Remembering the Blood of Kent & Jackson State, May 1970
Posted by Mike E on May 4, 2011
Last year, 
Fire on the Mountain called on the grayer heads to revisit the days when Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four of us on Kent State campus.
Here is my small piece of that much larger picture.
By Mike Ely (Kasama Project)
May 1970. Forty years have passed. It is history now in the eyes of the world. But for me, and many others, it is raw and alive. It always will be.
I won’t tell the well known details – if you don’t know them, look them up. But I will tell you what it felt like, and looked like to a teenage boy who wanted desperately to see the liberation of the Vietnamese and Black people in America.
May Day for Bobby Seale — New Haven 1970
On May First 1970, I was in New Haven, Connecticut. Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party was facing a murder trial in New Haven. They had first bound and gagged him in the courtroom of the Chicago 8, then shipped him to Connecticut to lock him up for life. We were determined to free him.
Students came from all over the East coast to turn the city upside down. On my campus, we had worked day and night to explain the attack on the Black Panther Party – and to mobilize busloads to go New Haven.
Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party
There was a heavy, heavy air over the whole event – we did not know it yet, but Nixon was about to unleash an invasion of Cambodia, and he was determined NOT to allow student radicals and Black militants to obstruct his plans. Everywhere in the country there was a stiffening of the power structure. We didn’t know it then, but Nixon and his minions was on the phone demanding that governors, mayors, police chiefs and college administrators prepare to suppress resistance.
What we did know was that all kinds of ominous moves were being made. Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, airlifted 4,000 Army paratroops and Marines from east coast bases to the New Haven area. And, the press was announcing that a military train had been looted and that thousands of military rifles were missing. It was a lie, it was disinformation – but it was clearly intended to create mass hysteria, and it was clearly designed to justify Nixon’s own preparations for violence.
Within the city, the police focused heavily on tracking and demoralizing the Black Panther Party. A book, written by the police chief, later explained how he had developed a set of teams to deploy parallel to the Black Panther’s own teams. Whenever the BPP went out into the Black community, to agitate for Bobby Seale and to mobilize for the May Day march, a plainclothes police team would be there, disguised as ordinary passersby. And they were trained to heckle and denounce the Panthers – to give them the (false) impression that they were isolated, and that the mood among Black people had turned sharply against them. It was the kind of Cointelpro tactics that were being deployed generally at those times – to divide and confuse the growing revolutionary forces.
The Panthers had inspired us to be revolutionaries. The attack on their leadership had brought us into the streets. We looked to them for leadership. And yet, things were about to become more complicated than I expected.
The Black Panthers generally were skittish about gathering Black people in large militant crowds. They tended to believe that they would be exposing the community to mass murder. And while they often supported the mobilization of supporters (“mother country radicals”), there was a reluctance among Panthers to bring out the Black community into the streets – even in their own defense.
And, to the surprise of many of us, the Black Panther Party pulled out of the plans to bring out New Haven’s Black community for May Day for Bobby at the last moment. Part of this was their reaction to the unmistakable signs that this system (at a high level) was preparing bloody acts. Part of it was, i believe, confusion that police disinformation caused among their own members. And part of it was their own ambivalence: the Panthers (as a movement) did not have clear grasp of the need to mobilize and rely on the people. The Panthers were very much in the crosshairs — literally. And sections of them, especially on the East Coast were already thinking about retreating to a strategy of “moving in twos and threes.”
Black Panthers in New Haven
We didn’t know about the Panther decision until very late in the game. And it did not (could not) deter tens of thousands already making their way to New Haven.
Fighting Spirit
My plans had been to hook up with some of my close high school friends who were coming with a radical contingent from Antioch College. And I remember vividly how intense it was to see them come marching through the milling crowds on the Yale college campus: they marched though the crowed in disciplined ranks, wearing motorcycle helmets, and carrying red flags on heavy wooden clubs. They cleared a space on the green lawns and started practicing karate – moving in lines, moving in groups. We were preparing for street fighting.
My close friend David Sullivan took me aside to show me his special pack. He was always eager for a fight, and he loved gear. He pulled out a special combat first aid kit, and pointing out that he had bought a dozen gunshot dressings – heavy cotton padding and gauze.
