Murder at Kent State

Thirty-five years ago today


Cover art from ``Pete Hamill's Murder at Kent State University,'' 1970 Flying Dutchman spoken word album narrated by Rosko

GOV. JAMES RHODES: We are seeing here at the city of Kent, especially, probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups. They make definite plans of burning, destroying and throwing rocks at police and at the National Guard and the Highway Patrol. This is when we're going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem. We're not going to treat the symptoms.

And these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the Brown Shirts in the communist element and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say that they're not going to take over a campus.

REPORTER: How long do you expect to keep the Guard at Kent?

GOV. JAMES RHODES: I'll answer that: Until we get rid of them.

Ohio Governor James Rhodes interviewed on May 3, 1970, excerpted from the documentary Kent State: The Day the War Came Home, directed by Chris Triffo, produced by Ron Goetz; broadcast by Amy Goodman today on Democracy Now!

America -- Spring, 1970 -- must have seemed a land of madness to, let us say, a citizen of Copenhagen watching on television what we were doing to ourselves. Let alone what we kept doing—and keep doing—to others in Vietnam, in Cambodia, and God (or is it the Devil) knows where else and how soon.

America -- Spring, 1970 -- was witnessing a further dimension of madness. We were killing our own children. Officially. Men wearing uniforms, carrying and using guns issued to them by the state, were murdering the young. At Kent State. In Jackson, Mississippi. And by the time you read this, perhaps at other places....

...The Mobe Marshals -- as police tear gas began during the end of the day in May, after Cambodia and after Kent State, when the Army of the young had again come to Washington -- the Mobe Marshalls, Pete Hamill writes, ``intervened with the only weapon they had: their bodies. They formed a line between the young and the police, arms locked, tears running down their faces from the gas, holding on, choking, trying to hold back the rushing tides of blood and anger.''

Unless millions of us organize—and stay organized—after Kent State and Cambodia and Jackson—there will be no holding back those tides....There is not that much time left. Those other voices—hawking ``bums'' and ``impudent snobs'' -- still have the power to make many, many Kent States and many, many Jacksons. They are beyond understanding but they are not yet beyond the democratic processes if we implement those processes and tell them—in numbers they cannot ignore—to stop the killing, stop the madness.

There is not that much time left.

Excerpt from Nat Hentoff's liner notes in the 1970 Flying Dutchman spoken word album ``Pete Hamill's Murder at Kent State University''