FIVE TENSE DAYS IN 1970:THE AFTERMATH OF THE KENT STATE SHOOTINGS

By Mike Smith

Some Background

The school year 1969-70, during which I served as ASSOC President, looms in retrospect as a tipping point in the nature and intensity of anti-war activity in America, especially on its campuses, and while the activity at SOC, the protest in Ashland, never reached the extremes it did in places such as Madison, Wisconsin, or even Eugene, things at SOC got turbulent enough, as the tenor of discourse went from polite oratory in the much-debated one-day Vietnam War Moratorium in October to the “strident and abrasive” measures that occurred in May. (That memorable phrase came from Kip Morgan, briefly Student Body President at the U of O until his conviction for throwing a bucket of pig’s blood around during a meeting of a Roseburg Draft Board, and his subsequent sentencing to forestry work in the Coast Range.)

Let me begin by saying that in 1970, we had precious little information about what was happening in the rest of the country with regard to anti-war protest. Our print sources of news were limited to the Mail Tribune and The Daily Tidings, our television coverage to the two local network affiliates, one of which, KMED, gave ready access to an impromptu ultra right-wing student “group” eager to portray anti-war protest on the SOC campus as violent.

As far as radio went, the Valley’s stations were roughly divided into music formats: mostly country, a couple of top-40 rock stations, including KBOY, who broadcast license limited its broadcast day to “dawn-to-dusk.” Some easy listening. What talk radio there confined itself to Joe Pine, a famous venom-spewer of the day, who would make Rush Limbaugh look like Phil Donahue. There was no NPR.

Fm radio was such an anomaly that the Student Senate subsidized the sale of FM-only transistor radios in the Student Bookstore, so that students could afford to buy a radio at a fifty percent discount price of $14.00, on which to listen to the fledgling KSOR, housed in the basement of what we students called Myrtle Funkhouser Hall, though it had been colorfully named Central a few years before. The station was in line-of-sight of my office in the back of Britt, about fifty yards distant, with a signal weak enough to be interrupted by the passage of students between classes.

The point of all this is to serve as a reminder of how isolated we were from the news of the outside world, especially if the two mainstream outlets in the Valley chose not to cover it. Few students saw much television news, though by that time it was filled nightly with battle footage from Vietnam. Peaceful protest got scant coverage.

Most of our news regarding student protest came in the way of mail from student organizations with which the Student Government was in some fashion affiliated. Chief among these was the National Student Association, the NSA, influential enough that the CIA was later shown to have infiltrated it and to have used it as a recruiting ground. Still, it took a firmly anti-war stance, and unlike the SDS, advocated peaceful protest. All that is background regarding “what we knew and how we knew it” in Ashland in 1969-70,

The National Student Strike

In doing some research to clarify dates, I ran across a website on the historical impact of what is now known as the National Student Strike of May, 1970, in the aftermath of the Kent State killings. What we were aware of at the time-that virtually every campus in the country would be involved in some sort of strike is something I only had a vague grasp of. Nearly five million students nationwide took part in some form of protest (according to alancanfora.com), called the largest strike in American history. On May 9, over 150,000 protesters, most of them students, converged on Washington, where President Nixon effectively barricaded himself in the White House surrounded by troops armed with machine guns. In Ashland we heard that I-5 in Seattle had been blocked by protesters. But I think we were largely in the dark about the extent of protest elsewhere. It was enough to know it was happening, that momentum was shifting in our direction, and that we had our own roles to play. Think globally, act locally, so to speak.

On April 30, President Nixon announced (or admitted, since reports had been leaking this news for some time) that he had authorized American forces to make incursions into Cambodia in pursuit of enemy combatants who were crossing the border into that noncombatant country, including air-strikes and bombing missions. It was this admission, and its implication of widening the war by incursion into an unaligned sovereign nation that inflamed outrage among anti-war groups. It seemed as if Nixon, who, as 1968’s “peace candidate,” having successfully run on a secret plan to bring the war to an end, was now nakedly flexing arrogant American muscle, defying international law, disregarding Cambodia’s sovereignty. Demonstrations broke out on American campuses nationwide, most memorably at Kent State University in Ohio, when on Monday, May 4, a group of National Guardsmen, deployed by that state’s Governor, unaccountably opened fire into a crowd of students, wounding many and killing four, all of whom were full-time students, at least one on her way to class. If the invasion of Cambodia had inflamed student outrage, the Kent State killings threw napalm on the fire, and campuses nationwide erupted overnight at what seemed like the government openly declaring military war on student protest.