I remember thinking: We all understand the stakes now… the pigs may come at us this time with guns, and we have come prepared to fight, and even to die. David planned to stuff cotton into massive wounds if need be, as we carried off our injured and kept fighting.
It had come to this. We were determined to free Bobby Seale. We were determined to confront and defy anything Nixon threw against us.
Liberal Foes Become Reluctant Allies
In the complex swirl of events, there were all kinds of forces gravitating toward the radicals. On a campus like Yale, the administration of Kingman Brewster was basically the kind of liberals who we had viewed as enemies on campus (and who had been persecuting our SDS takeovers). But things were shifting massively. Brewster was confronted by plans for a student strike at Yale. At a campus rally, a Panther leader had declared “The Panther and the Bulldog gonna move together!” The faculty had endorsed that rally – and had called for suspending classes. No student was going to be penalized for abandoning schoolwork.
New Haven Rally for Bobby Seale, outside Yale, May 1st 1970
And faced with all that, Brewster simply climbed on board, and announced that Yale would open its doors to the march. I suspected he didn’t want his campus torn up, and I believe he also wanted to end the war. But in any case, as we arrived in New Haven, we went to sleep packed back-to-front on floors in Yale dorms and ate at the college cafeterias.
And after the huge rally in front of Yale, after all the speeches, the fighting began. And it went late into the night, with tear gas hanging heavy in many parts of New Haven creating blue halos around the street lights. Lines of us squared of with their lines of riot police. We broke up into squads and darted around doing our work. And we retreated as needed, into the courtyards of Yale. I remember the surreal sight of ducking back through one of the Yale entrances, and seeing Alan Ginsburg, cross-legged and dressed in white, surrounded by dozens of kids, all chanting “Om” in a resonant prayer, surrounded by the chaos.
The News Hits: New Aggression in Indochina
In the middle of all this, the news arrived: Nixon had invaded Cambodia. He had expanded the hated war to yet another country. He had sent his planes to flatten the world of peasant farmers, and send soldiers across a new border. He thought he could crush the command posts of the revolutionary forces – and save his criminal invasion from defeat. Through new escalation! New aggression!
Fuck Richard Nixon
It was intolerable. It was infuriating. We wanted to fight, to risk anything and everything to stop it. And it is worth remember that our mood and organization did not “pop out of no where” — it had been building for a decade. Even as teenagers many of us had been through a lot, had seen a lot, were becoming hardened and determined. Nixon wanted to win this war, we wanted to defeat him hard.
The day after our Saturday action, many of us gathered in some vast Yale lecture hall to make plans. We had activists from campuses all over the eastern half of the U.S. SDS had collapsed in the summer of 1969, but all those networks and political links were very much alive. And some of us were starting to connect with the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist group on the West Coast that was circulating its “Red Papers” call for communist collectives.
In other words, our rally in New Haven for Bobby Seale put us all (collectively) in a position to organize a massive response to Nixon’s new crime. And while I watched wide eyed on the edge of my seat, the gathering called for a nationwide student strike:
US Out Of Southeast Asia
End Campus Complicity With The War Machine
Free Bobby Seale & All Political Prisoners
And we dispersed – not to chill out from the fighting of New Haven, but to spread it, to call out our campuses.
Toe to Toe: Strike and Gunfire
We had barely gotten back, we had barely written the leaflets calling for a campus shutdown when a new event lit the sky: Kent State, Ohio… National Guardsmen had shot four of us dead on campus.
May 4, 1970, they had opened fire on protesters. Nixon had brought the war home. The troops had not been deployed in New Haven, but they had been (by Nixon’s close crony Governor Rhodes) in Kent. Nixon had wanted to answer us this time in blood. How would we answer him?
The climate among students was like a blazing forest fire that swept everything in its path. School stopped. Classes were canceled. Exams were forgotten. Colleges that had been quiet were suddenly seized by the movement. Colleges that had been storm centers were intense. My campus formed dozens and dozens of squads to go out among the people – to factories, communities, high schools – and reach out widely. We got maps and learned our way through the whole of society.
