Soldiers in the Ohio National Guard leveled their M-1 rifles and poured rifle fire across the commons at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding another nine.
Many of those people were not involved in the demonstration. William Schroeder, an ROTC student, age 19, was shot in the back as he was walking to class; he was over 125 yards away. Sandra Scheuer, 20, was also on her way to class, was over 100 yards away, and was shot through the throat. Jeffrey Miller, 20, was shot through the mouth and died instantly; he was standing in a parking lot over 80 yards away. Allison Krause, 19, was shot through the chest from over 100 yards.
No investigation has ever shown any provocation worthy of mass gunfire as a response. Nobody was ever successfully prosecuted for the shootings.
There was a nationwide student strike in the aftermath. My high school was open on May 5th, but probably 90% of the students refused to go to class. After the second period, the administration gave up and canceled school for that day.
Ten days later, in a similarly unprovoked shooting, the cops at Jackson State University (Mississippi) shot and killed two students, wounding 12. As in Kent State and at Orangeburg South Carolina two years before (4 dead, 31 wounded), none of the shooters spent a day behind bars.
You can easily find folks on the Right who maintain, to this day, that the mass shooting of unarmed demonstrators was justified. Keep that in mind when you read stuff about how the Teabaggers are so, so outraged because there are riot cops on the periphery of their protests.
UPDATE: A column by Elaine Holstein, the mother of Jeff Miller, one of the four students who were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard.
5 comments:
When the picture of a screaming woman kneeling over a shot student came out, I heard the same two words from at least three coworkers:
Communist bitch.
I remember it quite well, I was in college at the time.
Personally, I always felt the governor should have never sent in the guard; they were a bunch of kids the same age as those they were sent against, they were scared, and they had no training for dealing with mobs and riots. All it takes is for one to panic, and then it's all over.
I remember we had a big meeting on campus the next day, and the whole campus was crawling with MIB's.
Teabaggers whose feelings were hurt by a dozen awkward cops marching out of time while wearing unfamiliar riot gear in Quincy, Illinois ("left... left... left... no not that left Hubert, your OTHER left!"), have no idea what it means to be the actual target of police repression.
I am still baffled why anybody thought it was reasonable to issue live ammunition to the National Guard in this situation. It's the same as what I saw in airports right after they reopened after 9/11... National Guardsmen with loaded M-16's standing around on concourses. It was only luck and maybe the Almighty that kept them from ventilating a few unlucky airline passengers... it was one of the stupidest ideas I ever heard of, soldiers are trained to kill people, not to be cops. (Red caps excepted, of course).
And now there's people who think it's a good idea to put the U.S. Army at the Mexican border (uhm, except it's all in Iraq or Afghanistan right now, duh?). But even if we had an army big enough, the inevitable result would be dead women and children, because that's the military's job -- killing people -- and many of those crossing the border illegally *are* women and children. The death sentence for trespassing might satisfy the racist bigots of this country, but would be as appalling to most as the photographs of neat black men and women in their Sunday best being attacked by racist white cops in Selma, Alabama. But the same sort of people who muttered "communist bitch" at the photo of the distraught young lady over the body of a dead kid would get, like, the biggest woody you ever seen over the thought of dead darky women and children... sadistic bastards, the lot of them.
- Badtux the Repression Penguin
They put the Marines on the border years ago. One of the Jarheads shot and killed a kid who was herding goats because the kid was armed with an old .22.
Oh, and while we are talking about trigger-happy cops, let's not forget the Greensboro Massacre, where the cops mysteriously disappeared during a protest march and allowed gunmen from the Klan to shoot 5 of the marchers to death.
As was often the case with such crimes int he South, nobody was ever convicted of the killings.
Fancy that.
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