The grim history of using troops against student protesters

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/26/kent-state-killings-lesson-protests/

https://archive.ph/a0SQj



House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republican Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) are among the conservative leaders suggesting that the National Guard might be needed to control campus protests across the country against Israel’s war in Gaza. Such calls stir memories of the tragedy 54 years ago at Kent State University in northeastern Ohio.

On May 1, 1970 — a Friday night — several hundred Kent State students poured out of downtown bars near closing time and began harassing motorists, smashing store windows and spray-painting buildings with antiwar slogans. Mayor LeRoy Satrom, a conservative Democrat elected by Kent voters six months earlier on a get-tough platform against “long-haired students,” telephoned the governor’s office the next day. Saying that outside agitators were fomenting subversion and disorder in his town, the mayor asked that the National Guard be dispatched to Kent.

University officials had a different plan. They preferred to deal with the situation by using university police, with county sheriff’s deputies as reinforcements and Ohio State Highway Patrol officers as a last resort. But they were not consulted. That Saturday night, student protesters against the Vietnam War put Kent State’s ROTC building to the torch. University police in riot gear eventually drove off the protesters with tear gas. By then, Gov. Jim Rhodes had acted on the mayor’s request, and, a short time later, a line of armored personnel carriers, jeeps and trucks reached campus carrying several hundred Ohio National Guardsmen.

The following afternoon, on May 3, Rhodes met in Kent with state and local officials. Rhodes was in the final year of his second four-year term. Barred by the state constitution from running again, he was seeking the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in a primary election just 48 hours away. Trailing in the polls, Rhodes had positioned himself as the candidate who would use “all the force that was necessary” to end campus disturbances throughout the state.

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