At 12:24p.m. on the sunny spring afternoon of May 4, 1970, or 52 years ago this Wednesday, National Guardsmen patrolling the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University during a protest against America’s war in Southeast Asia — suddenly and with no warning, let alone rhyme or reason — turned, kneeled and fired 67 rounds of live ammunition into a crowd of students. Some 13 seconds later, nine young people lay wounded and four others — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder — were dead on the ground.
Those 13 seconds changed America. A notion that had animated the boisterous 1960s — that America’s largest generation of young people, raised in post-World War II affluence and optimism, would change the world — seemed to also die on the hot asphalt of the parking lot where the victims fell. Even though no one to this day knows exactly who ordered the shots or why, many took what happened that May 4 as a warning: there are unwritten limits on dissent in the United States.
What became known as the Kent State Massacre caused days of rage, including a nationwide strike that shut down dozens of campuses in spring 1970. It inspired a song — Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” written by Neil Young — that still lights up FM radios, and it motivated the founders of the rock bandDevo and the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde(all enrolled at Kent State at the time of the shooting) to reject bourgeois life and become artists. More than a half-century later, some activists work to keep the memory of that day and the victims alive and to apply that spirit to protesting new wars or other outrages, in an echo of Young’s famous refrain, “How can you run when you know?”
And yet there is something else about Kent State — or, more accurately, what it represents as the blood-soaked beginning of the end of an American youth movement — that we rarely talk about, even though this aftershock continues to affect tens of millions of people, most of whom weren’t even born on May 4, 1970.
The shooting at this large Ohio public university, coming after years of similar youth-led protests from Berkeley to Columbia and everywhere in between, finally convinced a rising cohort of conservative “law and order” politicians that the movement toward making American higher education a public good — affordable and accessible to any young person wanting to better themselves — needed to end. What followed was the privatization of the American Way of College, a move to radically reduce taxpayer support for public universities, tuition that rose every year even more than health care costs, and the rise of a student-loan industrial complexthat saddled new generations with a $1.75 trillion debt bomb. The political divisions and cultural resentments caused by this crisis have split America in two.
