‘There were massive revolts’: The history of the 1970 Kent State massacre you haven’t heard

Marc Steiner:  Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us.

Many people remember or know about the moment when the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State University when they were protesting against the war in Vietnam. Four students were killed that day: Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, and William Schroeder, and nine others were wounded. And just 11 days after that, at the predominantly African American University Jackson State in Mississippi, two students, Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green were killed while 12 others were wounded. And earlier in Augusta, Georgia, many people were killed when the Black community erupted over the killing of a 12-year-old boy by police. These are moments that many of us lived through, ones we’ll never forget. They’re indelible in our minds.

Mike Alewitz was a student at Kent State on that day when four unarmed students were gunned down by the National Guard. Mike is professor emeritus of censorship, art, and politics at Central Connecticut State University. Now, when he was a student at Kent State, he was chairman of the Student Mobilization [Committee] against the war in Vietnam. He’s now a world-renowned muralist whose work crosses the nation and the world. Actor Martin Sheen said about him, Mike’s work provides an important example of how an individual, by basing their art on the creative power of the working class, can create a body of work which helps to educate, organize, and agitate for a better world.

So Mike, welcome. Good to have you with us.

Mike Alewitz:  Thank you for having me.

Marc Steiner:  So here we are at this time, these anniversaries of Kent State, Jackson State. You were in the middle of Kent State. Could you, for people who maybe read the history, don’t even really know what happened, talk about that moment, where you were as a student, and exactly how you felt and what you saw?

Mike Alewitz:  Well, the massacre took place on May 4 of 1970, and I was a student activist at Kent. I was chair of the Student Mobilization Committee against the war, which sponsored demonstrations of several thousand students on campus. And we had been organizing, I started at Kent in ’68, and we were organizing against the war, and the anti-war movement nationally was becoming a majority movement.

And what happened was that Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, which was basically a major escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. And that began a national student strike. And what happened was that, three days later, the shootings took place, and that was like a spark, and that just threw gasoline on it.

And so, the strike became this massive event. 4 million students were on strike. Over 900 campuses had protests and demonstrations, including high schools, many high schools, and 400 universities were occupied. It began to be a major national student strike. Some of us socialists who were involved were basically trying to follow the example of the students in France in May/June of 1968 who marched to the factory gates and called out the workers, 10 million workers joined, and it became a revolutionary situation in France. They used the base of the university to organize from, they called it the red university, the concept of the university.

Well, we didn’t have a red university. We were organized, an anti-war university, and that’s what we began to do. We tried to pull together a national coalition as the strike was spread, and it just became this massive, organic, national movement, the largest protest that had ever taken place in the United States up to that time.

As you mentioned, there was, after Kent, there was the massacre at Jackson. Two students killed — Actually an unknown number. Generally people use 12. But the fact was that Black students understood that they were going to get different treatment than the students at Kent State. And so, we know that some didn’t go to seek medical help because they felt they would’ve been charged and thrown in jail, which is quite probable.

In between these two student massacres was the massacre in Augusta, Georgia, where six Black men were killed, shot in the back, and 60 wounded, mostly shot in the back. So that was fresh in their minds at Jackson State.

But these events, the use of the National Guard — At Jackson, it was the cops, it wasn’t the National Guard — But the use of the National Guard had a profound effect on a lot of people because, basically, what they were seeing was the US military now turned its guns on its own people.

And a lot of the impact was in the armed forces. I had actually ended up in Texas after the strike, and I was helping to organize GIs against the war, and the shootings at Kent marked, and the national student strike, for a lot of active duty GIs, was a turning point, and the anti-war movement in the armed forces became a mass movement. That was a majority movement that began to spread. It spread into Southeast Asia.

A lot of this history has been suppressed, but there were massive revolts. There were 600,000 men deserted over the course of the war. In Southeast Asia, soldiers were fragging their officers. They were killing officers. There were ships that were taken over. There was major rebellions on an aircraft carrier. The Army was lost to the ruling [inaudible] on the war, and that totally transformed American politics. It totally transformed world politics. The United States has never been able to win a war since that time, and has to fight its wars without involving the American people, to a large extent, because people are totally anti-war. The American people are anti-war.