Bullet holes in the Jackson State dorm
And then ten days, as this firestorm raged and spread, more terrible news: On 14 May 1970, two Black students were killed and 12 wounded by state police gunfire at Jackson State in Mississippi.
The mainstream media and historians often simply ignore Jackson state – in a way that is so obviously and shamefully racist. But at the time, among the people in motion those names “Kent and Jackson State” were mentioned together, always. And so it is for us today.
In the middle of this, I was put on trial at my college – for taking over a building and putting a big shot on trial in a city park. The oh-so-very-liberal college prosecutors had a fat folder of pictures – tracking my activities through every step of the actions (which was not hard to do given my unmistakable blond Afro standing out in every crowdshot). Looking the photos over in their disclosure of evidence hearing I felt like a character in Arlo Guthrie’s song about Alice’s Restaurant (“with circles and arrows on the back of each one”). And they were convinced of course that they had me, and would make an example, to dampen the upsurge around us.
But precise in the heat of this student strike, they could not find a single student willing to sit on that trial committee – not even the ambitious student government types. And so they attempt their repression without even a figleaf of legitimacy – and ended up even more exposed and weak.
An Eye-Opening Communist View
Mao Zedong sent out a powerful summation of these events, and in it he wrote:
“A new upsurge in the struggle against U.S. imperialism is now emerging throughout the world. Ever since the Second World War, U.S. imperialism and its followers have been continuously launching wars of aggression and the people in various countries have been continuously waging revolutionary wars to defeat the aggressors. The danger of a new world war still exists, and the people of all countries must get prepared. But revolution is the main trend in the world today.
“Unable to win in Vietnam and Laos, the U.S. aggressors treacherously engineered the reactionary coup d’etat by the Lon Nol Sirik Matak clique, brazenly dispatched their troops to invade Cambodia and resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, and this has aroused the furious resistance of the three Indochinese peoples…
“While massacring the people in other countries, U.S. imperialism is slaughtering the white and black people in its own country. Nixon’s fascist atrocities have kindled the raging flames of the revolutionary mass movement in the United States. The Chinese people firmly support the revolutionary struggle of the American people. I am convinced that the American people who are fighting valiantly will ultimately win victory and that the fascist rule in the United States will inevitably be defeated….
“It is U.S. imperialism which fears the people of the world. It becomes panic-stricken at the mere rustle of leaves in the wind. Innumerable facts prove that a just cause enjoys abundant support while an unjust cause finds little support… This is a law of history.
People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!”
Poster from the Black Panther paper
Mao’s words made a deep impact on many of us. I put on a Mao badge, and never took it off.
Meanwhile, on the chessboard of empire, the ruling class saw they were losing control of a generation. They felt like important parts of society were slipping out of their control. They could see that each action they took for victory in Vietnam and for quite on the homefront was producing greater and greater resistance. The emergence of revolutionary currents was real and powerful.
At the center of this was (as Mao pointed out) the heroic self-sacrifice of the Vietnamese people – who quite simply rose up to fight for their country, and simply stepped up one after another to take the place of those who fell. And driven by this, the youth within the U.S. caught the contagion of revolution. The calculations of those days looked bad from the White House and Pentagon – and the result was a historic defeat for the U.S. in Vietnam.
And here we are today…
Many things about 1970 must seem distant. Many of those events may seem impossible. But grasping the reality and possibility of such things is exactly the point of remembering.
Many of us have already seen, in our own lives and practice, how the crimes of this system can ignite a firestorm. We have seen how the resistance in a small, distant, unknown country can bring a world empire into crisis. We have seen how the activity of a few hard-core internationalists and radicals can, under some conditions, reach tens of thousands. And we have seen how the bloody repression of the government can produce a response that they simply cannot control.
Once you have seen this, it cannot be forgotten. It is life-changing. It gives great hope. And it gives us ideas of what to do now.
Carl Davidson said
I was working at The Guardian in NYC at the time. My phone starting ringing off the hook to come an speak at rallies. I did as many as I could, going from one campus to another via subway, where thousands were rallying at each campus. I lost count as to how many I went to.
