People Who Died In the Sixties: 4 students at Kent State
People Who Got to Live in the Sixties: All the other students at Kent State
Today we celebrate the glorious day when four baby boomers were deprived of the opportunity to grow up, name their kids “Dylan”, take up EST, and vote for Bill Clinton. Twice.
Each year at this time, this blog marks the anniversary of the Kent State shooting, aka the You’ll Never Hear the Frickin’ End of It Massacre.
The only reason Kent State matters is that a few days it led to the much more significant and therefore largely forgotten Hard Hat Riots, which we’ll get to later this week.
Anyway, let’s review what really happened at Kent State in 1970:
Read More...“Kent State was hardly a placid campus before the Cambodian operation. The university had 21,000 students, and a sizeable SDS chapter [a communist front group] devoted to making trouble. In November, 1968, for example, charges were brought against 250 members of SDS and the Black United Students who had demonstrated against police recruiting on campus.
“The charges were dropped when about 300 black students left campus demanding amnesty. On April 8, 1969, SDS led a demonstration that resulted in clashes with university police. The demonstrators demanded that the university abolish the Reserve Officers Training Corps, a crime laboratory, and a school for law enforcement training. State police were called in and quelled the disruption. SDS was then banned from campus, thirty-seven students were suspended, and five were charged with assault and battery. Worse was yet to come.
