Kent State/Jackson State Massacres; Fifty Years Ago

[RTFirefly]

@Magiver

I didn’t miss anything. It was the governor who sent the guard out because the local leaders asked him. They were afraid rioting would get out of control and setting fire to buildings falls under that expectation.

Regardless of how poorly the Guard performed it’s the arsonists who caused the incident.

So because a building had been torched on Saturday, that justified the troops firing into a crowd on Monday. And threatened? One of the people they killed was 90 yards away - almost the length of a football field.

From the AARP link in the OP, an account from a captain in the National Guard that day:

We got an intelligence update — people were coming in from out of town. We were told some had machine guns.

Sounds like the Guard was fed a bunch of inflammatory bullshit. Make them afraid, put their nerves on hair trigger, make them feel threatened by a crowd of unarmed students. (And “outside agitators.” Can’t forget that bullshit canard.)

[Colibri]

@Magiver

the bigger picture is you don’t needlessly risk other people’s lives by setting fire to buildings in a riot.

Are you really that ignorant of what actually took place? The arson of the ROTC building took place on Saturday May 2. The shootings took place two days later, on May 4. No attempts at arson were going on at that point. Two of the students who were killed weren’t even participating in the protests (one of them was a ROTC member) but walking to class.

Anyway, you disputed whether Nixon had anything to do with the shootings. If you can blame the shootings on a fire that took place days earlier, certainly Nixon bears responsibility by carrying out the actions that prompted the protests in the first place.

[UltraVires]

@Colibri

Anyway, you disputed whether Nixon had anything to do with the shootings. If you can blame the shootings on a fire that took place days earlier, certainly Nixon bears responsibility by carrying out the actions that prompted the protests in the first place.

That’s a rather odd definition of “responsibility”:

1. Nixon takes a government action.
2. People disagree and protest the action–some setting fire to a government building.
3. The State National Guard responds and overreacts.
4. People die.

Therefore Nixon bears responsibility for people dying. It’s so attenuated and blames Nixon for taking an action which as president he had the power to do.

One might as well blame the OKC bombing on Bill Clinton for signing the assault weapons ban.

[nelliebly]

Let’s focus on Jackson State for a moment, as it seems to be regarded, incorrectly, as a vague footnote to Kent State. The Jackson state murders had nothing to do with Kent State or the war, and they deserve attention they’ve never had.

The city of Jackson had seen its share of racial tensions, particularly between the whites in economically depressed Jackson and the black students at JSU. (It should be noted here that JSU was a remarkably apolitical campus for that era.) From time to time, one group or the other would throw rocks at vehicles on Lynch Street, a main thoroughfare that cut through the JSU campus. There’d been a few cracked windshields but no injuries. This happened again on May14th, when a group of Black students and non-students, threw rocks at white motorists. Tensions were heightened and a crowd formed when a false rumor spread that Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had been murdered. A man who was not a student at Kent State started a dump truck on fire. Firefighters put out the blaze but called for police assistance.

Rocks and bricks were thrown at the (all-white) 75 state and local police units who responded, though it seems most in the crowd consisted of peaceable students from the nearby dorms, drawn by the racket of law enforcement vehicles and personnel.

What happened next is unclear. Police claim they heard a shot and saw a sniper in a window of Alexander Hall, the women’s dorm standing just beyond the crowd of onlookers. Both an FBI investigation and a presidential commission determined there was no sniper.

Just after midnight, May 15th, police opened fire. 150 rounds and 30 seconds later, 27 people had been injured, and two young men lay dead, a 17-year-old high school senior walking home from his job at a grocery store and a 21-year-old junior who planned to go to law school. The bullet holes in the concrete and brick building are still visible.

The Jackson State murders did not involve an anti-war protest at a largely white school. The dead and injured were Black at a largely Black school in a Southern state. With that in mind and coming as it did, on the heels of Kent State, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the events at JSU have drawn little attention, but that inattentiveness says a lot about us, both then and now.

I don’t claim to be an expert on Jackson State and welcome further information from others. My sources include the 18-minute audiotape of first-person interviews at WYSO, a site that includes photos, as well as NPR, and Wikipedia.

[Mangosteen]

I’ve always blamed the Kent State shooting on whoever sent the “kids” out to the campus with live ammo. Many, if not most, of the National Guard troops were in their early twenties, under trained and over scared. What could go wrong?

There was little chance that the National Guard troops were going to face a life threatening situation and therefore they should not have been armed with lethal force. Local, well trained, LEO should have been the only individuals on the scene armed with deadly force.

[RTFirefly]

@UltraVires

That’s a rather odd definition of “responsibility”:

1. Nixon takes a government action.
2. People disagree and protest the action–some setting fire to a government building.
3. The State National Guard responds and overreacts.

Let’s take #3 outside the quote box and correct it, shall we?

3. The State National Guard responds two days later and [del]overreacts[/del] shoots a bunch of people whose primary sin was to have been in a nearby vicinity two days later.

