, but more liberal observers sided with the protesters.
In June, President Nixon appointed a Commission on Campus Unrest to investigate the shootings. William W. Scranton , a former governor of Pennsylvania, led the committee. In October, the Scranton Commission issued its reports on the campus situation in general and the Kent State and Jackson disorders in particular. The commission strongly condemned all violence, by students as well as by National Guard forces. The commission urged that police and National Guard units be trained and equipped so that the use of lethal weapons on campus would be unnecessary.
An Ohio grand jury later indicted 25 people—none of them guardsmen—on charges related to the unrest in Kent. In 1971, two of the accused pleaded guilty to felony riot charges and one pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. After two others were found not guilty, the state prosecutor—citing lack of evidence—dropped the remainder of the charges.
In November 1974, a federal judge found eight former Ohio National Guardsmen not guilty of intentionally depriving the demonstrating Kent State students of their civil rights. In 1979, the state of Ohio approved a $675,000 payment to victims and their families to settle a civil lawsuit against Governor Rhodes and 27 National Guardsmen.
