Submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Weekend Contributor
I was going to write this last weekend on the actual 44th anniversary of a very sad event. For some reason, I had a hard time focusing on what I wanted to say, in light of the many emotions that were going through my head. I don’t want the anniversary to go by without writing about the personal significance that day in May had on my life, and I believe on the lives of many in my generation. The Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by John Filo, included above from Wikipedia, is one that I have never forgotten. Nor should anyone forget it.
I can’t believe that 44 years have elapsed since that fateful day in May, 1970. On May 4th, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired upon unarmed student protesters, killing four of them and wounding and maiming several others. I will never forget that day because I was a Freshmen at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and when the news of the student killings broke, I thought a bomb had gone off in my head. I wasn’t overly political at that point in time, but that somber event changed all of my prior thinking.
I was just short of my 19th birthday and I remember that day as my personal coming of age experience. I was no longer just a young college student. I was now a member of a class that was shot down by soldiers on a campus not too far away from mine, and in many respects, very similar to mine. The fact that agents of the government could fire upon peaceful protesters was so extraordinary that it felt like a kick in the groin to myself and many other students on my campus and on campuses throughout the country. Along with the killing of two students at Jackson State University(f/k/a Jackson State College) around May 14th, it looked and felt like it was open season on college students.
Indeed, I was “watching” a protest that turned ugly on May 11th, 1970 when elements of the Illinois State Police and the Illinois National Guard attacked the crowd of students that I and friend were in the middle of and chased down and beat some of us and arrested a large group of innocent students. I can still smell the pepper spray from that warm evening. I was one of the unlucky ones who were arrested that night. That event which started as a protest against the killings at Kent State turned into a night in Jackson County Jail in Murphysboro, Illinois.
After getting arrested and fingerprinted and receiving my first full body cavity inspection, I was literally thrown into a cell designed to hold 4 prisoners, which was already holding 8-10 of my fellow students when I was thrust upon them. After spending most of the early morning of my 19th birthday in the lockup, my head was spinning from the tear gas and pepper gas used by the authorities the night before and from the lack of sleep in that overcrowded cell. I realize that my little experience pales in comparison to what the students at Kent State and Jackson State had to endure, but the whole event opened my eyes to something that I have never forgotten.
My country and my state would not allow me and my college classmates and friends to express ourselves as the U.S. Constitution provided in the First Amendment. I felt like I was a second class citizen in my own country and state. Shortly after my arrest, Southern Illinois University was closed down for the semester and many students grades were negatively impacted by the decision to close down early. Many other campuses across the country also closed down early in response to the demonstrations and protests that were being held on a daily basis. So once again, my grades were impacted negatively because of the closure and I was placed on social probation by the university, all because I was expressing my Constitutional rights. Did the Government or the Illinois State Police care about my rights? No, because I was just a student who got in their way.
After the summer ended and I was acquitted of the charge of “unlawful assembly” in a court of law, I was still left on social probation by my university even though I was found not guilty of any wrongdoing. Once again, I felt helpless in my own university because I was labeled a trouble maker even though I had done nothing wrong or illegal. It took many months and years for an investigation into the Kent State killings to take place and as you might have guessed, it was pretty much a whitewash job. The National Guard claimed that they were fired upon even though there was little or no evidence backing their claims.
Even President Nixon lambasted the students in interviews following the sad event. I saw this as another example of the college students being treated as if they had less rights than the National Guardsmen or any other citizen. (I highly recommend a book titled, “Kent State, What Happened and Why”, by James Michener, which discussed all of the evidence and facts surrounding the shootings and came down to the conclusion that the Guardsmen illegally and improperly fired upon the unarmed students.)
The events surrounding the Kent State killings still resonate in my head and I became more politically involved and aware because of Kent State and my arrest shortly after. My big brother was in Vietnam at the time and this weighed heavily upon me, but I had just been slapped in the face by my University, my State and my Country and I now had a duty to expose any and all wrongdoings of our government in prosecuting the war in Vietnam. After all, the students at Kent State and Jackson State were killed while protesting our country’s immoral actions in Southeast Asia.
I made a pledge to myself that I would not allow any government of this country take advantage of any so-called “lesser” citizens for any reason. I also promised myself to never trust my government again without verifying the facts. The phrase heard a lot during those “Days of Rage” was “My country, love it or leave it”. Well, it was my country too and I wasn’t about to leave it just because my rights were being violated. It became my duty to do whatever I could to right the wrongs and to help the disadvantaged overcome the odds. It was also critical in my decision to become a lawyer.
