From protest to tragedy: The day the National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State

Fifty-five years ago last month, the Kent State University shootings left four people dead and several others injured, amid student protests over the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

The subject of an iconic, prize-winning photograph, the massacre sparked student strikes at universities across the U.S., is credited with helping to sway overall public opinion against the war, and gave rise to one of music’s best-known protest songs.

What happened in the Kent State shootings?

On Monday, May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators on the Kent State campus, as students protested against the U.S.’s invasion of Cambodia as part of a widening of its Vietnam campaign.

Anti-war protests had erupted at universities across the U.S. after President Richard Nixon’s announcement of the move. Just 18 months earlier, Nixon had been elected to the White House amid promises to bring an end to the Vietnam War.

On Friday, May 1, a rally on the Kent State campus was followed by disturbances in downtown Kent, where police used tear gas to disperse protestors. Kent’s mayor, LeRoy Satrom, then sought the mobilization of the National Guard, and confrontations ensued between protestors and Guardsmen over the weekend.

Although authorities announced a ban on a further rally planned for May 4, by noon on the Monday around 3,000 students had gathered in the middle of the campus, on a grassy area known as the Commons.

In a detailed report on the massacre, Kent State’s Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley explain that National Guard troops then arrived and ordered the crowd to disperse, firing tear-gas canisters and marching towards the students.

Demonstrators responded by shouting and throwing rocks at the Guardsmen. “The protestors moved up a steep hill, known as Blanket Hill, and then down the other side of the hill onto the Prentice Hall parking lot as well as an adjoining practice football field,” Lewis and Hensley say. At this point, “yelling and rock throwing reached a peak”.

Suddenly, troops reacted by firing between 61 and 67 shots over a 13-second period. “Many Guardsmen fired into the air or the ground,” Lewis and Hensley note. “However, a small portion fired directly into the crowd.”

Who was killed in the Kent State massacre?

The shots killed students Allison Krause, 19; Jeffrey Miller, 20; Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20; and William Schroeder, 19. Nine others were injured, including 19-year-old Dean Kahler, who was permanently paralysed from the waist down after being hit in the back.

A Pulitzer winner and “the greatest protest record”

The immediate aftermath of Miller’s killing is recorded in a still image which, the following year, earned its photographer the Pulitzer Prize.

Taken by John Filo, then a photography major at the university, the photo shows Miller’s dead body lying face down on the ground, with a screaming Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, kneeling over him.

The Kent State shootings also prompted the singer-songwriter Neil Young to pen the iconic track “Ohio” - a song described by the music journalist Dorian Lynskey as “the greatest protest record”.

Written, recorded and released within less than three weeks of the massacre, “Ohio” urges those Americans who were critical of the protestors to consider: “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?”

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone magazine placed the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young track at No. 9 in its all-time ranking of protest songs, lauding it as “one of the defining songs of the anti-war movement”. “We were speaking for our generation,” Young has said of “Ohio”, per Rolling Stone.

What happened to the National Guardsmen?

The National Guard troops involved in the Kent State massacre argued that they had only opened fire as they feared their lives were in danger.

“Guardsmen testified before numerous investigating commissions as well as in federal court that they felt the demonstrators were advancing on them in such a way as to pose a serious and immediate threat to the safety of the Guardsmen, and they therefore had to fire in self-defense,” the university says.

In a 1974 criminal trial against eight Guardsmen, a judge accepted their version of events, dismissing the case.

Four years later, a civil case ended up in an out-of-court settlement that saw the state of Ohio pay $675,000 to the injured students and the families of those killed.

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