50 years later: Kent State shootings remembered

MONDAY, May 4 — Take a moment at noon today to reflect about what happened 50 years ago at Kent State University when National Guard troops shot into a crowd killing four students, including Jeffrey Miller, who attended MSU before transferring to Kent State. Nine other students were injured by the shootings. 

East Lansing resident and MSU Graduate Sarah Fryer in a 2018 article in City Pulse said she shared a class with Miller and has attended an annual memorial at Kent State to honor the dead. Others killed were Allison Krause, Sandra Scheur and William Schroeder. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by student photographer John Filo showed a young woman leaning over a dead student. This ghastly photograph, which came to symbolize the era, ran on the front page of The New York Times and in the May 15, 1970, issue of Life magazine and not on the cover as is widely thought.

As the news of the shootings reached the MSU campus, more than 6,000 students gathered around Beaumont Tower and on May 15 Lansing saw one of the largest protests when an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 protesters trekked to the Capitol to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Speakers, which numbered more than 20, included Gov. William G. Milliken. Although graduation was held in 1970, classes at MSU were canceled for the Spring Quarter.

Kent State University had planned a major event commemorating the day but has moved everything online at www.kent.edu/may4kentstate50, including a candlelight walk and vigil that began in 1971.

Just 10 days after Kent State National Guard Troops fired 150 shots into a dormitory at Jackson State College (now University), a historically black school in Mississippi, killing Phillip Gibbs and James Green.

Numerous books have been written about the Kent State killings and the popular memorial song “Ohio,” written by Neil Young of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, is still played on the anniversary of the killings.

Two of the most important books on Kent State are I.F. Stone’s “The Killings at Kent State” and James A. Michener’s “Kent State: What Happened and Why.” Freshman at Kent State are required to read “This We Know: A Chronology of the Shootings at Kent State” and “Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State,” by authors Mike Roberts and Joe Eszterhas, who covered the story for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

 Another book is “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties,” by author Thomas M. Grace, who was one of the nine victims injured by the shootings. He recalls vividly riding with another victim, Sandra Lee Scheur, who died on the way to the hospital.

One premise that the Buffalo, New York, college teacher made in the book was that the antiwar activism on campus was the result of the large number of students from working-class families, many from families of activist union members.