Have I been able to help “right the wrongs” by my country since 1970? I may have helped some, but probably not as many as I would have liked, but every day I attempt to even the odds against the little guy. It has been 44 years and I am physically not the same person, but it feels as if it was just yesterday. I often relive the events of May of 1970 and as I pledged to myself 44 years ago, “never again”. The Occupy Wall Street protests reminded me of the anti-Vietnam war movement in some ways. Those protesters were also mistreated and maligned by an ever-growing police presence. They too may have been changed forever by their experience standing up to governmental power.
Never again will I sit and let someone else stand up to a government gone astray. I can still hear the screams of the students in the video of the event and I can still see the picture of the young girl kneeling over a dead student and I can still hear the words of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song of the day, “Four Dead in Ohio”. Peace to all of you and I hope that the parents and loved ones of the victims have been able to find some peace in the past 44 years. I hope the Mothers of those lost or maimed, if they are still with us, can also find some peace on this Mothers Day.
I will continue to remind everyone that I can, every year, that those students did not die in vain. They did not die in vain because they spurred on an anti-war movement and they altered my life forever and I believe the life of our country. Their fate is a stark reminder of what kind of power a government has and an example of what a government should not do. What do you think?
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So, you’re the one.
If you Google search: Vietnam Veterans Against The War, you will get a good view of the role that Vets had in stopping this dumb war. There is a photo of John Kerry in a military outfit testifying before Congress. I am glad that he is our Secretary of State.
rafflaw,
Excellent post! We should always remember such events in our country’s history. For me, the change came a year earlier–during my first year of teaching–when I learned of the death of one of my good friends in Vietnma.
*****
By Michael Hirsch
July 16, 2013
Issue #188
https://www.indypendent.org/2013/07/16/hardhats-peace
Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
By Penny Lewis
Cornell U. Press, 2013
Excerpt:
A lot of books get published. Some are worth reading. Occasionally one comes along that is so complete, so thoughtful and so well-argued that not only does it move the discussion, it closes it. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, City University of New York sociologist and labor educator Penny Lewis does that to a reigning myth — that the mass movement against the United States’ war in Southeast Asia comprised mainly spoiled college kids, and that the true, authentic blue-collar Americans backed the war with brio. That’s a slick line to propagate. Not only does an image like that of construction workers attacking protesters (as famously occurred on Wall Street in May 1970) justify foreign interventions and military spending, it stigmatizes dissenters as illegitimate and alien to the body politic. That grossly distorts real working class sentiment or the class composition of protesters, all to divide critics themselves.
Slick as it was, the line was not true, says Lewis, whose work in this remarkably readable and textured analysis shows us the past isn’t so much remembered as “reconstructed,” in schools, by the media and elsewhere. Even contemporary polls by Gallup showed that the greater one’s education, the more likely one was to support the Vietnam War. That is the reverse of the urban myth that blue-collar families were the war’s key defenders and that a privileged and ungrateful elite — what neoconservatives would soon name a “new class” — was responsible for defeat in the field. It’s an old trope, that wars are lost not through military blunders, or because they were undertaken for the worst possible reasons, or because the domestic effects from an indefensible and bankrupting military adventure estrange growing numbers of people, but because of a “stab in the back” by a willful and disloyal minority.
In fact, as Lewis demonstrates, the U.S. drive to stabilize what quickly became a series of military dictatorships in South Vietnam was defeated through the resistance of the Vietnamese and the disintegration of a near-mutinous U.S. army in the field. As for the antiwar movement at home, Lewis calculates that some tens of millions of Americans took part at its height, with the majority of Americans opposing the war. If the movement began on elite campuses and with the help of traditional pacifist and left organizations, Lewis demonstrates how it quickly grew to encompass communities of color, including civil rights organizations aghast at the domestic cost of the war, parents with a real expectation of losing sons in a pointless slaughter, mid-level trade union officials and rank-and-file union members bucking their war-abetting union leaders, and returning troops — typically with no more than a high-school diploma or GED — very publicly discarding their medals in antiwar mobilizations while helping build the GI coffeehouse efforts. And with the draft swelling resisters’ ranks, the now grounded multi-class movement changed a bipartisan consensus among Washington policy-makers that “rolling back communism” and “defending freedom” were both fair statements of war aims, let alone real possibilities. Communism would within a generation be rolled back, but by the tenacity of a then ascending global capital, not by the U.S. military.
