Fifty-four years ago, four students were shot by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State university in Ohio – a tragedy that still resonates today. As these BBC Archive clips show, the events symbolised political and cultural divides across the US at the time.
On 4 May 1970, four students were shot dead by the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest at Kent State University. The shocking incident still resonates as a seminal moment in modern US history.
Warning: This article contains a video with images that some people may find distressing.
Immortalised in the song Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which was released a few weeks after the event, the Kent State shootings provoked the biggest student strike in US history, which involved hundreds of campuses nationwide. The iconic photograph of a young woman screaming as she knelt over the body of a student was published across the national press, and came to symbolise the political and cultural divide in the US at the time.
A new wave of student protests against the Vietnam War formed the background to the shootings. They followed an announcement in April 1970 by President Nixon that he had authorised the US invading Cambodia to fight the Viet Cong there, thus signalling a major widening of the US war effort. One of the protests against this took place on the Kent State university campus, Ohio, on 1 May. That evening, trouble broke out in downtown Kent, following an initially peaceful protest. There followed a violent confrontation between young people and the police, and some shops were vandalised.
The next day, the city's mayor asked Ohio's governor to send the state National Guard to Kent. Violence and confrontations continued for the next two days, with a Reserve Officer Training Corp building on the university campus burning to the ground, though it's unclear what or who started the fire.
On 4 May, another protest was called on campus, which was by now occupied by the National Guard. Demonstrations had been banned at the university, but many students were apparently unaware of this, and many others didn't care. According to the university, approximately 3,000 people had gathered in the centre of the campus by late morning.
At about midday, the guardsmen ordered the protesters to disperse. The details of what followed have been disputed, but the dispersal order was ignored, and witnesses say rocks were thrown. After tear gas was fired and following a series of standoffs, troops fired live rounds into the crowd. Four students were killed and nine wounded. Two of the dead had not been involved in the demonstration.
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Five months later, Man Alive, a BBC current affairs programme, visited Kent in Ohio, in an episode entitled The Mood of America. An eyewitness to the shooting, Ginny Rickard, who wasn't involved in the protests, described to the BBC her shock after the barrage of shots were fired. At first, she and a friend assumed that blanks had been used. "Still no one could believe they had fired, it was inconceivable – no one had done anything, why would you fire?
"[When] you saw bodies being put on stretchers into an ambulance, I think that's when people really believed it [had] happened, and that's when people really started falling apart. Girls were moving around crying hysterically and the main thing you heard were people screaming 'why?'"
As the BBC team found though, there were strong differences of opinion in Kent about the shootings. Garage proprietor Pete Selman was unsympathetic to the students: "I don't feel sorry for the kids, they asked for it. They weren't supposed to be there… sure it was sad, but you can't stand around and agitate a person for days and days and days… It's been coming on for a long time."
The BBC team also spoke to a number of student activists at Kent, and their answers encapsulate some of the profound political and generational divides in the US at the time. "Violence only arises from frustration, violence is the last resort, I mean this is almost clichéd by this point. It's obvious that's what's going on all over the country. That's why political protests take the form of violence, because of this basic cynicism. We all understand that nothing will happen within profit channels," said one.
Asked why it so often seems to be the "working man" who is bitterly opposed to student protestors, he replied: "Because he's more or less a victim of a kind of propaganda system – that is the papers he reads, the information he's used to getting are so one-sided. He's fed a certain line which excludes any sort of openness on his part to new ideas. Ideas are scapegoated under the terms of 'radical' or 'communist'. The frustrated paranoid worker only wants more of the system – he's got a stake in it."
Another offers a view about the people who President Nixon may have categorised as the "silent majority". "He's after more expensive clothes and looking like white middle-class society in America should look, you know, with an asphalt driveway and a house and shutters and two cars and a playground out in the back for the kids and… university students completely reject that."
Although a number of investigating commissions and court trials followed over many years, no one was ever found guilty of the murder or manslaughter of the four students – Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder.
In History is a series which uses the BBC's unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today.
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