A Call to Action

I had just returned to my office after a Student Senate meeting when I received, as I’m sure hundred if not thousands of other student leaders did on campuses across America, a call from someone at the NSA, informing me of what had happened at Kent State, and advising me of the whirlwind of protest that would follow.
The tenor of that call was something like this: the days of trying to stir up anti-war feeling were very likely behind us; what was coming was likely to take on a life of its own, and where the local student leaders didn’t take prompt action to shape the events of the following weeks, those events, powered by unprecedented anger, fear and distrust, could very well and, in some cases would inevitably, turn very ugly.

One measure that was suggested was an immediate student strike, i.e., encouraging students to boycott classes for at least one day, starting the next day, Tuesday. The rationale was that students were eager to do something, anything, immediately in the heat of their anger to send a message to the powers that be that they had finally gone too far, and that there would be hell to pay if they didn’t backtrack quickly. Immediate opportunities for such expression might well defuse any urges to more violent reactions.

Activities at SOC

I put the world out as quickly as I could, and whatever grapevine we employed worked amazingly rapidly in those days before e-mail. “Boycott classes tomorrow.” Unlike last fall, no torturous persuasion through channels to win reluctant approval of the Student Committee of the Faculty Senate. This was not a day set aside for debate, the academic value of which had to be justified; this was a day when academics were to take a back seat to our expression of outrage that our government was making war on us, its own citizens, exercising our Constitutional rights to assemble and seek redress from our government.

Many of us spent Monday night on the lawn in front of Churchill Hall, just uphill from the flagpole. Tuesday, we didn’t interfere with those who wished to attend classes; we just stayed away in droves. I did, too, and spent the mornings that week trying to defuse suggestions of those who had visions of “guerilla theater” and other manifestations of protest that seemed like simultaneous opportunities for grandstanding, confrontation, and malicious mischief. In the afternoons I attended the one class I couldn’t afford a week away from, my student teaching assignment at Crater High School in Central Point, my alma mater, where I was teaching a writing class.

Apparently this student protest was getting some local coverage. Tuesday afternoon, my students reminded me to remove my black armband and, noticing grass stains on my cords, asked if I had spent the previous evening on the lawn in front of Churchill. I had. “Were there really one hundred people?” they asked, as the Mail Tribune had apparently reported. My guess was double that, probably attributable to a failure by the Ashland Police, parked across Siskiyou Boulevard, to multiply by two after counting sleeping bags. My students, of course, were quick to point out the inconsistency of my boycotting classes, but showing up to teach theirs, which, of course, was for me a class.

A Flag Controversy, A Peace March

As it turned out, the two manifestations of protest that student support crystallized around were pretty mild. First was the lowering of the flag to half-staff in recognition of the deaths at Kent State, and second was to be a peace march on Friday evening from the Plaza to campus. As for the flagpole, there was a problem: President Sours was attending a conference, and for some reason, my guess being a pre-paid ticket, he would not return to campus till Thursday, and the senior administrator in his absence, dean of faculty Dr. McGill, didn’t feel comfortable authorizing the lowering of the flag, an issue that became in the space of two days, amazingly polarizing, since, of course, it involved that most irrationally polarizing of American symbols, the flag. Interestingly, the President of Kent State was also off campus during this time, attending the same conference as President Sours. I’m guessing his return to campus was more expeditious. By the time Dr. Sours returned, this controversy had garnered enough local play that there were threats from “members of the community” that if the flag didn’t go to the top of the staff on Thursday morning at six a.m., I think it was, they would cut the flagpole down with a chainsaw. To his credit, Dr. Sours okayed the half-staffing of the flag. I stayed up all that night, too, at one point in the Student Union declining an insistent offer, from what were apparently itinerant student organizers, “outside agitators” in the parlance of the time, to “help get things rolling here.”

