Talkin' 'bout my GenerationKent State University - 1970

“Then I heard the tatatatatatatatatat sound. I thought it was fireworks. An eerie sound fell over the common. The quiet felt like gravity pulling us to the ground. Then a young man’s voice: 'They fucking killed somebody!' Everything slowed down and the silence got heavier… The guardsmen themselves looked stunned. We looked at them and they looked at us. They were just kids, 19 years old, like us. But in uniform. Like our boys in Vietnam”
~ Chrissie Hynde, Kent State student, later to become lead singer for The Pretenders ~

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard fired upon unarmed students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, during a protest against the bombing of neutral Cambodia by United States military forces. Four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Two of the dead, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest of about 500 students. The other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, were walking to class at the time they died. Schroeder was a member of the Kent State ROTC battalion.

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The Kent State Massacre followed four years of protests, sit-ins and walk-outs by Kent State students against the ongoing war in Vietnam and the invasion of Cambodia.

Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. The Kent State shootings also led to protests on college campuses throughout the United States, and a student strike, causing more than 450 campuses across the country to close with both violent and non-violent demonstrations. A national study concluded that this was the first nationwide student strike in U.S. history; over 4 million students protested and hundreds of American colleges and universities closed during the student strikes. The Kent State campus remained closed for six weeks.

Richard Nixon expressed that those in the anti-war movement were the pawns of foreign communists. A Gallup Poll taken immediately after the shootings reportedly showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion. Students from Kent State and other universities often got a hostile reaction upon returning home. Some were told that more students should have been killed to teach student protesters a lesson; some students were disowned by their families.

Though eight members of the Ohio National Guard were identified in videos and photographs as having fired upon the students, none of them ever faced criminal or civil trials.