Kent State Shootings

Noon on the Commons

The clock above the student union read noon, but for many on the Kent State University campus, time already felt askew. The air was sharp with spring, but heavy with something else—anticipation, fear, indignation, fatigue. A crowd—somewhere near two thousand, it was later said—gathered on the Commons: protesting students, classmates passing between lectures, a few faculty, onlookers. Beyond them, a row of Ohio National Guardsmen pressed in, rifles slung and faces set.

The campus, usually a picture of peaceful Midwestern normalcy, had become a crossroads. Some in the crowd wanted to shout slogans against the war in Vietnam. Some just wanted to see what would happen next. And as hands fumbled with protest banners and leaflets, and Guardsmen shifted nervously in their boots, no one standing there could know what those thirteen seconds would bring—or that, in 1970, the war would come home to Ohio in a way that wouldn’t be forgotten.

How It Came to This

Just days earlier, trouble had started the way it often does: with an announcement. On April 30, President Richard Nixon appeared on television to declare that the war in Vietnam would be expanding into Cambodia. For many young Americans, already weary of a seemingly endless war, this was a gut punch. On campuses across the United States, the reaction was swift—a new wave of protests, marches, teach-ins. Kent State, in the quiet town of Kent, Ohio, was no exception.

That Friday, May 1, the mood at Kent State was tense but not unfamiliar. Students met on the Commons to protest the war and Nixon’s new campaign. The rally wasn’t an unusual sight—Kent State had seen its share of activism. Yet as dusk fell, something simmered over. Angry students spilled into town, and the lines between protest and riot began to blur: windows shattered, bonfires made from pilfered traffic signs burned on Main Street. The city declared an emergency. Rumors flew—radicals from out of town, threats against officials, something big on the horizon.

By May 2, the front lines moved to campus. That evening, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) building—symbol and stand-in for the war on campus—was set ablaze. Who struck the match? No one saw for sure; in the chaos, it was impossible to tell. When firefighters tried to douse the flames, furious students blocked their way. Smoke rose across campus as the National Guard rolled in, steel-helmeted and exhausted from back-to-back nights of unrest elsewhere in Ohio.

Major General Robert Canterbury later said, “We thought we were coming to control a riot. We didn't expect a campus war.”

The Guard Arrives

By Sunday, Kent State felt less like a university and more like an occupied zone. The guardsmen—soldiers, mostly young men themselves—camped on the grass, bayonets fixed, trading jokes one minute and scanning crowds the next. Overnight, skirmishes flared between the Guard and students. Tear gas canisters arced through the air in answer to rocks and jeers. The university declared a ban on further gatherings; it wasn’t clear anyone intended to listen.

Ohio’s Governor, James Rhodes, came to campus that same day, making his position clear before TV cameras: “These are the worst type of people that we harbor in America, worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes.” The tone, if not the words, was understood by all who heard: this was war of a kind.

Inside dorm rooms and dining halls, fear hummed alongside anger and defiance. Senior Jeffrey Miller, who had grown increasingly furious about the war, described the looming protest on the Fourth as something he felt “couldn’t not happen.” History was, after all, not just far away anymore; it was walking between the cafeteria and his dorm.

May 4: “They’re Going to Shoot!”

Monday morning, May 4, campuses across America hung in uneasy balance. At Kent State, students hurried to class, careful to avoid guardsmen stationed at every campus crossing. But just before noon, as word spread about a rally—scheduled or spontaneous, it hardly mattered—the crowd gathered on the Commons, defying the ban.

Guardsmen lined up at the foot of Blanket Hill, their faces blank beneath riot helmets. Campus police issued warnings over a bullhorn: the rally was illegal, it was time to leave. Few did. A few bandana-wearing students raised their fists, chanting. Rocks pinged off helmets and gas masks. Some students—too far away to hear or see what was happening—cut across the grass on their way to class, as any other Monday.

At 12:24 p.m., after firing tear gas (much of it blown off course by the wind), nearly 80 National Guardsmen started to move up the hill in a wedge, trying to clear the protest. The students—some angry, some merely watching—refused to disperse. Rocks and insults filled the air. The guardsmen crested the top of the hill, reached the parking lot, and stopped. For a moment, there was confusion—later, nobody could quite explain who said what, or why.

And then, suddenly, it happened. Guardsmen wheeled around. In a flash, rifles lifted to shoulders, and a volley tore the air: 61, maybe 67, rounds—most fired into the sky or dirt, but others toward clusters of unarmed students hundreds of feet away.

