Kent State and Jackson State

Kent State and Jackson State. In May 1970, amid escalating protests against the Vietnam War, six students died in violent incidents at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State College in Mississippi. On Thursday, 30 April, protests had erupted as President Richard M. Nixon revealed that American troops had entered neutral Cambodia to attack Viet‐cong sanctuaries. The next day at Kent State, a peaceful campus protest was followed in the evening by a disruptive disturbance in downtown Kent that prompted Ohio's Republican governor, James Rhodes, to declare a civil emergency and call out the National Guard. On Saturday, arsonists burned the ROTC building on campus. After clashes between students and guardsmen on Sunday, authorities banned a noon rally planned for Monday, 4 May. When two thousand students gathered on campus anyway, the guardsmen first used tear gas to disperse the crowd and then, a few seconds later, for reasons never fully explained, twenty‐eight guardsmen fired more than sixty shots that killed four students— Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison B. Krause, William K. Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer—and wounded nine others.

Meanwhile, tensions were running high at all‐black Jackson State, where students often clashed on spring evenings with local youths, passersby, and police along Lynch Street, which cut through the campus. On 13 May, when students hurled rocks at white motorists driving along Lynch Street, the National Guard was placed on alert as police and state patrolmen used an armored car and tear gas to disperse several hundred students. When the rock‐throwing resumed the next night, the police, highway patrol, and National Guard returned. Around midnight, shooting suddenly began. In twenty‐eight seconds, law‐enforcement officers fired more than 150 rounds into a dormitory, killing two students, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, and injuring a dozen others.

The killings at Kent State, compounded by the Jackson State shootings, triggered a wave of outraged protest that marked the high point of the antiwar movement. An investigative commission appointed by President Nixon found the Kent State shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable” and attributed the Jackson State deaths to “the historic pattern of racism that substantially affects daily life in Mississippi.” Nevertheless, a significant portion of the public supported the forcible suppression of campus protests. In 1979, in a suit arising from the Kent State case, twenty‐eight defendants, including national guardsmen and Governor Rhodes, paid the victims or their families $675,000, accepted responsibility for the shootings, and expressed regret over the deaths and injuries. A decade‐long lawsuit against city and state authorities in the Jackson State case failed.
See also Antiwar Movements; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

The Report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, 1970.
Scott L. Bills, ed., Kent State/May 4: Echoes through a Decade, 1982.
Tim Spofford , Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College, 1988.

Charles W. Eagles