Download PDF of this full issue: v7n4.pdf (8.4 MB)

Kent State: Students Arrested

By VVAW

On July 13 nearly 200 chanting students and supporters at Kent State University were arrested and dragged away from the site of proposed gymnasium at the school. The students, who had lived in a tent city on the site since May 12th, are demanding the gym be built elsewhere and not on the ground where Ohio National Guardsmen gunned down the Kent State students on May 4th, 1970, killing four and wounding 9 others.

The attack on the students at Kent occurred during massive protests following the US invasion of Cambodia during the Indochina War. Later the courts found all those responsible for this outrage "innocent" but brought charges against 23 students and faculty members at Kent State.

This further outrage and the continual attempts by the school administrators to cover up and make the struggle that occurred a thing of the past has been a rallying point for Kent State and other students for the past seven years.

Of the 200 arrested, among the first were the parents of Sandy Scheuer, one of the murdered students, and the parents of Al Canfora, one of those wounded in 1970. As the police dragged away the demonstrators, 1,000 people held a rally to protest the arrests, and a picket line was set up at the Portage County courthouse, scene of legal proceedings around the case.

This was not the end of the struggle at Kent State. On July 15th more demonstrators were arrested including Lyn Stoval, a former Ohio National Guardsman who was present on the day of the shootings. The May 4th Coalition has called for further actions including a national demonstration on July 22nd.

The fight to preserve the area where the students were shot down is a real blow to those who hope that the killings would undercut the student movement. The students, armed with the knowledge that it's right to rebel and to resist a rich man's war, are a powerful weapon for other students and supporters across the country in the fight against the futile attempts to cover-up and hide the events and lesson we all learned from Kent State.