Forty-Five Years Ago This May 4th – Four Dead In Ohio

A Brief Commentary from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

“It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song,” Neil Young once said of ‘Ohio’, a song he composed and recorded with Crosby, Stills & Nash in the days following the fatal shooting of four students by a regiment of U.S. National Guardsman during an anti-Vietnam War rally on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

On the 25th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, a little girl place flowers on a spot where one of the students fell. File photo by Doug Draper

“Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American campus,” Young continued of the shootings, and to this day he may be right.

Like millions of other young people growing up in Canada and the United States in the hyper-naïve, idealistic times of 1960s, I joined in raising whatever small voice I could lend at the time for civil rights for people of colour, and for an end to war- especially the one then raging in Vietnam that wiped out the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese and neighbouring Cambodians, many of them civilians who fell into the faceless, anti-septic realm of “co-lateral damage.”

Jerry Garcia wasn’t wrong either when he summed up the 1960s as quite a trip – an Oz-like whirlwind of ground-breaking pop music, rebellion punctured by shell shocks, staring with the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, followed by the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, a murders of countless civil rights activists and those four young African-American girls in a bombing of a church in Alabama.

All of this in the backdrop of the killing floor in Vietnam which consumed all of those hundreds of thousands of lives, along with the presidency of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his vision of a more just society for all his citizens.

The anti-war movement in both the U.S. and Canada continued to grow as the 60s drew to a close. It played out on college and university campuses and other places, including Canada/U.S. border crossings like the Peace Bridge where young people from both countries, including Peter Kormos (long before his time as a maverick Ontario member of parliament from the Niagara area, met in solidarity in the middle.

Many of our elders back in those days – parents and grandparents who lived through and supported the fight against Hitler’s Nazi’s during the Second World War or “Good War” as it was later called, were reflexively appalled at all of this anti-war protest and some went so far as to say that maybe they should shoot a few of these protesters to put an end to it.

A distraught demonstratoor over the body of one of the felled students.

Then on May 4rth, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University, they did. =Ohio Guardsmen formed a firing squad, squeezed their triggers and several students were hit and went down.

Four of them – Allison Krause, 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer and William Schroeder – died from their wounds. Two of them were not even participating in the demonstration. They were gun down with text books in their hands as they walked from class to class. One of the others, Allison Krause, was remembered for sticking the stem of a flower in the barrel of one of the Guardsmen’s’ rifles a day or two before the shooting and saying; “Flowers are better than bullets.”

A few days later, on the campus of Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) in Jackson, University, and police shot into another anti-war gathering of students, killing two and wounding several others. But it did not get anywhere near the reaction the Kent State shootings did – maybe because the Kent State students were white and the Jackson State College students were black.

How sad it is that 45 years later, in cities like Baltimore, New York and Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrators are still carrying signs around trying to convince the larger world that “black lives matter.”

And how sad it is that the Vietnam War began with a few military advisors sent there, escalating into a military creep that bogged down to a hellish war that, all these years later, few can justify.

Does that not all sound familiar. Look at what we are up to in Iraq and Syria today.

As the late folksinger Pete Seeger wrote earlier on in the 60s, before Kent State, “When will we ever learn?”

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