Kent State Shootings - May 4, 1970 - Digital Archive - Jayden Smith

"On April 30, 1970, President Nixon announced that American and South Vietnamese forces were moving against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. Minutes after this announcement, student-organized protest demonstrations were under way at Princeton and Oberlin College. Within a few days, strikes and other protests had taken place at scores of colleges and universities throughout the country.

The expanding wave of strikes brought with it some serious disturbances. One of these was at Kent State University in Ohio, and approximately 750 Ohio National Guardsmen were sent to quell the disorders there.

On May 2, the ROTC building at Kent State was set afire. On May 4, Kent State students congregated on the university Commons and defied an order by the Guard to disperse. Guardsmen proceeded to disperse the crowd. The students then began to taunt Guard units and to throw rocks. The guardsmen fired tear gas into the crowd, and then some fired their weapons. Four students were killed, and nine were wounded."

"At Kent State, in the aftermath of the shootings, the campus was closed indefinitely by the Court of Common Pleas. It not only closed the institution but delegated to the Ohio National Guard control over access to the campus. In referring to the Kent State case and the case of the University of Miami, which had voluntarily closed for a short time after the Kent State shootings, O'Neil makes the following comment:

'In neither case was the administration even consulted, much less the faculty. The problem is not so much that these decrees were wrong on the merits; one would have to know more about the facts and the circumstances to make that sort of judgment. The fault is that they constituted complete and summary displacement of campus decision making by external agencies (p. 34)'."