Nothing so special about my message. Like many others, I called for shutting down the entire university system in a general student strike, and to take the battle to the streets and induction centers, to jail Nixon and the war criminals, and for solidarity with the peoples of Indochina.
With the killings at Jackson State, we insisted on always keeping a focus on them and the oppression of African Americans as well. In the end, I recall writing a roundup piece showing that 5 million of the country’s 8 million students had joined in these protests, and did indeed ‘shut it down’ in many places.
My main regret at the time was that SDS, which had recently been dissolved from the internal struggle, was not there, as an organization, to see the fruits of its many years of struggle and organizing work.
chicanofuturet said
During that era there existed many favorable conditions for change,there were some winds of revolution that were at the back of those who struggled and died for a better world.The sense of freshness,of newness,the progressive social cultural milieu especially within youth culture created fertile ground for rebellion and revolution.So many new fronts of struggle were being opened up,many for the first time..
It was a time of the heroic anti-imperialist war in Vietnam,it’s great leader “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh so popular with progressive american youth,it was a time of “Red” China and the Great Helmsman Mao Tse Tung..it was time of Malcolm X,Huey Newton and the black panthers,MLK,Cesar Chavez and the UFW…a radical huge SDS..
Due to such relatively positive conditions compared to now, it was easier ..more acceptable to rebel,to make Revolution.For many of the 60s’ youth it was the rite of youth.To rebel meant for millions political rebellion and even revolution..no “rebel without a cause”..this time it was “rebel with a damn good cause”..
Thge Communist left learned some lessons,but then yet,so did the ruling class..
Except the ruling class was much more successful in applying critical lessons adapting to adverse conditions for maintaining and continuing of the Empire,keeping things under control in the “belly of the beast”.
The battle between the bourgeoise and the proletariat in following decades was eventually won by the ruling class.They won that stage of War ….we were essentially defeated,forced into an almost total retreat from which we have never since advanced forward in any significant way..not even partially…
2011..the times have changed,conditions changed..
This period finds Revolutionaries,Communists mostly disoriented,confused,cynical,bitter,spiritually and psychologically beaten…some even corrupted into reactionary,racist,objectivley anti-communist practice..
2011..The youth culture of today to a significant extent has also been incrementally corrupted with the poison of capitalist morality-cynicism,selfishness,greed,petty ego gratification,along with a vast sub-culture of criminality,violence,gang drug enterprise,sexism, self-annihilation.It will not be easy to turn these things around anytime soon..but what other choice do we have other than struggling to change this?
Neo-liberalism has come up with what they consider as being the perfect political “mousetrap”,an effective means of co-optation,of winning support from oppressed minorities,liberal and progressive americans..Barack Obama.. a man who has seen fit to take employment as “hired help” management for the ruling class.No doubt,the wages are high,the benefits excellent and after he leaves the white house he can always find work for some chickenshit third world exploiting transnational corporation.
The ruling class has been creative and daring in their manipulation and use of race as a powerful tool for further maintainance control over the american people,at the same time winning their support ….
The revolutionary left,Communists,tragically,have been,since the 60′s early 70′s .. the time of Kent and Jackson State..
“stuck in the pit” with “no gain in wit” as Mao would say..spinning their wheels-a few feet forward then many feet backwards..
Tragically,for the cause of Revolution and specifically for people of color,Communist organizations,Marxist ideology,has been relegated to things alien,identified as an exlcusively “white thing”.
There are many objective reasons for this ocurring and no one group has a monopoly of blame for this extremely dangerous dilema which carries within it the potential to be the “kill shot” “life killer” of Revolution USA…..”Communism EKIA” as the ruling class would love to one day hear coming from their general staff.
Those who hunger for Revolution,if they are serious and sincere for a better world must do everything humanly possible within their power to connect,unite,forge multiracial unity,and sometimes this will require painful and difficult struggle against racism through criticism self-criticism..not easy by a long shot..
Although extremely difficult and frustrating tasks they are worth the sacrifice,the effort… considering the “alternative”.
