#Kent State

[another-punk-trans-woman]

As protests start ramping up and violence escalates please remember:

DO NOT PUT MILK IN YOUR EYES FOR PEPPER SPRAY OR TEAR GAS.

It can and will cause infection due to bacteria. Flush with water, distilled if possible, and never EVER wear contact lenses to protests where there may be police retaliation.

Please reblog. It may save someone's sight.

[animentality]

[drsonnet]

On This Day: Kent State shootings leave 4 students dead!

Four Kent State University students were killed and nine were injured on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd gathered to protest the Vietnam War. The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by the conflict in Southeast Asia. In its immediate aftermath, a student-led strike forced the temporary closure of colleges and universities across the country. Some political observers believe the events of that day in northeast Ohio tilted public opinion against the war and may have contributed to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.

Students dive to the ground as the National Guard fires on faculty and students May 4, 1970, to protest the war in Vietnam. File Photo courtesy of Kent State University Archives

The Kent State Shootings

“… Give Peace a Chance (iastate.edu)

On This Day, May 4: Kent State shootings leave 4 students dead - UPI.com

[oldmanpeace]

The Kent State tragedy is oh so important to remember. More so than ever here and now in 2025. Shameful.

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

(x)

[forever70s]

student at Kent State, photo by Lafayette Tolliver (1970 / 1971)

[perrysoup]

This May 4th, in the US at least, don’t think of Star Wars.

Think about Kent State. Think about how the government killed its own people for daring to speak up about the murders being done “for democracy” in Vietnam.

Think about how every time college students speak up, the state comes down on them as they never do for racists or bigots.

Think about how the media will portray these students are worthless and ignorant while praising the police state that silences them.

Think about how years later both the state and the media will lie and say how important they really believed it was as they happily sent the police after them.

Don’t forget Kent State

Don’t forget Columbia.

Free Palestine

[cptnbeefheart]

Neil Young introducing Ohio at a 2023 concert, a relevant protest song about the massacre at Kent State on May 4th, 1970. original post

[daughter-of-sapph0]

sending in the national guard to a university to stop students from protesting against the united states' involvement in the killing of innocent people? where have I seen this before?

[semioticapocalypse]

John Filo. Mary Vecchio grieving over slain student. Kent State, May 4, 1970

I Am Collective Memories   •    Follow me, — says Visual Ratatosk

[bayareabadboy]

Neil Young - Ohio (Live at Farm Aid 25)

[transpondster]

At 12:24p.m. on the sunny spring afternoon of May 4, 1970, or 52 years ago this Wednesday, National Guardsmen patrolling the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University during a protest against America’s war in Southeast Asia — suddenly and with no warning, let alone rhyme or reason — turned, kneeled and fired 67 rounds of live ammunition into a crowd of students. Some 13 seconds later, nine young people lay wounded and four others — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder — were dead on the ground. Those 13 seconds changed America. A notion that had animated the boisterous 1960s — that America’s largest generation of young people, raised in post-World War II affluence and optimism, would change the world — seemed to also die on the hot asphalt of the parking lot where the victims fell. Even though no one to this day knows exactly who ordered the shots or why, many took what happened that May 4 as a warning: there are unwritten limits on dissent in the United States. What became known as the Kent State Massacre caused days of rage, including a nationwide strike that shut down dozens of campuses in spring 1970. It inspired a song — Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” written by Neil Young — that still lights up FM radios, and it motivated the founders of the rock bandDevo and the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde(all enrolled at Kent State at the time of the shooting) to reject bourgeois life and become artists. More than a half-century later, some activists work to keep the memory of that day and the victims alive and to apply that spirit to protesting new wars or other outrages, in an echo of Young’s famous refrain, “How can you run when you know?” And yet there is something else about Kent State — or, more accurately, what it represents as the blood-soaked beginning of the end of an American youth movement — that we rarely talk about, even though this aftershock continues to affect tens of millions of people, most of whom weren’t even born on May 4, 1970. The shooting at this large Ohio public university, coming after years of similar youth-led protests from Berkeley to Columbia and everywhere in between, finally convinced a rising cohort of conservative “law and order” politicians that the movement toward making American higher education a public good — affordable and accessible to any young person wanting to better themselves — needed to end. What followed was the privatization of the American Way of College, a move to radically reduce taxpayer support for public universities, tuition that rose every year even more than health care costs, and the rise of a student-loan industrial complexthat saddled new generations with a $1.75 trillion debt bomb. The political divisions and cultural resentments caused by this crisis have split America in two.

And, 11 days later, police shot two students at Jackson State:

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

(x)

[arinewman7]

Ohio

Neil Young

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We're finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

[collegepeaches]

Kent State Golden Flashers Gymnastics

[bossymarmalade]

The Girl in the Kent State Photo

Mary Ann Vecchio dropped to the pavement and waited until the smoke had cleared to look up. Jeffrey Miller, the student she’d been talking to, was facedown on the ground; he’d been shot through the mouth. She knelt over his body as blood seeped onto the pavement. Other students walked by, too stunned or confused to look. “Doesn’t anyone see what just happened here?” she remembers crying. “Why is no one helping him?” As the soldiers approached, their guns at the ready, she recalls asking them a question that countless others across the country would soon ask as well: “Why did you do this?”

Nearby were more bodies. Allison Krause was shot in the chest; William Schroeder in the back. Sandy Scheuer, who was just passing through the area on her way to class, was struck by a bullet that hit her jugular vein. Four dead in Ohio.

“It was because she was 14, because of her youth, that she ran to help, that she ran to do something. There were other people, 18, 19, 20 years old, who didn’t get close to the body. She did because she was a kid. She was a kid reacting to the horror in front of her. Had she not been 14, the picture wouldn’t have had the impact it did.”