Marc Steiner:  Couple of things. First I’m going to come back to what you said about the American people being anti-war. Of course, we now have an all-volunteer Army, which is very different than having a mass-based Army that was drafted into the service when we were young. I do want to come back to that.

But I want to take this back to Kent State for a minute. I want you to help paint a picture of that moment and what actually happened and what you felt at that moment. There were demonstrations taking place all across the country, but this changed everything because there were soldiers who actually fired on students, who were their age, and gunned people down. And it led to a whole subculture with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and other songs being written about Kent State. It gripped the nation. So take us back to that moment when you were a young student at Kent State.

Mike Alewitz:  Well, what happened was the invasion of Cambodia was announced on a Friday, I think it was on Friday. And so, we had the initial activities that you would expect. The Black students held a demonstration, the history students buried a Constitution as a symbolic act. There were some things like that. There was unrest in downtown Kent.

And then, in what seemed to be, to me, to be the work of agent provocateurs, the ROTC building was burned down. Now, the ROTC was the military presence on campus. Actually, over the course of the anti-war movement, there were a number of ROTC buildings that were burned down. The one at Kent was actually an old wooden structure from World War II that was scheduled to be destroyed anyway.

That was used as a pretext. And we’re going to see the same thing with what’s unfolding in Los Angeles. What they do is they use these events, whether it’s agent provocateurs or just [inaudible] or well-meaning people engaging in provocative activities, it will be used as an excuse for military action. And that’s what happened at Kent.

So using the destruction of the ROTC building, Nixon in cahoots, Nixon came out and famously called the students bums, the student protestors. And then Gov. Rhodes of Ohio echoed that. He came to Kent, there was this choreographing where he stood over some burned weapons that were actually never weapons, they were just used for exercising, marching around campus and stuff. But the implication was, oh my God, there’s this thing taking place, just like they’re trying to do right now in Los Angeles. And so they laid the political framework for the massacre.

Now, on May 4, we assembled on the Commons, which was a traditional free speech area, because there’d been protests for many years. The Commons had been designated as a place you could hold an activity. You didn’t have to get permission ahead of time or anything, you just go use it. And we formed up, there were a couple thousand students. It was largely unorganized and just spontaneous, organic. And we formed up on the Commons. The guard was on the other side of the Commons —

Marc Steiner:  The National Guard, right?

Mike Alewitz:  Yeah. Our gathering was very peaceful. It was a sunny, warm spring day. People were very relaxed despite the fact that there was this military presence.

And what happened was that General Del Corso of the Ohio National Guard rode over in a Jeep and said, you have no right to assemble, you have to disperse. People yelled and didn’t disperse, at which point the guard formed at the other end of the Commons and began a barrage of tear gas that, if you see the photos of this, is just like you’re in an enormous cloud of tear gas. And for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of being tear gassed, at that point, the protest was over. It had been broken up.

We ran over, we were in front of a hill. We ran over a hill, Blanket Hill to the other side to get away from the gas, and this line of guardsmen who started marching towards us. On the other side of the hill, there was a practice field, a playing field. And by this time, we had been largely dispersed. We were all over the place. The guard marched to the middle of the practice field, crouched, aimed their weapons, but got up, turned around, and started marching back to the Commons where they had started from.

At the top of the hill, with no students threatening them or anything, and when you see the students, most of the students were hundreds of feet away [who were] shot, they turned and shot, fired into the crowd. And it left four dead and nine wounded.

Now, most of them did not shoot at students, or there would’ve been a lot worse carnage. As you were pointing out before, these were young people. A lot of people in the guard were there to avoid going to Vietnam because for somebody my age, that was the question. When I was in high school, when you were graduating high school, the question was, what are you going to do to avoid Vietnam? I had a brother who went to Canada. There were people who shot their toes off. People had all kinds of ways. And then a lot of people would join the Guard or the Coast Guard or whatever would keep ’em out of Vietnam.

And there was a lot of fraternization between the Guardsmen and the students. Allison Krause, who was an anti-war protester, famously put a flower in the barrel of one of the Guardsmen’s guns and said, flowers are better than bullets, which inspired the great poet Yevtushenko to write a wonderful poem.

Marc Steiner:  Right. That moment, people don’t realize that that changed. When she did that, it became this symbolic, this powerful, symbolic moment that affected the entire anti-war movement.