Early Thursday morning I set up a card table by the flagpole and had Scotty’s, the all-night diner just across Siskiyou Boulevard from Churchill, which sold coffee to past-midnight studiers like me, poet Greg Keith, and future coffee mogul Alan Schultz for twenty cents an hour, deliver a huge 36-cup pot of coffee to serve any community members who might show up for the raising of the flag. When the worker whose duties included raising the flag arrived, no one from the community had yet shown. He held out his hand, allowed that he might just have felt a raindrop, and citing flag etiquette forbidding flying it on rainy days, tucked it back under his arm and returned inside. Imagine my surprise when, upon moving to Salem, I discovered no one in the Willamette Valley seems to have heard of this injunction.

This is not to say that community members were not active around campus. One coed (isn’t that a quaint term?) was hit by a brick thrown from a passing vehicle as she walked along the Boulevard toward her dorm. Asked to describe the vehicle, she responded that it was a pick-up truck with a rifle rack in the rear window. That information probably eliminated about half the vehicles in Jackson County at the time.

Inflammatory Rhetoric

Meanwhile, a student named Gordon Shadburne, whom it would be more than fair to characterize as very conservative, somehow gained the ear of the owner of KMED-TV in Medford, representing himself as president of a conservative group on campus (which group did not in fact exist) and did a live, half-hour interview on Tuesday night, expressing his hope that there “would be not further violence” on the SOC campus, inflammatory rhetoric, inasmuch as there had been none. But he had been given a forum to give the public the opposite impression. It took us over a week to gain equal time from KMED, and only after threats to challenge their license renewal.

Friday’s peace march threatened the possibility of violent confrontation. The Rogue Valley in those days was famously conservative, or at least the wildly conservative elements were very vocal. I’ve heard it said that Josephine County supported Barry Goldwater by a 2-1 margin in 1964, when the rest of the country voted 2-1 for Lyndon Johnson, that year’s “peace candidate.” A very vocal pro-firearms group called The National Committee to Preserve the Right to Keep and Bear Arms had such strong local roots that it held a national board of directors meeting in Trail (you know, near Tiller), at which meeting one board member, no doubt incensed by the application of some provision of Robert’s Rules of Order, cleared leather, as we used to say in Wyoming, and drew down on another board member as a means of expressing his difference of opinion.

“Community members” threatened violence, should the peace march occur. Personally, returning to my office that Friday after student teaching and before heading to the Plaza, I found a little yellow “while you were out” form on my desk, a phone message taken down by Chris Fisher, ASSOC Secretary, reading as close as I can remember: “Caller wouldn’t leave his name, but said if you take part in the march tonight, he’ll blow your fucking head off. Have a nice day, (Happy Face) Chris.”

The planning and execution of the march were models of liberal respectability. The fact that I can’t recall who took the lead is, I think, a testimony to the fact that the impulse for posturing and self-aggrandizement were admirably absent. I recall Ross Nelson, in his late thirties and resembling Pete Seeger, making the point that in terms of gaining mainstream momentum, “every necktie is a plus, every beard a minus.” I noted that he didn’t shave for the march, but short-haired as I was, and a dozen years away from my first convincing beard, I for one, was down with his message.

We had signals at which everyone was trained to hit the pavement, exposing anyone infiltrating the march and thereafter pulling a weapon, or just as a way of minimizing any exposure to fire from passing vehicles. But most heartening of all, we had real “community members,” adults, faculty members, elderly people (not necessarily the same thing). It wasn’t us against the world. The tide was beginning to turn. The march was, from the standpoint of threats followed through on, uneventful, though Siskiyou Boulevard seemed clogged with pickups sporting rifle racks.

Final Words

Similar things had to be going on that week on hundreds of little campuses off the beaten path all over the country that week, that month.

Former Chief Justice Warren called the protests of May, 1970 the worst American crisis since the Civil War. Within a week after Kent State and the subsequent demonstrations, President Nixon acted to limit incursions into Cambodia to 35 kilometers inside the border, and more significantly, to discontinue them within two months.