Eureka Times-Standard
Kent State students discuss 1970 clash
Sunday, May 01, 2005 -
ARCATA -- "She was a very striking young woman and she was flipping them off with both hands. They noticed her."
Joe Lewis described Allison Krause, the girlfriend of a friend of his at Kent State University, a few moments before she died and Lewis was injured when the Ohio National Guard fired on student protesters 35 years ago. Four students were killed and nine injured. Lewis and another of the survivors, Jim Russell, spoke at Humboldt State University this week.
The shootings at Kent State, the culmination of four days of anti-war protests, led to shutdowns at university campuses throughout the nation and came to symbolize the polarization of the country during the Vietnam War.
More than 100 students and community members gathered on the HSU Quad Thursday evening to hear Lewis and Russell's story. Russell said he was shot while merely walking across a similar university commons on May 4, 1970.
Three days earlier, on Friday, May 1, students held a burial of the U. S. Constitution to symbolize what they termed its murder by President Richard Nixon, who had just ordered the invasion of Cambodia. The students announced another rally to follow at noon on Monday, May 4.
But tensions escalated over the weekend, beginning with some vandalism on Friday and rumors of outside agitators bent on violence. Saturday, the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps building on campus was set afire. By Sunday, the Ohio National Guard was occupying the campus, though there were conflicting reports of whether a state of emergency had been declared and the National Guard was actually in charge.
"They came in full battle dress in Jeeps with machine guns," Lewis said.
Students gawked at and talked with the National Guardsmen. Lewis recalled his friend Barry Levine, Krause's boyfriend, describing Krause picking a flower and putting it in a guardsman's gun barrel.
Sunday night, Russell said, students marched and attempted to meet with the mayor and university president, but were stopped. The mayor had declared a curfew, which the National Guard enforced.
"It wasn't clear who were wearing the white hats and who were wearing the black hats here, but clearly the only people with weapons were the guardsmen," Russell said.
On Monday, classes were held as usual, but hundreds of students gathered to protest the National Guard's occupation of campus. Lewis said he was new to political activism, but joined them to show his support.
"Friday's rally was in response to Nixon. Monday's rally was a response to the response," Russell said. "It was, Get the National Guard off of our campus, let's get back to life as normal."
But the National Guardsmen declared that it was an illegal assembly, because of erroneous reports that state of emergency had been declared. They ordered the students to disperse, and fired tear gas when they didn't.
Russell said he was a senior about to graduate and not interested in activism. But crossing the commons, he stopped to observe and picked up an empty tear gas canister, which he wanted to use in an art project, he said.
When the students moved uphill, the guardsmen pursued, Lewis said.
"This is one of many points ... the guardsmen could have stopped what they were doing and nothing further would have ensued," he said.
He said only some of the students were really vocal in their demonstrations. Some were angry and threw rocks. Others, like Krause, gestured angrily at the guardsmen.
After a while, Lewis said, the guardsmen headed back in the direction they'd come and the students assumed it was over. But a few of the guardsmen stopped and leveled their rifles at the students, including Lewis. He said he assumed they weren't loaded, and it was merely "a gesture of derision."
"I answered their gesture with my own gesture. ... The first couple bullets churned up the ground at my feet and then I realized they were loaded with live ammunition."
Lewis was shot in the abdomen and leg, Russell in the thigh. Lewis described the scene as "13 seconds of solid gunfire followed by a pause -- before wailing and screaming began."
Conflicting reports soon erupted of what had happened and who was to blame. Some initial media reports said students had attacked the guard, Lewis said.
The National Guardsmen testified that they felt in danger of their lives. Lewis and Russell said this seemed unlikely, since many of those shot were hundreds of feet away and not facing the guardsmen.
Legal battles continued for most of the next decade. A group of 25 Kent State faculty and students were indicted by a state grand jury on charges related to rioting, though most charges were later dismissed. Families of the slain students won a civil suit against the guardsmen in 1979.
Russell said student documentation helped clarify the evidence. The rally took place near the journalism building, and students were on the scene with cameras and tape recorders from the beginning. One, John Filo, won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of 14-year-old Mary Vecchio wailing in front of the body of student Jeff Miller.
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