Mike Alewitz:  Yes.

Marc Steiner:  It was iconic.

Mike Alewitz:  Yeah. And now, Sandy Scheuer, who was my friend, I don’t know if you would call her an activist, but she would always take flyers from me and hand them out and stuff. I guess she was a borderline activist. And Allison certainly took great pride in her activity. She had marched on demonstrations before and was very proud of that. The whole history of the massacre was suppressed. And one of the things they did is they tried to depoliticize this, particularly Allison and Sandy, as though they were just victims, that they weren’t out there protesting the war. And then they suppressed the whole history of the anti-war movement at Kent. They’ve tried to erase the history. They created a fictional history, which has happened in a lot of places, that SDS was the radical group on campus — Which there was an SDS. But SDS after it called the first March on Washington didn’t officially sponsor any of the anti-war actions after that.

It got to the point around the 50th commemoration five years ago. They named Stephanie Danes Smith as head of organizing the commemoration. Smith was a top official in the Central Intelligence Agency. She worked directly with Condoleezza Rice and these other scumbags to organize terror sites that were being used. And she was in charge of the commemoration. And they’ve tried to just totally depoliticize it and take the mass movement away. So it becomes, oh, this unfortunate misunderstanding.

But the fact is they can try to change these histories, they can try to airbrush history. They’ve tried to do that with the whole anti-war movement. You don’t hear about what was going on and stuff. But they can’t erase the collective consciousness of the working class. And that became deeply embedded. The soldiers who fought in Vietnam were profoundly affected, and to the point where the anti-war movement had such an effect that the US can no longer use troops in the same way. They can bomb people from the air. That’s what they do. They bomb. They can go into Afghanistan, they go to Iraq, bomb people from the air. But they run into big problems when they try to occupy because then it’s human beings facing human beings.

And it’s true that it’s a volunteer Army now, but really it’s an economic draft. A lot of these kids are Black and Latino kids who have no other options so they join the service. They want to get a skill, sometimes they just need a job. And so they have a problem sending Black and Brown soldiers into countries where it’s people of color.

So everything has been changed in that way. And they can send the guard into Los Angeles. But who are the guard? Again, it’s largely African American, Latino, a lot of women now, and suddenly they’re facing their neighbors, their families, their friends.

Marc Steiner:  It’ll be interesting to see if that actually happens. This will be a real moment to see if that has an effect. I want to focus a little bit on, given what we’re facing today, what you think that legacy of Kent State and Jackson State and those moments in our history that those of us who are getting long in the tooth experienced [laughs], what do they say about what we’re facing today? Because we’re in a similar place, maybe an even more dangerous place, internally in this country than we were even then, what could be coming. So what does that moment say for you in your analysis of what we face at this time?

Mike Alewitz:  Well, I think it’s very right when you say that there’s a lot more at stake at this point in history. This is not 1970. We were fighting to end the war. It was the women’s movement was emerging, the gay rights movement began —

Marc Steiner:  The Black liberation movement.

Mike Alewitz:  All these social movements began to emerge, and it was a very optimistic time for socialists and activists. We saw these great movements developing. They had a tremendous effect on American culture. For somebody like myself who grew up in a semi-rural housing project in the 1950s, the ’70s was amazing, and it totally transformed American society.

Now though, we’re fighting for the very, in my opinion, we’re fighting for the very existence of the species because capitalism is dying. The US empire is dying, and it’s not pretty. It’s a very ugly thing. And these people who are responsible for this, and the government officials, not just of this country, but of a number of countries, they’re perfectly willing to let the whole planet go down the crapper in their incredible quest for profits. All they know is how to steal money. So we are faced with the possibility of nuclear annihilation or the global change that will fundamentally destroy many species. So the stakes are pretty big in this.

Marc Steiner:  In terms of what happened with the student movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s, we’re seeing at this moment this assault against universities by the right wing, by the people in the Trump administration, to decimate universities and to push them back into the dark ages of the ’30s. That’s a piece of this. I was thinking about Kent State, other things that happened around the country, the organizing that took place on campuses, and it’s very different right now. In many ways, it pushes back everything people fought for in the ’60s and ’70s, from civil rights to anti-war stuff, to community organizing, it’s changed the entire paradigm of the nation.

