Lessons from Kent State
On Saturday I stood in front of the White House with a throng of people so vast I could hardly move. I was at the Women’s March with my teenage sons, my mother, and my friends’ young daughters. The crowd was exuberant, joyful, polite and fired up. As we chanted “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” tense looking soldiers in full battle gear stood by in their armored trucks, dark islands in the sea of people. It crossed my mind how great it was that we live in the democracy of the United States where we feel safe and secure around authority, smug in our assurance that we had the right to protest and that no harm would come to us even though many were directly protesting our new president. Our only encounter with the authorities was a nice security guard who, after telling my mother she couldn’t walk where she wanted to, pulled out a pink “pussy hat” from her uniform and whispered “I’m with you!”
But that deep sense of safety and security that I take for granted turned into foreboding last night as I lay in bed reading Witness to the Revolution, an oral history by Clara Bingham about the end of the sixties. I picked up the book because my father was telling stories after the march about being with me at an even bigger march in front of the White House. It was 1969 and I was a baby on his back at the huge anti-Vietnam protest where busses circled the White House as barricades and the mood was angry and violent. (Not sure why he thought that was a good place to take a baby!) The chapter that made me sit up in bed was about the Kent State Massacre in May of 1970. I knew about Kent State and had seen the iconic photo of Jeffrey Miller’s body face down on the pavement with a screaming student crouching above him, but I always thought that I must be missing something because it didn’t make sense to me. National Guardsmen occupied a college campus and shot thirteen students, killing four? What was the real story?
Reading eyewitness accounts for the first time I learned that the students were so angry about the escalation of the Vietnam War that they burned down the ROTC center on campus. In that tense national climate, the Governor summoned nine hundred members of the National Guard to bring order to a campus that was seething with anger and frustration. The students, like us on Saturday, chanted at the guards and, like us, felt invulnerable, at one point throwing tear gas canisters back at the Guardsmen and cheering when they hit their jeeps. Then the Guard fell to one knee, took aim and fired into the crowd of unarmed students. One student interviewed in Witness to the Revolution said: “I was convinced that these guns were not loaded with live ammo - I thought, How ridiculous would that be? Until I saw the ground in front of me churn up, and I realized, at that moment, that they were live bullets.”
I was shocked to read about Kent State, especially in the happy aftermath of the peaceful Women’s March. But it opened my eyes to how naïve so many of us are. As Julius Lester, a civil rights activist said in Witness to the Revolution: “Kent State was the first time that whites had been killed. It was the first time that they’d been confronted by violence. That was it. They didn’t want to take that risk anymore. In the civil rights movement, you had to ask yourself that question, “Am I willing to die?...You had to answer that question, and whites hadn’t been confronted with that.”
And so here we are today. My sons and I, who are white, never thought seriously about violence at the Women’s March. We take for granted that it is our right to march, our right to exercise our free speech. But people of color in America have always known that speaking out for them has a price. That standing up for your rights can have fatal consequences. And for me, Kent State is a reminder that times can change and that the security I prize is not assured. Most chilling of all to me is that the initial media reports of the massacre implicated the students, saying two Guardsman were among those killed. The photographer, John Filo, who shot the photos of the dead students got hate mail accusing him of doctoring the photos. “It never happened, you set up the photos.” “You are part of the conspiracy to bring down America.” So, as hundreds of thousands of women around the country discuss how to keep the momentum going after the March, let’s keep our eyes open about what fighting for equality really means and not take our security or our freedom to protest for granted. We have to be ready to continue even if it is no longer safe to do so.
