It’s taken me fifty years to write the poem below.
May 4th is always a day of mourning for me. This day marks the 50th anniversary of the Kent State killings. My then husband and I had finished our coursework at Northwestern and moved to Kent State the previous fall to teach; we were both writing our dissertations and living just off campus.
In the months that followed that May 4th, as you may remember, there were student uprisings all over the country, and two students were shot and killed at Jackson State University in Mississippi. For a dozen years, Kent State was penalized by Governor James Rhodes with unwarranted budget cuts because he could not forgive the university for what he had done in sending the National Guard to Kent. Every year when I was teaching at Kent State, faculty and students gathered on the Commons for a memorial, but it took twenty years for the university to build a memorial to the students who were killed and injured.
It is a sign of hope beyond disaster that both Kent State and Jackson State (a historically black university) have become major research universities. I think there are lessons for us in remembering those days, lessons that may help us in this time of plague and conflict.
Mourning, After Fifty Years
Kent State, May 4, 1970
The sun was bright that Monday, the air May-soft
and filled with birdsong.
It had been the first warm weekend of spring,
a time for parties and protests.
The Friday parties were large, raucous,
students drinking in the streets,
an illegal bonfire, a few broken windows.
But a thread of protest ran through them,
some voices calling for action, confrontations with police.
Earlier protests had been small, easy to dismiss
by serious first-generation students working their way
through jobs and degrees toward new dimensions,
a trivial thing on a campus not much experienced in politics.
The invasion of Cambodia had been the last insult
for the angry few, and they called for justice.
No power answered that call, no voice spoke for them.
The result was destruction, symbolic and limited, but enough
to invite retaliation from a governor who believed in force
over the power of ideas. The National Guard was called,
young men without the opportunities of university life,
tired and stressed from ten days facing a belligerent union,
unused army rifles against bricks and rocks.
At Kent State, they faced peers they resented
armed with slogans and flowers.
A more sophisticated campus would have been more sensible,
better prepared, better protected.
At the beginning, there were conversations, not unfriendly.
The first inevitable confrontations were defused,
while resentment escalated into further protests.
The worst act (perpetrator never known) was setting fire
to the shack that housed the tiny ROTC program.
The Guard took charge and rallies were banned,
but at noon on Monday students gathered in defiance,
demonstrators, supporters, casual observers,
all on the campus commons.
Ordered to disperse, some drifted to a nearby parking lot.
The Guard, rifles ready, streamed down the hill
toward the unarmed students in the parking lot.
The shots that exploded in the Monday calm
sounded, from just off campus, more like firecrackers –
more than fifty in quick bursts. The birds stilled momentarily
before resuming their vocal battles.
Then the sirens broke through the birdsong,
and the spring air was suddenly full of fear.
Why did they fire? No one is sure, even those
who pulled the triggers. The currents of protest and resentment
were so convoluted that a butterfly clapping its wings
might have set off the catastrophe.
Thirteen were shot, some demonstrating against power and death,
some watching or merely walking by on their way to class.
Four died, one was paralyzed, eight were injured.
What additional toll was inflicted on the uninjured, the students
not present but facing studies cut off abruptly or altered dramatically,
the university closed for months, the faculty grieving and desperate
to see their students through it all, the guardsmen facing the results
of their own actions, the belligerent governor whose anger
had consequences even he had not chosen?
So what is it I mourn, fifty years later,
I who was there that day, and changed forever?
The young lives lost or grimly twisted, certainly,
and the long years scarred by debate and controversy
as we tried to come to terms with a university
maimed and abused. Most of all, betrayal –
a safe world of study and exploration
turned to fear, to anger and self-doubt –
loss of trust in leadership
and a government become a monster of destruction.
We were young then, full of ideals lost too suddenly.
In a world filled with anger and hatred,
in this complex and plague-filled present,
learn from this past.
Mourn the students killed by their own government.
Remember their names:
Allison Krause
Jeffrey Miller
William Schroeder
Sandra Scheuer.