Mike Alewitz:  Well, they’re trying to, they’re trying to. They want to go back to the ’50s, make America great again. They want to go back to the 1950s when women were in the kitchen, when gays were in the closet. When it was this incredibly oppressive society, and workers dutifully went about their jobs and weren’t protesting, they’d like to go back to that. And it’s not going to happen. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Now what’s happened is they’ve tapped into some of the anger that exists and they’ve redirected it. That’s what the basis of this right wing… I don’t even like to call it right-wing support to Trump. These are people who are very angry, as they should be. Unfortunately, their anger is misdirected. But over time, the promises that have been made to people, they keep promising that things are going to be so much better. The fact of the matter is capitalism cannot solve these problems, and people are very angry, and it’s all going to explode.

I think that’s what we’re seeing the beginnings of in Los Angeles. Right now, it’s centered around immigrant workers and protests by immigrant workers, but that’s always been who has led social change in this country. When we look back at the 1930s and we look at the sit-down strikes and stuff, and you look in, you see those white workers, you don’t think, oh, immigrant workers, but they were immigrant workers. They were from the Baltics, they were from Eastern Europe, they were from Scandinavia. And they were brutally mistreated, and they organized industrial unions. They led the organization of industrial unions. That’s how change happens.

And we’re seeing the beginnings of this. It’s going to be, unfortunately, we are saddled with union, with a union bureaucracy that is totally abstaining, is just sitting by the sidelines. The American working class, which has such a proud and militant history, being led by these millionaire bureaucrats, basically. The head of the California SEIU gets arrested and the AFL-CIO doesn’t do anything. It’s astounding.

Marc Steiner:  That was pretty astounding, yes.

Mike Alewitz:  And largely, these college administrators are toeing the line. Like bureaucrats, they have to keep the host alive. So when Harvard is being threatened with being destroyed, then they make a few timid comments and they file lawsuits. They all file lawsuits as though that somehow resolves anything. Filing a lawsuit is meaningless. First of all, they don’t pay any attention to the results of these things. And the other thing they do is you got Sanders and AOC going around the country saying, you got to fight oligarchy, and they’re just trying to promote the Democratic Party and their own careers, and they’re trying to channel the anger —

Marc Steiner:  You think that’s all they’re doing?

Mike Alewitz:  — Back into the Democratic Party.

Marc Steiner:  Do you think that what they’re doing is that narrow?

Mike Alewitz:  Oh yeah.

Marc Steiner:  I mean, I’m not saying that they are the end-all-be-all.

Mike Alewitz:  I think they’re trying to save the Democratic Party. People are so sick of the Democratic Party, as they should be, which has done nothing to meet their needs, and they’re facing more disasters in elections, and, yeah, AOC and Bernie Sanders and some of these other jokers, they want to save the Democratic Party. They say, we can have a different kind of party, you just got to get back in line. You got to come to our thing. You got to give us money, and we’re going to solve this problem. Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s not how change happens. So it’s an attempt to divert it.

Now, what happens is 10, 20,000 people show up to these things, and they’re not there to save the Democratic Party, they’re there to oppose the government. So, in a sense, that part of it is progressive. They’re going to, it unleashes. Anytime you’re with thousands of people chanting against the government, people get a sense of their own power.

There was a very telling incident at one of Sanders’s things where people held up a Palestine banner behind where he was speaking.

Marc Steiner:  Right. I saw that.

Mike Alewitz:  Activists held up a “Free Palestine” banner, and he had them arrested, and the people were chanting “Free Palestine.” And that right there just shows exactly what the dynamic is in these gatherings. The problem is the working class doesn’t have a political party of its own. It doesn’t have a labor party. It has these ossified bureaucrats at the head of our trade unions. There’s no civil rights group or women’s group taking the stage in order to help organize. This stuff in Los Angeles is totally organized from the ground up by young people. Good on them. It’s wonderful to see.

But unfortunately, anger and protest is not enough. You have to organize a movement that challenges the ruling class. My hope is that that emerges from all this. I’m sure there’s a lot of political discussion going on that we’re not getting reports on. They just take a few incidents and show those. They don’t show the process that’s going on. Fortunately, there’s alternative media like yourself and other people who bring some of this stuff out.