We witness the menacing “Rise of the Global Corporation” gradually replacing and brushing aside outmoded tame traditional established liberal bourgeois governments,more “efficiently” appying facistic strategies and tactics to control the people with high technology- “full spectrum dominance”-subverting Democratic gains made,waging more Imperialist wars for profit and geopolitical stragegic position..Oil and other vital natural resources and markets..
We also witness to a much a greater extent ,a more public,visible and conspicuous capitalist ruling class intervention in national,regional economies,thier deadly imposition of people killing “austerity” programs managed by capitalist global organizations such as the IMF,World Bank,and other such lending banking financial institutions,regulators…..etc etc..
Kent State,Jackson State,being the horrible and violent events as they were,according to my evaluation of the present situation,will now and into the future,pale in intensity,scope and range of tyranny-imprisonment,harrasement,assasination,violence.
For the most part the ruling class showed us it’s “Velvet Glove” during the era of the 60′s 70′s..
Now and in the future they will have no choice but to remove their “Velvet Glove” and show us their “Iron Fist” beneath..
We Communists must become like cockroaches-amazing creatures-
survivors,victors -undestructable,adaptable to change,nuclear wars,apocalyptic events of all kinds,extremes of heat cold…etc etc ..
Gio said
People’s Park “Bloody Thursday,” foreshadowed Kent State. Almost a year after “Bloody Thursday” and the death of James Rector, addressing the California Council of Growers at Yosemite, Reagan defended his actions, saying: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Less than a month later, on 4 May 1970, similar violence erupted at Kent State University, killing four students and seriously wounding nine.
The Background at Berkeley’s People’s Park.
Reagan considered the creation of the park a direct leftist challenge to the property rights of the university, and overrode Chancellor May 6 promise that nothing would be done without warning, and on Thursday, 15 May 1969 at 4:30 a.m., he sent the pigs into the park. They cleared an 8-block area around the park while destroying what had been planted, and erected an 8-foot tall perimeter fence to keep people out and to prevent the planting of more trees, grass, flowers and shrubs.
Beginning at noon, about 3,000 people appeared in Sproul Plaza at nearby U.C. Berkeley for a rally, with a different original purpose but when they opened up the Free Speech platform to express concerns it, this led to a mobilization of students. The speaker, Siegel said later that he never intended to precipitate a riot; however when he shouted “Let’s take the park!, police turned off the sound system, and this angered the people, and the crowd responded spontaneously, moving down Telegraph Avenue toward People’s Park chanting “We want the park!”
A major confrontation ensued between police and the crowd. Protesters opened a fire hydrant, the officers fired tear gas canisters, protesters attempted to tear down the fence, and bottles, rocks, and bricks were thrown. More police were brought in. Reagan put Chief of Staff, Edwin Meese III in charge as he had established a reputation for firm opposition to those protesting the Vietnam War at the Oakland Induction Center and elsewhere. He c he called in the Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies, along with some 791 officers from various jurisdictions.
The police were permitted to use whatever methods they chose against the crowds. Police obscured their badges to avoid being identified and headed into the crowds with nightsticks swinging, and guns shooting, including at those running away, in their backs.
The Sheriff’s deputies resorted to using shotguns loaded with “00″ buckshot. “00″ buckshot consists of lead pellets that are much larger, and thus more lethal, than the birdshot that is occasionally used for crowd control.
This is what fatally wounding student James Rector and permanently blinding carpenter Alan Blanchard.
As the protesters retreated, the Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies chased them several blocks down Telegraph Avenue as far as Willard Junior High School at Derby Street, firing tear gas canisters and “00″ buckshot into their backs as they fled. At least one tear gas canister landed on the school grounds. Many people, including innocent bystanders, suffered permanent injuries, some with as many as a hundred lead pellet wounds in their scalps, necks, backs, buttocks and thighs. One man, John Willard, lived for years in intractable pain with lead pellets lodged near his spine.
At least 128 Berkeley residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police. The actual number of seriously wounded was likely much higher. Many more protesters and bystanders were treated for minor injuries. Local hospital logs show that 19 police officers or Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies were treated for minor injuries; none were hospitalized.
