Kent State at Fifty

The grassy hill sat empty and an eerie silence hung over the grounds. Every year for the past half-century, hundreds had gathered in mourning and commemoration, speaking the names of those who had died or suffered wounds. In these remembrances often rang a call to action, to continue the struggle for a better world. However, this day, those voices did not echo through the campus or roar through the crowds. This year, despite all the planning, logistics, and anticipation, a global pandemic had made public gatherings dangerous and forced the commemoration to move online and in this virtual world Kent State remembered and the world remembered Kent State.

It should come as little surprise that in the fiftieth year of commemoration several new books on Kent State and the tragedy of May 1970 would appear. Susan Erenrich’s The Cost of Freedom, James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer’s Cambodia and Kent State, and Howard Ruffner’s Moments of Truth add new perspectives and interpretations that help to flesh out a sprawling historiography. With so much written about May 4, it seems fair to wonder what new questions can be asked, what new lessons can be learned, and what is left to reflect upon that we have not ruminated on before? The works contributed here shed new, different, and compelling lights on the story of Kent State, the Vietnam War, and the tragedy of spring 1970 that both scholars and the casual reader will find worthwhile.

In 2015 a PBS special declared May 4, 1970, as “The Day the 60’s Died.”¹ For many in the baby boom generation, this was the day “the war came home,” and the tumult of the preceding half-decade reached its apex. Assuredly, antiwar protest did not end that spring day in Kent, Ohio. We tend to see moments such as this as break points in history, dividing time into “pre-event” and “post-event” constructions. In doing so, they create a false sense of definition that serves to frame later understandings. The tragic events whereby members of the Ohio National Guard fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds on student protesters at Kent State in May 1970 did not end one era and usher in a new; they serve as a bridge between times drifting apart from each other.

Sixties student activism was multifaceted and cross-causal in its construction and actions. Attempting to talk about student antiwar activism without linking it to the struggle to end in loco parentis or various forms of discrimination (both on and beyond campus) fails to acknowledge the breadth and depth of student engagement. Most of the earliest scholarship on Sixties student activism came from participant narratives, especially from the white, male, middle-class students who populated New Left organizations at elite universities and focused on individuals like themselves. The memoirs of Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, former leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the quintessential New Left student organization of the 1960s—reinforced this basic narrative of an explosive, radical Sixties.² As scholars pushed beyond these limiting frameworks, they sought to incorporate new actors and new locales, finding that students around the nation engaged in a wide range of activism. Kenneth Heineman’s Campus Wars (1992) serves as model for many of the studies that came after, as he shifted the historic gaze toward non-elite state universities (including Kent State) and demonstrated that the lived experiences of millions of Sixties college students may have differed from those at UC, Berkeley, and Columbia but they were not bystanders to the tumult of the...