38 years later, Kent State still goes unanswered

Saturday, May 3, 2008
BY Jim Hillibish
REPOSITORY COLUMNIST

... We had no chance to comprehend it. I heard it on a loudspeaker: 'The university is closed. Leave the university immediately."

Or what, get shot? That was not a small consideration nor a crazy one ...

I remember getting a call at home from one of my professors. He asked if I was OK. Then he said we need to contact everybody in the class and organize a university away from the university ...

Every May 4, we drink some wine around noon and think about that day. We hear shots and screams and sirens and the "victory" bell. And then there's silence as soldiers and students alike stand on that sunny hillside thinking, "Oh, my God, what have we done here?"

http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=410672&Category=9&subCategoryID=0

I was at Antioch, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, not even near Kent State, and I was in my husband's office - he was a faculty member, I was a student - when his secretary came in, pale and shaking, and said, "They're killing students at Kent State."

Our campus was shut down by demonstrations for about a week afterwards.

"Four dead in Ohio." Neil Young remembers.

we had been organizing small antiwar demonstrations in our town, and suddenly this...we all had older siblings away at large universities and we were terrified for them...and us.

so many unanswered questions....


does anyone know what happened to the girl in that photo, kneeling next to one of the dead, blood pooling by his head, a look of utter anguish on her face? I think she was a runaway who just happened to be on the Kent State campus that day, but I could be wrong....

but I don't know what happened to her.

The Orangeburg Massacre

It had been four years since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and most public places in Orangeburg, South Carolina were integrated. However, the city’s All Star bowling alley remained segregated. On the evening of February 6, black students from South Carolina State University and Clafin College gathered in protest in front of the bowling alley. The next night they returned. On that evening, fifteen were arrested. After two days of protest, tension was already high by the evening of February 8.

Students again organized in protest. But this time they gathered on the campus of South Carolina State. They started a bonfire and as law enforcement tried to put it out, an officer was injured with a piece of banister.

In response to the commotion, a highway patrolman fired his gun into the air to calm the crowd. But instead of ending the commotion, other law enforcement officers began shooting into the crowd of student protestors. As a result, three students were killed and 27 were injured. The nine patrolmen responsible were charged with using excessive force; all were acquitted.

http://afroamhistory.about.com/cs/civilrights/a/orangeburg.htm

The Orangeburg Massacre

The shootings occurred on February 8, 1968, two nights after an effort by students from an almost all all-black college to bowl at the city’s only bowling alley. The owner refused. Tensions rose and violence erupted. When it ended, nine students and one city policeman received hospital treatment for injuries. Other students were treated at the college infirmary. College faculty and administrators at the scene witnessed at least two instances where a female student was held by one officer and clubbed by another. In total, 28 students were injured and three were dead.

After two days of escalating tension, a fire truck was called to douse a bonfire lit by students on a street in front of the campus. State troopers—all of them white, with little training in crowd control—moved in to protect the firemen. As more than 100 students retreated inside the campus, a student tossed a banister rail which struck one trooper in the face. He fell to the ground bleeding. Five minutes later, almost 70 law enforcement officers lined the edge of the campus. They were armed with carbines, pistols and riot guns—short-barreled shotguns that by dictionary definition are used “to disperse rioters rather than to inflict serious injury or death.” But theirs were loaded with lethal buckshot, which hunters use to kill deer. Each shell contained nine to 12 pellets the size of a .32 caliber pistol slug.

As students began returning to the front to watch their bonfire go out, a patrolman suddenly squeezed several rounds from his carbine into the air—apparently intended as warning shots. As other officers began firing, students fled in panic or dived for cover, many getting shot in their backs and sides and even the soles of their feet.

http://www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=1

It was the first nice warm day of the season, after a cold winter. All the students were outside, because it was a NICE DAY! Students did not want a confrontation... all we wanted to know is "why we could not ask any questions about the Viet Nam War?" Shame on us. The National Guard Troops opened fire for no reason. Today, it is the same. Do not ask George Bush WHY we are in Iraq. As long as the American Citizens are willing to pay for Iraq, so be it. But if we are going to Nation Build, would'nt it make sense to nation-build in the United States?

I can still remember Joe Walsh and the James Gang on Water Street. I can still smell the gun powder from the U.S troops who shot up College Kids...and were acquitted. What the Fuck is wrong with you People?

Does Anyone remember Joe Walsh and the James Gang? Water Street? I remember the smell of gunpowder. All because we "dared" to question authority.

And, to be honest... it terrifies me that we heading down the same path yet again.

I pray for our young Dems every day. So willing are they to be part of the Dem party's "revolution." I pray that the hammer doesn't fall as it did at Kent.