[Peace-discuss] 4 May 1970: USG kills students at Kent State

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Times-They-Changed/65192/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

I remember that evening quite well. I was in my first year of teaching 
at a large Midwest university. A friend, an American historian, and I 
we're giving a series of talks in dorms on the war and American 
politics.  (He was in fact the only other member of the university's 
history department who did not support the war in Vietnam; we were both 
fired within the year.)  He met me on the stairway to the basement room 
of one dorm between talks and said, "Have you heard? The army has killed 
some students at a college in Ohio."

I think I responded, "That'll change everything."

In fact, as Lembke explains (and I'm not sure he's mentioned all the 
mechanisms), the universities responded vigorously and in a few years 
were able to stamp out student political awareness.  They convinced 
students that they should beg for jobs and party in the meantime. 
Student politics didn't die: it was murdered like Jeffrey Miller forty 
years ago.

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