Marc Steiner:  In the time we have left before we close out, so there’s all the stuff you’ve described. Is there a new mural in your head that you need to get out?

Mike Alewitz:  Well [both laugh], I am actually painting a thing about Kent. I’m doing it in the studio, but I am. It’s on my bucket list before I drop dead [Steiner laughs]. I feel like, Jesus, it’s been 54 years, never painted a thing. No, actually, on the 40th commemoration, a fellow faculty member, I was teaching mural painting at Central Connecticut State —

Marc Steiner:  The 40th commemoration of what?

Mike Alewitz:  Of the massacre.

Marc Steiner:  OK, gotcha. Right, right, right.

Mike Alewitz:  On the 40th anniversary, so 15 years ago, myself and Jerry Butler, who came from Jackson, Mississippi, we painted a 40-foot commemorative banner, and the banner and dedication is available if anyone wants to watch. If you go to Red Square, the Red Square, Red Square is our little, [inaudible] mural museum in New London, Connecticut.

Marc Steiner:  We will link to that, yes.

Mike Alewitz:  If they go to Red Square, redsq.org, our website, you can find links to all of this stuff, all this stuff about Kent, the mural, the dedication. Students at Kent have gone back, a lot of students have gone back every year, and it’s this nostalgic affair, and it’s important to commemorate what happened there. I’ve always felt that the commemoration should be out [inaudible], so I’ve always used May 4 as a chance to give slideshows, to show what happened, to talk about the anti-war movement, to build opposition to the US wars and occupations abroad. That’s the real commemoration. That’s the real, living memorial to the students of Kent.

We are going to go through some very hard times. There’s going to be very hard times ahead. But after the last weeks and months, getting up this morning looking at all the demonstrations, young people pouring into the streets and fighting as best they can, it warms my heart. It really does. It gives you hope for the future. One of the slogans from the major events in France was “Our hope comes from the hopeless,” and I think that’s very true. It’s those who’ve been marginalized, who’ve been ridiculed, who’ve been subjected to the worst forms of oppression who are going to inspire us to build new movements for social change.

Marc Steiner:  And in that way, what happened at Kent State, and people need to know the story because it’s that kind of movement, it’s that kind of power that inspires the rest.

Mike Alewitz:  The shootings at Kent was a spark. It was the mass anger that went on for many years of being lied to about the war in Vietnam. It would’ve happened from some other event if it hadn’t happened at Kent.

We’ve been watching as these sociopaths in Washington have been waging these assaults on working people over the last years, and now suddenly there’s a spark, and that spark is in LA, and it’s going to be emulated. There’s going to be demonstrations all over the country. There’s going to be protests against ICE. We’re going to demand that ICE be abolished. We’re going to defend as best we can those who are being victimized.

And in the process, we’re exposing the true nature of this government, just like we’re exposing the true nature of Israel. We’re out there. This started by opposing a genocide. That’s what led to this. Just as it wasn’t violent student protests that leads to the implementation of military assault on the city, it was the fact that we are opposing the genocide of the people in Gaza, and that is something that the US does not want to allow, that the ruling class of this country does not want to allow. But Israel is exposed to the entire world. The US is exposed to the entire world.

Never in my lifetime has it been so clear the nature of capitalism and its bloody hands than what’s going on today. I think more people are more aware that capitalism must die than at any time in my life.

Marc Steiner:  Michael, this has been an interesting conversation, and we are going to link to your work as well because people need to see it.

Mike Alewitz:  Well, I thank you. I wish we had more time. I think I could chat with you for a long time.

Marc Steiner:  We can come back maybe and just focus in on your murals, which would be great.

Mike Alewitz:  I would love that. I would love that. Well, I have to thank you all for inviting me to say these few words. It’s much appreciated.

Marc Steiner:  Keep your brush at the ready.

Mike Alewitz:  And go to our website, redsq.org and check out other stuff that we have.

Marc Steiner:  Absolutely. It’s well worth it. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Mike Alewitz:  Alright, thank you, Marc.

Marc Steiner:  Once again, thank you to Mike Alewitz for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for running our program, and our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.

And please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you.

Once again, thank you Mike Alewitz for your brilliant work and for being part of our program today. And so for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.