67 Shots by Howard Means

Author:Howard Means
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306823800
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

The dearth of compassion often came with a caveat. “This is all very tragic,” a husband and wife wrote to the Record-Courier, “yet if this is what it takes to teach law and order to students, then this is the high price that must be paid to keep our country free.” In a letter to the editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, a woman expressed many of the same feelings: “My heart aches. The tears flow. I was shaken as many other are. When will we learn that laws must be obeyed. It’s the nature of everything created. Change cannot come overnight.”

The May 4 late edition of the Record-Courier that reported the death of the four students also ran a front-page editorial decrying the protests and seeming even to justify the shootings: “The acts of violence in Kent and on campus during the past two days are so serious as to merit the sternest repression.” The side-by-side, top-of-the-front-page headlines make for unsettling bedfellows: “4 Kent State Students Killed in Clash Today” and “Universities Must Oust Hooligans.” Inside the front section, a poem by a twelve-year-old local girl titled “A Child’s Plea” reinforced the paper’s implicit editorial stand: “The war in Vietnam is not nearly as bad / As the one you’ve started with your peace fad. . . . The National Guard has come and things are well in hand. / But look at the disgrace you spread over this land.” For Kent State administrators, the editorial stand was particularly hard to ignore: Robert Dix, editor and publisher of the Record-Courier, had been president of the university’s board of directors since August 1963.

Such responses almost always assumed a collective guilt, whether a shooting victim had been throwing rocks, tossing back tear-gas canisters, or trying to skirt the danger while passing from class to class, and thus a collective justification. By the same cold logic, Jack Kennedy had brought on his own assassination by traveling to volatile Texas, Martin Luther King Jr. by appearing on a motel room balcony in volcanic Memphis, and Bobby Kennedy by campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in Southern California, a hotbed of known wing nuts.

The assumption of collective guilt didn’t stretch only in one direction, either. Later, after the campus had been closed and students were scrambling to finish the semester, a Guardsman who had joined up to help pay his Kent State tuition went to see one of his professors at an off-campus office.

“I came in to see him, and I said, ‘I’ve missed a test.’ And he said, ‘Well, why did you miss the test?’ And I said, ‘Well, I was in the National Guard. I was on active duty.’ And he said, ‘Were you on this campus, too?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘You will never pass my course. You will never graduate from this university if I have anything to do with it. You can’t finish this course. You have failed this course. And as far as I’m concerned, you shouldn’t be permitted back on this campus.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.