Elaine – there was CPUSA money and activists in both the anti-war and Civil Rights movement.
Many of the blue collar vets I grew up w/ were alienated by the protesters. It was, in large part, a class divide. When you grow up in the lower echelon as did I you have a different perspective.
Nick While it is true that the most active cadre of the anti-Vietnam war movement were the students, we had overwhelming support among the blue collar folks too. When I got out of the USAF, I tried going to college on the GI Bill, which I found did not cover much. I immediately got involved in the anti-war movement and did draft counseling, and leafleting at the railroad station where the guys taking their physical for the draft left for New Haven. The draft board people called out the names of guys who were supposed to be there, and I was quite surprised at how few showed up. My own estimate was only 50% reported.
When I had to go to work since I ran out of money, I found that most people were not for the war at all. There was a vocal minority that was for it, but most folks were against it or neutral and wanted nothing to do with it. The way the anti-war movement got started as a mass movement was from the vets coming home and telling their family and friends how screwed up it was. One of our most active vets was a black Army vet who had been in Vietnam and his unit was ordered to take part in invading Cambodia. His regiment decided that their orders only said Vietnam, and they decided to pass on Cambodia. They didn´t go,but they broke up the unit and placed them in other ones. My uncle was a career Army officer, and he finally turned against the war because it was destroying the one thing he loved most, the US Army. So to say it was only students and hippies is flat out wrong. That was the establishment media spin, not reality.
Paul,
While the National Guard may have been undertrained, I submit that the bigger problem was the government at every level saw protest as a crime instead of a right. For some reason the 2nd Amendment can’t be restricted, but the First Amendment is ripe for attack.
Folks today think that there was a dichotomy between the Vietnam soldiers and vets, and the war protesters. Not so. The organizers of the May Day Demonstrations in May 1971 were Vietnam Vets and they were the most vocal, radical and “active” activists in that week of turmoil. Today one will hear from Vietnam vets that they came home and were dissed by hippies. Many hippies were vets. They were not dissing the boys who came home. They were dissing Nixon and the military industrial complex.
I was in the Marines stationed in North Carolina when this crime occurred. We were on alert because there were disturbances involving the Black Panthers in New Haven and the scuttlebutt was that we were going to be sent there. Most of the guys in my unit were chomping at the bit. A chance to go kill black people? Bring it on! Myself and two other guys weren’t having any of it and we were looked upon as if we were subversives. I was also set to get married on May 9th so my life seemed to be completely out of my hands.
I always believed Nixon told Governor Rhodes to shoot those kids and nothing will ever change my mind about that. Maybe I’m naive but I believe everything that has driven our country into the toilet stems from Nixon and the criminals, like Karl Rove, Rumsfeld, and Cheney among others, who got their start under his criminal administration.
rafflaw – I understand why we do not see you railing at THIS government and administration, since compared to the last one, we’re in such better shape.
I mean, hey, we haven’t been lied into any multi-trillion borrowed dollar wars lately that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Or millions, in the case of Vietnam.
I’m not sure if I’m older than you, but I understand that some people were very upset about the Viet Nam war, especially people who were going to be forced to go fight it by a bunch of chicken hawks. Kind of like that last administration, the Cheney/Bush one… you know the one many Republicans simply don’t want to talk about. The one headed by a man who took the easy way out and got in the under trained national guard…
I remember that some school facilities had even been taken over by students, some of whom were so angered by the unjust war in SE Asia that they were radicalized.
Guess we showed them.
If only hippie punching weren’t so damn messy…
The so called Ukrainian National Guardsmen are not that at all. They are the fascist thugs who overthrew the legally and democratically elected President of the Ukraine, Yanukovych. The regular troops were in most cases refusing to use deadly force on their neighbors, so the leader of the Nazis was made head of the Ukrainian military, and enlisted his goons into the new force. Those crooks are quite willing to murder any person who gets in their way. The current Ukrainian government has no legal leg to stand on since they came to power by the guns of the fascists. Those who support this govenment are against the rule of law and democracy. So it should be no surprise that they will murder any who they dislike.
