I'm Mr. Beat
The United States is a divided country.
Never has it been more divided than it is now.
Except for the Civil War.
and the decades leading up to the Civil War.
and the election of 1800, and the election of 1877. The Election of 1960.
and the Election of 2000. Ok, throughout all of American history we've basically been divided.
but tensions were especially high during the Vietnam War.
Sure, there were a lot of people who supported it when it was going on, but it was controversial.
You had young, underprivileged soldiers fighting a war
for less than noble causes
and thousands of them were dying
and if they weren't dying they were coming back permanently scarred.
And the government was lying about it.
So, needless to say
there were protests across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people protested.
Especially a lot of students protested on college campuses.
Here is the story of one of those protests going horribly wrong.
Friday, May 1, 1970. Students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio gathered to protest the war.
Even though President Richard Nixon got elected promising to end the Vietnam War, U.S. troops had just invaded Cambodia, a country next to Vietnam.
The war was expanding. These students demanded the troops be brought home.
They buried a copy of the Constitution to symbolize how Congress had never declared war like the Constitution says they were supposed to.
On the evening of May 1st, protesters got pretty angry.
They threw rocks and bottles at police officers. They built bonfires.
Because of this, the police ordered local bars to be closed early in an attempt to limit the stupid behavior that often follows when people get drunk. Well this just made some protestors even angrier.
A handful of them got violent and began to break windows and even loot stores.
In no way did these few bad apples represent the vast majority of protesters, but obviously police began to blame all the protesters.
The next day Leroy Satrom, Kent’s mayor, declared a state of emergency.
He asked the governor, James Rhodes, to send the Ohio National Guard to his city to keep order.
National Guard members got to town that night.
As they arrived, someone set fire to the Reserve Officer Training Corps building on campus.
No one knows who started the fire, but some of the protesters cheered it.
Some even sliced the hoses the firefighters were using to put the fire out.
Needless to say, these Guard members were a bit on edge after this. They released tear gas to break up the protesters.
By Sunday, May 3rd, about 1,000 National Guard members were on campus.
While most were friendly to each other, things became more tense throughout the day.
Governor Rhodes talked some trash when he said “They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”
Dude, that didn’t make the protesters happy.
As the protesters refused to go home, some National Guard members threatened them with bayonets. More rocks were thrown, more tear gas released.
Monday, May 4th. Classes resumed on campus, but the protesters returned, scheduling a rally at noon.
University officials tried to prevent the gathering but there were just too many students- around 3000 ended up showing up.
After the protest began, National Guard members released more tear gas at the students, but it wasn’t working due to the wind.
Some protesters threw more rocks. In response, around 77 National Guard members moved toward the protesters with armed rifles and bayonets.
Suddenly- some started firing their guns at the protesters. No one knows who fired the first shot.
The gunfire lasted between 13 seconds and, by some accounts, one minute.
Between 28 and 29 of the National Guard members fired a total of between 61 and 67 shots.
When the firing stopped, nine students lay wounded, four dead.
Two of those killed weren’t even participating in the protests.
Jeffrey Miller, age 20, who was shot in the mouth, was the only victim to die instantly.
Here is a famous picture of him by John Filo that shows him lying on the ground as a woman above him screams.
The average distance between the shooters and all the victims was about the length of a football field.
The other three who later died were Allison Krause, age 19, William Schroeder, also age 19, and Sandra Scheuer, age 20.
All of the students shot were in good standing with Kent State University.
So why did the shooters do it? Well, they later claimed they did it out of self-defense.
They felt threatened. Many disagreed, and the National Guard members did have to eventually go to court.
The Kent State shootings helped convince everyone that the anti-war movement was bigger than they previously had believed.
Many universities across the country cancelled classes for the rest of the school year afterward out of fear of more violent protests happening on their campus.
Famous musicians made songs in protest. Probably the most well-known song in response to the Kent State shootings was Neil Young’s song “Ohio.”
The shootings furthered American distrust of their government, at every level.
It caused even more protests to happen. Only after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords three years later, and after President Nixon brought the troops home, did the protests stop.
So what about those National Guard members who shot the students?
Well, eight of them faced a federal trial in 1974.
However, the judge dismissed the case in the middle of the criminal trial, ruling the case against the National Guard members was too weak.
Originally, due to the 11th Amendment, the parents of the victims couldn’t sue Ohio’s government, but the Supreme Court later said they could sue.
However, even though the parents got a federal civil trial, the jury in that trial also found the National Guard members not legally responsible for the shootings.
In January 1979, the Ohio National Guard gave a signed statement expressing regret, but not apologizing or admitting they messed up.
As part of the settlement, Ohio gave $675,000 to the wounded students and families of the students killed.
This was the end of the legal battles, but the event permanently scarred the country as a whole.
The Kent State shootings were a terrible and shocking tragedy that hopefully never happens again.
It really was symbolic of how hostile and chaotic things got at the height of the Vietnam War.
People were angry, man.
They were angry and divided over that war.
Good thing we're not angry and divided today.
This video was suggested by my Patreon supporter, Kyle Noyes,
who is currently a student at Kent State University.
so everyday he walks right by where these shootings took place.
In fact, some of the photos which you saw in this video, including of the museum which remembers the victims
Kyle took, so thank you Kyle for taking those pictures
and thank you for the suggestion.
Remember if you want your video suggestion made,
you just have to donate $3 or more per video on Patreon.
Thank you so much for watching.