Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties. By Thomas M.
Grace. University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 273 pages + appendices, notes,
index.
Tin soldiers and Nixon
coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio.
Those lines from Neil Young’s “Ohio” were inescapable by the
summer of 1970, with Young’s pained voice and blistering guitar presaging those
of punk and grunge. Anger was already in the air, but the May 4, 1970 shooting
of thirteen Kent State University students brought home that rage for
multitudes of Americans. By summer’s end, Kent State had become the symbol of
divisiveness that roils American society to the present day. Those on the left
seized upon Kent as further confirmation that the American Establishment was
controlled by duplicitous liars with murderous intent—those willing to expand
an immoral war (Vietnam) into neighboring Cambodia and also ready to mow down
anyone, including college students, with the audacity to challenge their authority.
To those on the right, Kent State was a long overdue crackdown on lawless
degenerates who sought to rent the very fabric of American society.
If the two camps shared anything in common, it was their
surprise that matters came to a head at Kent State. Until May 4, most Americans
had no idea where Kent State was even located. Those such as this reviewer who
are old enough to remember the 1970 shootings at Kent (and also Jackson State,
Mississippi) recall that most coverage presented Kent State as something of a
backwater—the term “small second-tier state school” was often used. Why there?
Kent, the media asserted, had not been an epicenter of campus dissent like UCal
Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Columbia, San Francisco State, or the
University of Wisconsin.
This was because too few were paying attention. So says
Thomas Grace and he would know—he was at Kent and was among the nine students wounded
on May 4. Kent, Ohio was a small
city of just over 28,000 in 1970, but it was no backwater—it was/is an outlying
section of Akron and part of the Greater Cleveland metropolitan region. In one
of the book’s many remarkable features, Grace has meticulously researched the
backgrounds of Kent students and can definitively say that though the
university had grown like Topsy—from 6,000 students in 1955 to over 21,000 at
the time of the shootings—its undergraduates were not the sons and daughters of
farmers; they were the children of blue-collar workers. Many were first-generation
college attendees and some were students of color whose entrance into higher
education was uneasy.
Grace deftly employs the concept of the Long Sixties to
prove that the events of 1970 were neither unique nor unpredictable. Ohio—as
election observers know—has long been a divided state. In 1970, conservative
Republican James Rhodes was governor, but Kent’s students hailed mostly from
parts of the state where labor unions had fought and won hard battles. In 1966,
the largely black Hough section of Cleveland exploded into six days of rioting
that destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. Four (ahem!) people died
and fifty were wounded. Those who landed on the Kent campus during the 1960s
were neither naïve nor quiescent. The campus saw its first major protest in
1961 and by the mid-Sixties Kent was a spider web of Old and New Left
organizations: socialists, Trotskyites, civil rights advocates, SDS members,
black nationalists, antiwar activists…. Moreover, ten percent of Kent students
were Vietnam veterans, many of whom were outraged by Nixon’s decision to invade
Cambodia. Though several of those shot at Kent were not actively protesting,
most of those chanting for the National Guard’s exit from their campus knew why
they were protesting and were experienced at doing so. As Grace says of
himself, “I was not a victim; I was a casualty.”
Grace’s book is so filled with individual stories that one
is sometimes lost in the welter of unfamiliar names, but some clear villains
emerge: Governor Rhodes, parts of the KSU administration, Ohioans applauding
the suppression of civil liberties, the Ohio National Guard, and court systems
that literally allowed the Guard to get away with murder. But Grace leaves us
with some of his namesake vibes. In a final sweep, his appendix traces the
post-May 4 lives of protestors. They did not slink away, as those hoping to
teach them a lesson had hoped. Most were activists before 1970 and remained so
afterward. Grace, who hails from Buffalo, returned to campus after a long rehab
to show he belonged. Until retirement, he was a social worker, union organizer,
and part of the May 4 Memorial task force. Then he got a Ph.D. and is now a history
instructor at Erie Community College. He insists there is nothing special about
his story—his prerogative, but his book is extraordinary.
What if you knew
her/And found her dead on the ground/How could you run when you know?
Note: This review originally appeared on" http://nepca.wordpress.com
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