A student named Allison Krause, just 19, crumpled in the grass. Jeffrey Miller’s body spun from the force of the bullet that struck his face, captured forever in a photograph that would shake the nation. Sandra Scheuer, walking to class, fell dead, a stray shot severing her jugular vein. William Schroeder, 19, a ROTC student and psychology major, was shot in the back as he tried to get away.

Nine more fell—some with broken bones, some bleeding from bullet wounds. A bystander, Dean Kahler, was hit in the spine and left paralyzed for life.

One witness remembers the silence that followed: “It was so quiet you could hear the birds. Then the screaming started.” Chaos. People ran, dived, dropped to their knees over classmates. Someone shouted, “They’re going to shoot again!” but the guns had fallen silent. The Guard, blank-faced, retreated.

The Country Reacts

News traveled at the speed of heartbreak: Four dead in Ohio. TV and radio carried the images and the shock across America. The country was transfixed by a photograph—Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, kneeling over the lifeless body of Jeffrey Miller, screaming in horror. At Kent State, students reeled; faculty rushed to organize peace rallies while others called their parents, too stunned to say what had happened.

The next day, Governor Rhodes closed the university. Faculty and students were told to leave for their own safety; the school would remain shuttered for six tense weeks. Across the country, the rage and grief ignited a chain reaction: On more than 450 campuses, students and professors declared strikes, teach-ins, occupations—a national outcry against the violence in Ohio and the war in Vietnam itself.

Flags flew at half-staff. On the National Mall, protesters sang “Ohio,” a furious lament written overnight by Neil Young: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.”

The funerals came next. Allison Krause’s parents, standing beside their daughter’s casket, confronted reporters: “She resented being called a radical. She was not. She was just against the war.” The wounding ran deep and, for some, never fully healed.

Accountability—or the Lack Thereof

Official investigations sprang up quickly: the FBI, Congressional committees, a Presidential Commission. Who fired first? Who gave the order, if any? The Guardsmen claimed they feared for their lives; students insisted that deadly force made no sense, that the bullets were punishment, not defense.

A grand jury indicted eight Guardsmen—the so-called “Kent State Eight”—charging them with violating the civil rights of the students shot. Defense attorneys argued it was impossible to pinpoint who fired which shots, and the trials ended with no convictions. Criminal cases closed, but the civil suits rolled on for years.

In 1979, the state of Ohio settled with the victims’ families: $675,000 divided among the wounded and the families of the dead, along with a formal statement of “regret.” For many, both felt hollow. “We think the monetary settlement will serve as a reminder that governments must be more responsive to their citizens,” the families’ lawyer said, “but no dollar amount returns a child.”

The shootings did force a reckoning. Congressional hearings and the President’s Commission condemned the lack of preparation and the breakdown in communication that led to gunfire; new guidelines for campus security and crowd control were ushered in—slowly, and often in the face of resistance.

The Memory That Won’t Fade

Fifty years later, the pain and questions linger. Survivors gather each May 4 at the site—now a National Historic Landmark—where the students fell. White stakes still mark in the grass the spots where the dead and wounded lay.

Time has brought detail, if not closure. Forensic analysis—ballistics, old cassette tapes of the shootings, new interviews—has fleshed out the timeline: the guardsmen fired toward the crowd from distances up to 400 feet; most of those struck were not actively protesting, but were in between classes or watching from the periphery. To this day, no definitive evidence has surfaced of a coordinated “fire” order. For many Guardsmen, the answers are caught somewhere between training, fear, and the blank spot where seconds sting much longer than minutes ever will.

The Kent State shootings became a symbol—a warning, a mirror—of what happens when anger, mistrust, and violence collide in the space between government and the governed. The memory flows through generations, invoked in moments when young people raise their voices against war and injustice, and when the force called to contain protest does not—or cannot—find the line between order and catastrophe.

For most who lived through it—a mother who lost her child, a student who saw a friend fall, a guardsman who pulled the trigger—May 4, 1970, is not just history. It is a wound that has never quite closed, and a story our country tells itself, again and again, so it does not dare to forget.

If you visit Kent, Ohio, today, you’ll find memorials set amid new buildings and changed faces. Each spring, alumni and students gather at noon on the Commons. In the stillness, you’re reminded: those thirteen seconds shaped a nation’s conscience—and still echo far beyond the gentle hills of northeast Ohio.