The BBC had some interesting video and interviews with these Nazis. They were quite open about their hatred for anyone who was not of pure Ukrainian stock. If you are for democracy, you cannot be for the current Ukrainian government. Simple. If they can come to power by extra-legal means, they cannot claim any moral high ground as far as the rest of their people being told to observe the very law that they spit on.
I doubt Kent State could happen again in the same way. The fact is that the Guardsmen thought that those who protested against the war were deserving of death. Absent a similar situation, it is unlikely the Guard would act in such a manner as then. The politicians likewise felt that they were the dictators as Nixon proved in his use of power, which is one of the reasons he would have been impeached. Once a government decides on the use of force here or abroad, they will use it in the same way here and abroad if there is a sufficient threat to their positions and power.
At least those who experienced the days of Kent State realized that the real enemy was those in power at home, and not so much abroad. All of our rights depend on keeping those in power on a leash and speaking up when they transgress. It is also foolish to have a blanket condemnation of every use of power. Police do have the need to use deadly force in some situations, as does any government. Kent State was not one of those. IT is more akin to the needless police shootings that we read about here.
I doubt Nixon had anything to do with the shootings, other than to defend them. That one side thinks it has the right to kill their political oppenents is the root cause of this. So while I don´t trust the US govenment on all things, I do know that not ALL of what they do is bad or with ill intent.
Just passing through. No comment.
Is secession legal, traditional or customary? Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin did it in Crimea and one of his predecessors did it in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Putin seems to be a reliable, global legal authority. Let’s ask Putin if it’s ok for states to secede from a union. Maybe the West should intervene on behalf of the union for the union’s sake. Where’s Abe when you need him?
America, love and change it.
I can see this happening here should some crazy state decide to secede from the Union.
Current headline on CBSNEWS:
“Ukraine guardsmen open fire on crowd in east after referendum
After trying to break up voting on the secession referendum in a small eastern town, Ukrainian national guardsmen shoot and kill some in a crowd outside a town hall….”
Pick your poison.
“Four Dead In Ohio”
“Four Dead In Benghazi”
Let’s be clear. Watergate was a break-in to abscond with a file from a file cabinet.
Benghazi was a black op, consorting with an enemy, that resulted in a running, 8-hour fire fight and the deaths of a non-combatant, presidential level ambassador and three support personnel with a massive and deliberate, subsequent factual cover-up, promoting the fiction of an anti-Muslim video, at the highest levels of government.
Geez! Maybe somebody should look into that.
And that’s my opinion and perspective. What say you?
Great column Rafflaw.
A common thread in most police (or government) shootings is that the dead did nothing that deserved death.
When you analyze the “crimes” committed, you come up with disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, marching without a permit, trespassing, or minor property damage.
Far too often the real crime is “disrespect” and governments respond with lethal force.
We see it or and over – Waco, Kent State, the camper in Albuquerque, – when the government gives a person a gun and a badge, his respect for the Bill of Rights goes out the window.
Kent State will happen again, but it is up to each of us to make the costs intolerable to the real criminals in those crimes.
Darrel, I turned 15 in 1970. I do recall there being a draft at the time where everyone who turned 18 was required to register at their draft board or risk jail. Willingly going to Vietnam? Perhaps some were willing. I would wager a bet that most conscripts were less than willing. They just would rather join the military than risk jail. And did those 50,000+ die for the United States? Did they keep the United States free from invasion? I suppose they did to the same extent those who died in Lebanon, Iraq or Libya did. Our military is out of control and what happened at Kent State was an outcome of that military. Could it happen again? You bet. We have learned nothing from wasting 50,000 United States citizens in Vietnam.
What happened at Kent State was the result of the joke of the undertraining of the National Guard. For those of us who were draft eligible, the National Guard was always considered the easy way out. They had a motto “Sleep Well Tonight, Your National Guard in Protecting You.” But it was changed to “Sleep Well Tonight, the National Guard Sure Will.”
Pat, I am arbitrarily taking a debatable point off the table to focus on a larger point. I mean no disrespect to those soldiers. I am sure it has taken a toll on them.
Thank you for a great post, and thank you for standing up for what you did those 44 years ago. I fear not much has changed. Anybody heard someone say that I have nothing to fear from the Feds keeping my phone records? Or how about the marijuana legal battles many face. Here is one that will play out this week. Do we really want to jail 70 year old men for growing marijuana?
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/05/11/3179857/feds-seek-prison-for-rural-washington.html