There. FTFY.

[Colibri]

@UltraVires

That’s a rather odd definition of “responsibility”:

1. Nixon takes a government action.
2. People disagree and protest the action–some setting fire to a government building.
3. The State National Guard responds and overreacts.
4. People die.

You ignored the first part of my sentence. Magiver blamed the shootings on the arsonists, who are still two steps away from the shootings. If you’re going to blame the shootings on the arsonists, then taking that to a logical extreme then Nixon is responsible.

Nixon’s responsibility is largely in promoting the “us-vs-them” mentality that continues to poison American politics. Those who disagreed with his policies were regarded as enemies of the state; it was no big deal if they got shot.

[CairoCarol]

@nelliebly

I was 13 and stunned by what had happened. My parents and I were glued to the TV. I remember how worried they were about my older siblings, who were in college.

I was 12, and although I was more interested in politics and current affairs than many of my peers, for some reason Kent State didn’t really register with me at the time. It was like, I dunno, a far-off car crash or something, sad but not incredibly relevant.

But when I was about 20, and was a college student myself, I did some reading about Kent State and for the first time I realized the magnitude of what had happened. The National Guard shot and killed four unarmed college kids. I went stone cold with shock for a moment realizing what a loss of innocence that represented for my country.

[wolf_meister]

Everyone seems to be forgetting the sentiment of the times. I’m 68 and remember the times quite well.
Nixon was loved, respected and admired by the older, conservative, Republican types and they hated the student protesters.
Conversely, Nixon was despised by the younger, liberal, student types.

Another “great divide” was the older generation remembered WW2 and how they had to fight it - and pay attention to it. (There was gas rationing in the US and sometimes “blackouts” were imposed for fear of enemy planes attacking the US mainland.)
My father (a WW2 vet) at least could see that “serving your country” was one of those sacrifices (like paying taxes) that American citizens had to face (without necessarily enjoying it).
I’d tell him that at least there was some serious damage done by the enemy on Dec 7, 1941 during the attack on Pearl Harbor, which definitely stirred up a lot of hatred and anger in American citizens (some even enlisted in the military Dec 8, 1941).
As I’d tell my father “and when did Ho Chi Minh attack Pearl Harbor”?
As can be seen, WW2 and Vietnam were wars that seriously divided the country.

[LH75]

to recap: At Kent State the National Guard fired 67 rounds killing 2 and wounding 9. Only two of the fiur killed were involved in the protest. The other two were just walking from one class to another in between buildings some distance away… At Jackson State the National Guard fired 150 rounds, (a later FBI forensic investigation determined that there were over 400 rounds fired) killing 2 and wounding 12. One of the men killed at Jackson state was a high school senior just walking across campus. Obviously the National Guard was just firing wildly into the crowd with no concentration on any specific threat.

This was a shameful period in our history.

[Urbanredneck]

Can someone fill in how it was stopped and the immediate aftermath? Did the guards and students just both leave?

As I understand it, a national guard officer stopped the shootings by grabbing rifles and several professors also jumped in between to calm everyone down. But what happened in the hours and days afterwards on the campus and in the community? Was the college closed down?

[Chronos]

Quoth Magiver:

the bigger picture is you don’t needlessly risk other people’s lives by setting fire to buildings in a riot.

And the even bigger picture is that you don’t needlessly risk other people’s lives by going to war. You don’t think there was any arson involved in that?

If the Kent State massacre was all the arsonists’ fault, does that apply to Nixon, too? If Nixon had been assassinated two days after the invasion of Cambodia, would that have been Nixon’s fault? The argument is a stronger one than the one you’re making, because at Kent, it wasn’t the arsonists who were shot.

[fedman]

@Colibri

Are you really that ignorant of what actually took place? The arson of the ROTC building took place on Saturday May 2. The shootings took place two days later, on May 4. No attempts at arson were going on at that point. Two of the students who were killed weren’t even participating in the protests (one of them was a ROTC member) but walking to class.

Anyway, you disputed whether Nixon had anything to do with the shootings. If you can blame the shootings on a fire that took place days earlier, certainly Nixon bears responsibility by carrying out the actions that prompted the protests in the first place.

they also trashed utility companies and other business offices; and how would you respond if someone threw rocks at you?

[carrps]

I was also a freshman…at UCLA. It was a local joke that UCLA was very apolitical (especially as compared to Cal), and it was mostly true. A high percentage of students were commuters, as was I. That day I’d walked down into Westwood Village. Nothing much was going on. When I came back an hour or two later I ran into a guy from my Russian class near the Waffle, who said the Unicops had called in the LAPD. And just as he said it, his face changed, and I turned around to see a line of what seemed like 50 motorcycle LAPD (was probably 12-15) who started riding directly at us, and we all scattered into the sculpture garden.

My memory of that day was mostly confusion. I saw Bill Walton help turn over a shuttle bus near the Admin Building. I escaped to Hilgard and got a bus home. But, yeah, it was fairly shocking.