The authorities initially claimed that only birdshot had been used as shotgun ammunition. When physicians provided “00″ pellets removed from the wounded as evidence that buckshot had been used, Sheriff Frank Madigan of Alameda County justified the use of shotguns loaded with lethal buckshot by stating “… the choice was essentially this: to use shotguns — because we didn’t have the available manpower — or retreat and abandon the City of Berkeley to the mob.” Sheriff Madigan did admit, however, that some of his deputies (many of whom were Vietnam War veterans) had been overly aggressive in their pursuit of the protesters, “as though they were Viet Cong.”
Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency in Berkeley and sent in 2,700 National Guard troops ignoring the Berkeley City Council voted 8–1 against the decision to occupy their city. For two weeks the streets of Berkeley were barricaded with rolls of barbed wire, and freedom of assembly was denied as National Guardsmen sent tear gas canisters skittling along the street toward any group of more than two people together. .” On Wednesday, 21 May 1969, a midday memorial was held for student James Rector at Sproul Plaza on the university campus. Rector had suffered massive internal injuries from his shotgun wounds, finally dying at Herrick Hospital on May 19. In his honor, several thousand people peacefully assembled to listen to speakers remembering his life. Without warning, National Guard troops surrounded Sproul Plaza, donned their gas masks, and pointed their bayonets inward, while helicopters dropped CS gas directly on the trapped crowd. No escape was possible, and the gas caused acute respiratory distress, disorientation, temporary blindness and vomiting. Many people, including children and the elderly, were injured during the ensuing panic. The gas was so intense that breezes carried it into Cowell Memorial Hospital, endangering patients, interrupting operations and incapacitating nurses. Students at nearby Jefferson and Franklin elementary schools were also affected.
During the People’s Park incident, National Guard troops were stationed in front of Berkeley’s empty lots to prevent protesters from planting flowers, shrubs, or trees. When some guardsmen syposised with the protesters they were sent home and replaced with National Guardsmen from the more conservative Orange County south of Los Angeles.
A curfew was established, and protesters jumped fences after dark to plant flowers in the guarded lots. Guardsmen destroyed the flowers each morning. Some protesters, their faces hidden with scarves, challenged police and National Guard troops. Hundreds were arrested, and Berkeley citizens who found it necessary to venture out during curfew hours risked police harassment and beatings. Berkeley city police officers were discovered to be parking several blocks away from the Annex park, removing their badges/identification and donning grotesque Halloween type masks (ironically including pig faces) to attack citizens they found in the park annex.
In a university referendum held soon after, the U.C. Berkeley students themselves voted 12,719 to 2,175 in favor of keeping the park.
On 30 May 1969, 30,000 Berkeley citizens (out of a population of 100,000) secured a Berkeley city permit and marched without incident past barricaded People’s Park to protest Governor Reagan’s occupation of their city, the death of James Rector, the blinding of Alan Blanchard and the many injuries inflicted by police. Young women slid flowers down the muzzles of bayoneted National Guard rifles, and a small airplane flew over the city trailing a banner that read, “Let A Thousand Parks Bloom.”
Almost a year after “Bloody Thursday” and the death of James Rector, addressing the California Council of Growers at Yosemite, Reagan defended his actions, saying: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Less than a month later, on 4 May 1970, similar violence erupted at Kent State University, killing four students and seriously wounding nine.
Stiofan said
‘What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground’
Ohio by CSN&Y
Stiofan said
[moderator note: reposted as its own thread]
mikediana said
As a child in the 1990s I first heard about Kent State – I recall being at a family dinner at a friend’s house and listening in on a conversation with some ex-national guardsmen who were also at the table. One man was telling the story of Kent State shootings from his point of view (he as a shooter) and he described how the “draft-dodging” hippies were taunting and humiliating the national guard so they dared each other to shoot at them and I learned that in some circles this man was hero of some sort. In the following week I read up on the event and it struck me how little thought went into the horrific act, and how little reflection too, yet what I learned on the other side that so much analysis and reflection was required to comprehend what was essentially a dinner party anecdote. This has not changed and I think its important to remember that what to many are basic social rights are in fact minor trivialities for the privileged.
jim sharp said
rote learning
aka sheep dip factor
capitals only way