G&R Episode 17: Tin Soldiers and Nixon's Coming . . . 50 Years After the Kent State Killings

In this special Green and Red  Podcast, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragic events of May  4th, 1970 at Kent State University, where agents of the state murdered 4  students and shot 9 others.  

Students, who'd been told the war was  winding down in Vietnam, erupted in protest at campuses all over America when Richard Nixon  announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on April 30th.  At Kent State, a  working-class public school in Northeast Ohio, protesting students and  other burned down an ROTC building, a common target in the Vietnam  protest era, and Ohio Governor James Rhodes, vowing a violent  response, mobilized the National Guard and sent them to Kent.  For  two days the students and Guard skirmished, with the paramilitaries hurling tear gas and intimidating students.  On May 4th, the Guard,  unprovoked, started shooting into the crowd of students and shot 13, killing 4, from distances beyond 300 feet.  These were extrajudicial killings and a sure sign the state would murder anyone who challenged its interests.  The war had come home!  Scott and Bob, who's also a historian of the Vietnam War and the 1960s  and has published extensively on those subjects, talk about the  background to the protests, the official, violent response, the  aftermath at places like Jackson State, where 2 more students were  killed, and the larger context of anti-state protests and their meaning,  and lessons. 

See  also, the Kent State Tribunal Organization, established by Laurel  Krause, sister of one of the students assassinated at Kent State that day; an interview with Alan Canfora, one of the survivors of the shootings, and also another interview here; The Kent State May 4th Poetry Collection; Denise Levertov, "The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why" ; a couple of well-known songs that came out of the tragedy, Neil Young, "Ohio" and Chrissie Hynde (who was a student at Kent State in 1970 and friends with two of the murdered students),  "Revolution";  Governor Rhodes press conference, May 3;  and Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life.

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