KENT STATE: TWO YEARS AFTER

By David Moberg

From "The 1st Casualty" - Volume 2, number 1 (July 1972)

Kent, Ohio (LNS) -- Four thousand students, led by a core of over 100 Vietnam veterans in khakis and medals, rallied May 4 as part of continuing protest actions that started a week earlier to commemorate the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four Kent State students 2 years ago.

The day had started with a march led by the vets through the streets of Kent and on to the site of the National Guard assault. At noon seven bells were sounded: for the Kent State dead, for the victims at Jackson State, and for oppressed people everywhere.

The resistance at Kent this spring has been led principally by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and a couple of area coalitions and collectives. There has been a continual program of films and speakers, including fired Stanford professor Bruce Franklin, Rennie Davis, UAW treasurer Emil Mazey, Ngo Vinh Long (a Vietnamese student at Harvard), and Attica prisoner Richard X. Clark.

Guerrilla theater by VVAW simulating the effects of a B-52 raid on a Vietnamese hamlet started the most recent chain of events on April 25. The next day Nixon was hanged and burned in effigy on the campus commons and 125 students occupied the ROTC building, peacefully sitting in and telling ROTC commanders they could leave anytime they wanted if they walked over the bodies of the protesters. The officers refused, conveniently giving university president Glen Olds, a defender of ROTC on campus, an excuse to arrest the sit-in protesters.

Cops in riot gear drove the protesters away, eventually invading the campus. But the cops also got caught in the embarrassment of arresting a student with an illegal AK-47 rifle, then having to release him and admit that he was an undercover agent and presumed agent provocateur, suspected by the VVAW of trying to infiltrate their organization and set them up for a weapons bust, and paid by the university at $918 a month.

Out in front of the university's administration building, on the vast front lawn of the school, another memorial to the dead in Vietnam and Kent has been going up. At the planned rate of 300 a day (the estimated number of casualties from the US air war), cardboard tombstones have been set up by students and sympathetic visitors. Each tombstone carries a message, and scrawled out for everyone to see is the collection of feelings of opposition to the war in a dramatic, unending reminder to town, campus, and, hopefully, the country:

"Lenny Green -- KIA -- July '69"

"Bob Winks -- Dead in Vietnam -- For What?"

"Apathy Kills People"

"R.I.P. Liberal Bullshit"

"I died a US robot. I picked up my gun as a learned reflex, not as my own moral judgement."

"Flowers are better than bullets"

"We care, too. From four Akron U. trackmen."

"Ho Chi Minh lives"

"Brother George Jackson Died Fighting Your War"

by David Moberg, LNS