Flashback*

*the reliving of a traumatic event, as if it were happening in the moment

Listening to the news on my way home the other night, I heard one of the protestors at Columbia express her concern that the university’s response to the protests -- bringing militarized police to campus – could result in another Kent State or Jackson State.  I share her concern. With campus protests against the war in Gaza and calls for universities to divest from corporations supporting the war erupting around the country, images of students protesting the war in Vietnam, soldiers marching through the streets near and on the Kent State campus, tanks rolling through town, and helicopters circling overhead on those early days in May 1970 have been repeatedly flashing through my mind. 

I was a naïve, mostly apolitical senior at Kent State High School at the time.  I’d heard about the protests on campus, but frankly was more concerned about our last Aqua Charms show, the final choir concert, classes, final exams, prom, and graduation than I was about protests against the ongoing war in Vietnam. I’m sure I was unaware of the escalation into Cambodia that prompted that latest wave of campus protests.  At a party in Kent on the Saturday night before the shootings, we heard the stories about the smashing of windows of businesses downtown  -- more by drunken revelers than anti-war protestors -- the night before, but didn’t think much of it until we saw the smoke coming from campus, which we later learned was from the burning of the ROTC building.  Things took a serious turn, and we avoided campus on our way home. We’d heard that the mayor of Kent had requested that the governor send in National Guard troops, but weren’t prepared for what greeted us as we rolled into Kent Monday morning.

No one ever talks about the tanks, of how the small city of Kent, Ohio looked like scenes from Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Warsaw Pact invaded to shut down the protests and political reforms of the Prague Spring. No one ever talks about the helicopters spraying tear gas on local residents who were out in their yards after the imposed curfew. No one talks about the feelings of fear, intimidation, shock, and horror over the police state that had taken over the campus and town, with 1200 National Guard troops marching through town and the terror of snipers rumored to be on rooftops. We all know now how the escalation of a military response to the protests on campus led to tensions so high that even as the protestors dispersed under sprays of tear gas, one of the National Guard battalions turned and shot randomly into the crowd and innocent bystanders, killing four students – Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer -- and wounding nine.

The shootings led to further escalation of protests at campuses across the country, including the one we rarely hear about — Jackson State — because this time it was two Black students who were killed and twelve wounded.  As Dr. Gene Young, a long-time civil rights activist reported about that time: “We had had several nights of protests, not only because of what was going on at Kent State, but every campus in this country was in an uproar about the war in Vietnam. . . . Young Black males were being sent to Southeast Asia in disproportionate numbers, and we were concerned about that, in addition to the historic racism there in Jackson, Mississippi.”[i]

On another night of protests, ten days after the killings at Kent State, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered on the street that bisected the predominantly Black campus — Lynch Street (named for John R. Lynch, a formerly enslaved man who became the first Black Speaker of the House of the Mississippi state legislature, not Charles Lynch whose name was the basis for the term “lynching.”) Tensions had been heightened by rumors that Charles Evers, brother of slain activist Medgar Evers, and his wife, had been assassinated. Reportedly white motorists passing through campus were shouting racial slurs at the gathered Black youth, who responded by throwing rocks at white motorists. At one point a non-Jackson State student set a dump truck on fire and 75 local police and state troopers were called to the scene. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State, a pre-law student, married, with an infant son, was walking by Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, that night, and James Earl Green, a high school track star, was cutting across campus on his way home when police suddenly fired over 150 rounds of buckshot for half a minute at Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, killing Gibbs and Green, and injuring twelve others. 

Fast forward to the campus protests of today. The scenes are eerily familiar. Most of the media attention has been focused on Columbia University where students took over Hamilton Hall — which they renamed “Hinds Hall” in honor of a six-year old child killed in Gaza by Israeli tank fire — determined to stay until the administration met their demands, and UCLA, where students who had set up a nonviolent encampment protesting the war in Gaza were met with counterprotesters who violently attacked student protestors as well as student journalists with bear mace, barricades, sticks, and batons, but these are not isolated incidents. In recent weeks, students have set up anti-war encampments on dozens of college campuses. Almost 2200 have been arrested, and many more face university disciplinary actions from suspension to expulsion.

Many questions arise, primary among them being the extent and limits of free speech and assembly and the use of riot police to disperse campus protests and encampments — or in the case of UCLA, the complaint that not enough was done to use police to keep the protesters safe from harm. The line between freedom of speech and hate speech as well as speech that incites violence can be a thin one. Frederick Lawrence, former President of Brandeis University, founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community, articulated this well in a recent interview on Democracy Now. “Free expression, free inquiry, academic freedom all have to be given broad range for protection. Where there’s actual threatening behavior, that can be restricted. . . .  But provoking people, challenging people, asking difficult questions, making people uncomfortable, that’s part of the price of living in a democracy, if you will. That’s what it means to live in a self-governing society.”[ii]

Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, also championed having difficult discussions across difference, drawing the fine line between spaces that are too safe and not safe enough. As he said in a recent PBS NewsHour interview, “You don't want the place to be too safe, because then you never encounter anything really disturbing, but you don't want the place to be so unsafe that you're too afraid to really learn. You want to find a middle ground where people can listen to ideas, even offensive ideas, and find out why someone else holds those ideas and maybe in the end learn from them.”[iii]

Suppressing basic rights of free speech and assembly are often the very things that lead to more escalation, not less.  That’s what happened at Kent State. Again, something I’ve not heard many people talk about – the prohibition, whether by the university or the mayor who had declared a civil emergency – for people to gather in groups greater than three, and the university’s banning the scheduled rally at noon on May 4th.[iv] Yet, it seemed like that’s what everyone around me was talking about on that day in May.  I can still hear student passersby shouting, “Come to the rally at noon!” despite the university’s prohibition, while National Guard troops marched, rifles in hand, down the same street. Yes, the students were protesting the recent invasion of Cambodia, but they were also protesting the limitations being put on their freedoms of speech and assembly, as well as the presence of National Guard troops on campus.

Which raises the other fine line -- between police, especially militarized police in riot gear or, as in the case of Kent State, National Guard troops acting to safeguard lives and basic rights of speech and assembly and such forces being used to disrupt and prevent the exercise of such rights. Roth brought an important perspective to this when he discussed the pressure that lawmakers and donors put on university administrators to shut down campus protests, stating, “Professors and presidents have to have the courage to stand up to politicians and donors who want to force us to do things that are countereducational. We need to create safe enough spaces, peaceful campuses where people can agree and disagree across lots of differences.”

 Having experienced the visceral reaction – the fear, the horror, the disbelief – of that much militarized force descending on campus in order to prevent students from assembling, it is no wonder to me that things at Kent State escalated to the point that people were killed, especially with deadly weapons in the hands of the troops (mostly kids themselves and already worn, coming directly from a long Teamsters strike in nearby Akron.) Compound that with the long-standing racism of Jackson police toward their Black citizens and you have the same tragic result at Jackson State.  As Resmaa Menakem explains, “We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for.  This is why people get murdered . . . the body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t.  If it doesn’t, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety.”[v]  

 Far better than bringing in militarized force are efforts to keep dialogue going.  I wonder how things might have turned out differently at Kent State if then-President White, who repeatedly refused to talk with students and attempted to close down their right to express themselves, instead had invited dialogue. Currently, in those places where students and administrators have maintained dialogue – Northwestern, Rutgers, and here at the University of Minnesota among them – peaceful solutions and agreements have been reached.  In the current moment where students are in disagreement with each other over the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, it is especially important to facilitate dialogue with each other.  Again, I refer to Roth’s wisdom on this moment, arguing that rather than inciting violence, “ . . . that habit of talking across difference makes it easier to prevent the outgrowth of violence.”  This habit is one of the main things most university professors, especially those of us in controversial fields, try to instill in students – far from the picture the far right has tried to paint of us. 

 Personally, I’m glad to see students caring so deeply about lives of those at a far remove from their own, and putting their personal concerns aside to express that passion to the world. On the campus where I taught for 35+ years, there were a few smaller protests following racist incidents on campus, and Women’s Studies students staged a sit-in in the administration building when the University administration decided to close our department, but I don’t recall such widespread protests in all of those years, even during two Gulf Wars. (I’m sure there would have been Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, but the campus had been closed since spring break that year due to the pandemic.) I was fortunate to have students in Women’s Studies and Political Science who were committed to social and environmental justice and doing good work for change in the world. I’m heartened now to see ever more young people activated, politicized, caring. 

 At 17, I was living in my own bubble, more concerned about prom and final exams than about the deaths and destruction of lives happening on the other side of the world supported and incurred by my own government.  A year later, I had come out of my easy isolation into the sometimes fraught, often challenging, always inspiring world of what Albert Camus would call “rebellion” – and would not choose to dwell in this world in any other way — for rebellion is nothing less than the action of caring about the lives and dignity of individuals beyond oneself. As Camus wrote, “I rebel -- therefore we exist.”[vi]  To foster that very existence, may we continue to care, to express our compassion for the world, and to listen to one another.

[i] 40 Years Ago: Police Kill Two Students at Jackson State in Mississippi, Ten Days After Kent State Killings | Democracy Now!

[ii] Former Brandeis President on Gaza Protests: Schools Must Protect Free Expression on Campus | Democracy Now!

[iii] Biden condemns violence and disorder as some college protests escalate into confrontations | PBS NewsHour

[iv] The mayor of Kent, LeRoy Satrom, used his declaration of a civil emergency, to impose an 8 PM curfew and was the one who requested Gov. Rhodes send National Guard troops.  The University had imposed first a 1 AM curfew and then an 11 PM curfew, further confusing the issue.

[v] My Grandmother’s Hands, 7.

[vi] The Rebel, 22, emphasis mine.