Knowing what led up to Kent State is extremely important in order to understand the full ramifications of the event and the aftermath. The Kent State anti-war demonstration was a direct reaction to the March 16, 1968 My Lai Massacre, where U.S. Army troops of Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division.under Lt. William Calley massacred between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam, including men, women, and children. Althought there were journalists on the scene and the aftermath, including photographers, the story was buried for almost two years.
In November, 1969, the story finally broke. Newsweek, Time and Life magazines led with pictures of slaughtered babies in a ditch, a young girl, naked and in shock running down a road away from the burning village, her arms outstretched, her body burned and covered in blood, her face wrinkled in an agonizing scream.
This threw every college campus in the United States into anti-war overdrive. People who had never dreamed they could question this war began to do so. Our parents, who had survived the Depression and fought WWII with a value system they believed was infallible, began to falter in their blind allegiance to the American system. Massacring innocents was not what America was supposed to be about, and people were sickened and in shock by the slaughter in this village.
The protests became a lot more emotional after My Lai. They weren’t just something to do on the weekend that might get you laid. Not anymore. This was serious shit now and the war needed to end. Something was really fucked up.
Protests and demonstrations became more numerous, larger, the mainstream media began to report more on the people behind the anti-war movement and that there were young FBI operatives imbedded into nearly every peaceful demonstration, as provocateurs, with orders to start violence. . And then in the following spring, Kent State happened.
The SDS, the nationwide organizers of simultaneous campus protests, broke into two factions over this. One wanted to begin no-holds-barred violent revolutionary operations immediately, the other—the surviving group that won the argument—continued as a non-violent group, professing Gandhi-like tactics, and retained their name. The others went off and formed groups such as the Weathermen and were eventually annihilated, their survivors imprisoned.
This by no means was the first time the U. S. military had fired on a peaceful political demonstrations in the U.S. The most notable instance before Kent State would be the attack on the Bonus Marchers in Washington, DC., in 1932, when regular U.S. Army troops under officers such as Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton led their men on horseback through a crowded, temporary tent city of peaceful protesters swinging sabers, shooting men, women, and children at random, and lighting fires.
There are a lot more instances that I never learned about in High School history class, such as the Ludlow Massacre, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Haymarket Riot, the Homestead Massacre, etc., etc., mostly workers trying to form unions against exploitative monopolists. Mostly the people who shed a lot of blood in order to get us the five-day workweek, the eight-hour working day, our worker’s safety laws, and the child labor laws that we have today. Things we, the grand- and great-grandchildren of these people, seem bent on giving up without a fight. I suppose there isn’t any room in the textbooks or any time left in the classroom for such trivia.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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