On the evening of May 4, 1970, I walked into the kitchen of our home in Canton. My dad was sitting in his wheelchair in his usual spot at the kitchen table, leaning toward the radio. As I approached, he shook his head and said, “This is bad. Really bad.”
In the preceding days, there had been demonstrations and rioting on the Kent State campus and in town. The ROTC Building had been burned to the ground. National Guardsmen, sent by Ohio Governor James Rhodes, had shot into a crowd of protesting students and killed four of them. Alison Krause, 19, and Jeffrey Miller, 20, were participating in the protest. Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder, both 19, were bystanders observing the demonstration between classes. Nine other students were wounded, including Dean Kahler, who has spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
I was a Kent State freshman, living at home and attending the University’s Stark County campus. I had lived through the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the killings of Reverend Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. I had watched unremitting footage of battles in Vietnam and in our cities on the nightly news. This is to say that I was inured to violence. I understood that it was deplorable, but I was numb. I felt removed from the day’s events.
My father’s reaction broke through to me. My father understood that law enforcement officers should not be shooting down students on a college campus. He also understood, more clearly than I did, that a President elected to end a war in Asia should not be expanding that war into a neighboring country. President Nixon had announced our incursion into Cambodia in a television address a few days earlier.
Other adults, besides my father, impressed me with the intensity of their revulsion, including Channel Five’s news commentator Dorothy Fuldheim, whom we young people used to ridicule as hopelessly out of touch. In her evening broadcast, she asked, tears streaming down her face, “And who gave the National Guard the bullets? Who ordered the use of them? Since when do we shoot our own children?” Neil Young wrote his iconic protest song “Ohio.” Several weeks after the shooting, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, “The four victims did nothing that justified their death. They threw no rocks nor were they politically radical. No sniper fired at the National Guard. No investigative agency has yet found any evidence sufficient to support such a theory.”
Many news outlets, politicians, and citizens, however, took a different position. In some cases, they had encouraged government’s overreach ahead of time. In April of 1970, while running for Governor, Ronald Reagan made this comment regarding campus unrest: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Richard Nixon called protesters “bums.” James Rhodes said student protesters were communists and “worse than Brownshirts.”
After the killings, the vitriol continued. The first card that Dean Kahler received in the hospital told him that the sender wished he was dead. The Nixon tapes revealed that the President, about a year later, asking his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, “You know what stops them? Kill a few. Remember Kent State? Didn’t it have one hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?”
As weeks passed, my sorrow and horror grew. A relative of mine reacted to my emotion by telling me, “They should have killed more of them.” We don’t execute people for protesting, I responded, or even for throwing stones at cops. He answered that maybe we should.
I need to point out that Kent State was not the only locus for campus violence. On May 15, 1970, police opened fire on a Black students’ protest at Mississippi’s Jackson State, killing two (Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Earl Green, 17) and wounding twelve others. In the intervening years, police shootings have disproportionately affected Black people. In each case, some Americans protest the overreaction of armed officers, while others blame the victims.
Recent events, of course, are prompting these recollections. In today’s Minneapolis, of course, we can watch live video of the shootings, though these videos don’t seem conclusive to everyone. In 2026, it seems that the powers-that-be will fight to prevent investigations. In the 1970s, we had no videos, but American institutions, flawed though they were, conducted thorough investigations.
I’m not going to say that we’ve been here before and that we’ve survived such periods in our history. I am going to say that in similar eras some people have clearly seen that armed, uniformed government agents should not be gunning down Americans who are exercising their free-speech rights. And that other people, apparently always, perennially, despite the evidence and the Constitution, will say that the men with the guns are right and that the citizens who revere the 1st Amendment are wrong.
