“How can you run when you know?”: the national response

Newsweek reported the story in an article headlined “My God! They’re Killing Us.” Its cover featured what would become the incident’s most iconic image, John Filo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a 14-year-old runaway’s anguished scream as she knelt over Jeffrey Miller’s prostrate dead body. In the aftermath, shock and indignation swept across the country like wildfire, with student strikes and demonstrations against the shooting and the Cambodian campaign erupting on hundreds of college campuses during the following weeks. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a campus known for radicalism, there were some 20 fire-bombings, but militant activism also broke out at institutions theretofore largely untouched by student protest, such as the Universities of Arizona and Nebraska. On May 9 some 100,000 protestors gathered on the Ellipse across from the White House, where President Nixon had responded to the shooting dispassionately: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy,” he said.

On May 14 the country was stunned by another on-campus shooting that resulted in the deaths of two African American students and the wounding of 12 others at Jackson State University in Mississippi. This time law enforcement officers fired more than 150 rounds in 30 seconds into a dormitory while answering a complaint that African American youths allegedly had been throwing rocks at white motorists and in response to the brick and rocks thrown at the police when they arrived.

These two incidents—particularly the Kent State shooting—gave rise to an unprecedented surge in antiwar activism throughout the United States, surpassing even the widespread student engagement that had forced Johnson from seeking reelection. The swelling of the “Movement” hastened the end of the selective service draft and the Vietnam War. On the other hand, as several historians have noted, it also catalyzed the conservative patriotic reaction to the Movement and its counterculture that resulted in the ascendancy of the “Silent Majority,” who would hand Nixon a landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election over the Democratic Party’s left-leaning pacifist candidate George McGovern. The pivotal moment in that reaction had come on May 8, 1970, when some 200 hard-hatted construction workers attacked student demonstrators in New York City with lead pipes.

“Gotta get down to it”: responsibility

Determining responsibility for the shooting at Kent State was a protracted process involving a series of criminal and civil legal cases (suits and countersuits), as well as speculation, ongoing investigation, reinterpretation, and conspiracy-based counternarratives.

In June 1970 Nixon created the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (better know as the Scranton Commission) to examine the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State as well as campus violence in general. The commission’s report, published in September, concluded that the Guardsmen’s “indiscriminate firing” was “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable” but that “violent and criminal” actions by the demonstrators contributed to the tragedy. The report also adamantly cautioned against the future use of loaded rifles in confronting student demonstrators.

In October 1970, twenty-four students and one faculty member (the “Kent 25”) were criminally charged for actions related to the events at Kent State, primarily in connection with the burning of the ROTC building. The grand jury that brought those indictments did not charge any Guardsmen, finding that they “fired their weapons in the honest and sincere belief...that they would suffer serious bodily injury had they not done so.” In November–December 1971, two defendants pled guilty to rioting charges, another was convicted of interfering with firefighters, still another was acquitted, and charges were dropped against the remaining defendants for lack of evidence.

After the U.S. Justice Department reopened (August 1973) the investigation of the Guard’s role in the shooting, eight former Guardsmen were charged with violating the civil rights of the students. In November 1974 the eight were acquitted by U.S. District Court Judge Frank J. Battisti, who ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove that the Guardsmen had willfully intended to deprive the four students killed and nine wounded of their civil rights. A private investigation conducted by Peter Davies for the Department of Law, Justice and Community Relations of the United Methodist Church’s Board of Christian Social Concerns came to a very different conclusion in the report it issued in July 1971. According to Davies, photographic evidence and testimony indicated that between eight and ten of the Guardsmen had planned to shoot at the students with the intention of killing or injuring them and that the other Guardsmen had shot instinctively in response to the premeditated firing by the smaller group. In 2007 this theory would be augmented by the release of an audiotape (discovered by one of the wounded students, Alan Canfora) that allegedly captured the command to fire.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned earlier rulings that had prevented the victims and their families from suing Ohio state officials and officers of the National Guard, a federal court jury decided in August 1975 that the students had not been victims of “willful or wanton misconduct or of the negligence” of the Guardsmen. An appeals court, however, overturned that decision in September 1977, and in January 1979 an out-of-court settlement was reached that awarded the plaintiffs $675,000 ($350,000 of which went to the paralyzed Dean Kahler). The compensation was accompanied by a statement from the defendants that read in part:

In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970 should not have occurred....Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed...that their lives were in danger. Hindsight suggests another method would have resolved the confrontation. Better ways must be found to deal with such confrontations.

We devoutly wish that a means had been found to avoid the May 4 events culminating in the Guard shootings and the irreversible deaths and injuries. We deeply regret those events, and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and wounding of nine others which resulted. We hope that the agreement to end this litigation will help assuage the tragic moments regarding that sad day.