May 5th, 1970. As Tuesday dawned, the whole country, the whole world, knew about the Kent State massacre. The famous photo of Mary Ann Vecchio on one knee, keening over the body of Jeffrey Miller, snapped by a Kent undergrad seconds after the National Guard ceased firing on Monday, went on the Associated Press newswire that afternoon and was seared into the nation’s consciousness the next morning.
Chip Young, one of several friends who volunteered memories when I started this project, recalls:
I would have been 11. I remember my older brother informing my mom about the killings. Her response: “Oh no, not in America.” Perfect moment of shattered idealism.
Nan Faessler blipped me a single sentence:
Because of the killings at Kent State, I made a decision to drop out of graduate school and devote my time to working with the anti-war movement full time.
John Kaye’s response:
I never went to college, but at the time was living near Marquette U in Milwaukee, working in a Movement bookstore. What the right wing at the time used to call an “outside agitator.” Even before the invasion of Cambodia, at that point in my life activism was everything.
When the news hit, especially about Kent State, and shortly after, about Jackson State, things sort of…exploded. I didn’t sleep for 3 days, up all night at meetings, silk-screening clenched fists on t-shirts, etc. Demonstrations and whatever else we could think of all day and evening. The only time in my life I ever gave an impromptu speech, to a smallish group of students gathered just south of the campus, about the Panthers, I think.
In these three brief recollections, we see events as they actually unfolded–shock, individual commitment to resist, escalation of the struggle.