May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970; A Play

Scene Four: The Rally

31 s c e n e f o ur : t he r a l ly narrator 3 Male Students narrator May 4. A clear, warm spring day, everything in blossom. it must have been after noon, when i watched a squad of national Guardsmen kneel, lock, and load in front of Satterfield. it never occurred to me, nor to anyone else i talked to, that the Guard carried live, steel jacketed ammunition. We did not think of ourselves as the enemy, dissidents but not enemy, believing the Guard to be on a peacekeeping mission, a civil action against an unarmed citizenry. male student 1 i stood up at my abnormal psychology class at 11:00 on Monday morning and said i thought it was strange that the instructor was beginning to hold class without referencing the fact that there was anationalGuardmemberstandingatourdoorwayholdinganM-1. i thought there should be some discussion, and, frankly, if there wasn’t, i didn’t think it was worth staying. So i urged everyone in class to come to the rally at noon, in defiance of the order not to gather. i mentioned the importance of our right to assemble. And i left that class with my abnormal psychology book in my hand and went to the rally. black student 1 i was aware of the rally, but at the same time, the black United Students had encouraged us to stay away from the rally because they felt that if there were any kind of trouble, we would most likely be the first ones targeted. As far as we were concerned, the national Guardsmen were the police. And because we’d been subject to so much harassment and abuse by the police, i had no illusion that those guys had blanks or pellets in their rifles. We all assumed they had real bullets, and we would be the first ones to be shot. 32 male student 2 i stepped away from the crowd and i heard that they were reading the Riot Act. There were a lot of innocent people that had no idea the Riot Act was being read. Having been in the military, i had a grasp of military-think, and frankly didn’t trust them. i knew the national Guard was edgy and had a reason to blow their cool. They were coming from at least two weeks of unwanted national Guard duty dealing with a truckers’ strike in which there were real snipers using real bullets shooting from real guns from overpasses at independent truckers. This was a set-up for tragedy. black student 1 i saw people playing tennis on the courts behind Terrace Hall. So much of that day was just surreal. There were so many normal things going on. male student 1 The army itself was the symbol of what everyone was angry about, and here was our own military kneeling and aiming rifles not just at protesters or rock throwers, but at a dormitory full of big glass windows filled with students. So you had these two groups facing off across the Commons, and by this time i think the anger on the part of the students was not Vietnam or Cambodia but “This is my home.” ...