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| Ohio National Guardsmen take aim to fire on students at Kent State on May 4, 1970. |
Note:
Versions of this have been posted
before but not since 2013 so it should be knew to most readers. Memoir stories like this are intended purely
as the observations and reminiscence of a single participant. I don’t exaggerate my importance. I was a foot soldier in the movement in those
days neither a leader nor central figure.
In this instance I stumbled upon an unusual role by happenstance and
then faded back into the woodwork universally unnoticed. The story here is just a hopefully
interesting angle on a moment in history from an unusual angle.
May 4th is a date fraught with significance in American history. On this date in 1886 a mass protest meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square was attacked
by a phalanx of police. A bomb was thrown. Eventually the
leaders of the labor and anarchist movements were hung and May Day became International Labor Day in their memory.
On May 4th 1961 the first Freedom Riders set off from Washington,
D.C. split between two coaches,
a Greyhound and a Trailways. The plan was to ride through the South
through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama,
and Mississippi, ending with a rally in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The aim was to desegregate public accommodations in the South. Ten days into
the trip, after several ugly incidents,
the buses were attacked outside of Birmingham
by Ku Klux Klan led mob attacked and severely beat the riders and set
fire to the buses. The attack drew national attention and the ride was completed by more volunteers.
Three years later again in bloody
Birmingham, the third of four marches of the Children’s Crusade of high
school and even younger students
was met by the fire hoses and the clubs and dogs of Bull Connor’s infamous
police. Organized by the Rev. James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC)
the marches were called after older
protestors were repeatedly arrested
trying to register to vote. Scenes from the attacks on TV helped build sympathy in the North
for the Civil Rights Movement.
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| John Paul Filo's 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph from Kent State became one of the most iconic images of the era. |
But for folks of my generation, May 4, 1970 will always be
the day when Ohio National Guardsmen opened
fire on student anti-war demonstrators on the campus of
Kent State University killing 4 and injuring several. The shootings sparked a nation-wide wave of campus protests.
What follows is an account of my own small part in those
events, as best as my poor memory can
reconstruct things more than 45 years later.
***
I must have been at my brother Tim’s (later known as Peter)
apartment on Sheridan Road near the Morse
Ave. Beach when we got the news of
the shooting. Oddly, unlike other Great Events, I can’t fix in my mind the moment I heard the news.
Rather than hopping on the L to get
to my own school, Columbia College, a
small communications college located
on a few floors of a commercial building at Grand Ave. and the Inner
Drive north of the Loop, my
brother convinced me to go with him and his friends to his campus, Kendall College in Evanston. Kendall was then a small, private two year college mostly drawing students from the northern suburbs. Neither the
school nor my brother was particularly politically
active. Tim was the center of
acid dropping spirituality and the self-appointed
guru to a circle of acolytes,
many of them fellow students at Kendall. He said he left the Revolution to me.
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| This banner hanging from an occupied campus building somewhere in America summarized the mood of outrage and defiance that swept campuses. |
When we arrived on campus, students
were in full possession of the buildings
and the administration was nowhere
to be found, although some faculty
was on hand mingling with the
students. There was no police
presence; it was as though the administration had simply abandoned the school to the students.
Some folks had gone over to join Northwestern students at barricades erected on Sheridan Road. Others milled about trying to figure out what
to do. One student was working a Ham
Radio and gathering information
from actions at campuses across the country. We soon realized that this
could become an asset.
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| At the barricades on Sheridan Road by the Northwester campus in Evanston student's try to block a camara man they believe to be an undercover cop from filming . |
Phone
connections were somehow made with students
from campuses across the Chicago area and we fed them news gleaned from the Ham
operator. Not all of that information was reliable, some turned out to be wild rumor, but enough was good so that it became apparent that we
were part of a spontaneous nationwide
student strike that was growing by the hour.
Besides participating in the phone
network, I started posting the news on
large sheets of paper, updated regularly throughout the night to keep
students informed. I called them the Joe
Hill Memorial Wall Posts and had about a dozen of them lining hallways by
the time the night was over.
There were also informal discussions all night. I was considered a real live activist because of my
connections with the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW) and my input was probably given more credence than I deserved. By morning I had agreed
to return to campus later and set up some
educational programs, which I did do, although Kendall never became a hot bed of radicalism.
In the morning, running on adrenalin, I headed down to Columbia. Columbia was
a commuter school specializing in communications and the arts—broadcasting, photography,
theater, dance, and writing.
With no one living on our non-existent
campus, I was not sure what I would find. There were no classes but it wasn’t exactly a strike either because the administration was totally supportive of the student cause and offered the facilities of the school free
to the movement.
I headed down to the print shop in the basement, where I worked as one of two printers. We ginned up
our little A.B. Dick 360 and Multilith 1250 offset presses and were
soon turning out hundreds, even thousands of flyers, posters, handbills, and other material advertising actions
across the city and region.
I have no recollection of how, but I was selected as one of two representatives from Columbia to a city wide student strike committee.
I believe it was Wednesday when a couple of hundred folks met at the Riviera Theater in Uptown to plan coordinated
actions. The meeting was a perfect example of sometimes chaotic participatory democracy, but a consensus was arrived at to have a unified, city wide march and demonstration downtown on
Saturday. I was named to the demonstration
organizing committee with students from University of Illinois Circle Campus, University of Chicago, and Roosevelt, among other schools.
Many of the others members were in SDS.
Others were Trotskyites, who made something of a specialty of organizing big demonstrations.
There was a sprinkling of Anarchists
as well. But the ideological wars
that wracked campuses were suspended—mostly—in the face of the common emergency. Another meeting
the following day was held at Circle
Campus.
Again, I have no memory of how, but
I was selected to try and negotiate
with Chicago Police in what most
felt was the vain hope of avoid an attack by authorities the day of the
March. Given the background of the Police
Riots against demonstrators during the 1968
Democratic Convention, at protest marches connected to the trial of the Chicago 7, and the virtual
street warfare around the Days of
Rage in October ’69 there was little
reason to hope for a better outcome.
Late Thursday afternoon I was
escorted through an eerily quiet Police Headquarters to the office of Deputy Superintendent James Riordan. I
believe I may have been taken through a route
intended to keep rank and file police from seeing that the brass was meeting “the enemy.”
Riordan was cordial. We shook hands. We both clearly understood the potential volatility of the situation. I
told him that organizers intended an
entirely peaceful march and pointed to some earlier mass marches that had gone off without a hitch. I also pointed out that there had been no significant acts of violence on any
of the Chicago area campuses even at Northwestern with its barricades or the building occupations at other
schools. I said that we would have marshals
to keep our demonstrators in line
and moving and to discourage break away marches.
Although others were trying to obtain a
parade permit, I said that we intended to exercise our free speech rights and march with or without a permit.
Riordan said he understood and said
that the police did not want to provoke a confrontation and would be as “restrained as possible.” I told
him that we expected police would line
the rout of march, but that putting those officers in full riot gear or having them stand
with batons conspicuously exposed might be provocative under the circumstances. Riordan made no explicit
promises but indicated that if we kept our people in line there would be a kind of truce. I got the distinct
impression that higher-ups had already
decided to try and avoid more bad national press.
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| Students gather on a campus to hear speakers at a protest rally. |
All during this period, although I
was known to be a Wobbly, I was not acting in any way as a representative of
the union. I did inform the Chicago
Branch of developments and the branch decided to participate in the march. That Saturday rather than joining
other “leaders”—and I use that term
in the loosest possible manner—in
the front of the march or joining with Columbia or Kendall college contingents,
I marched as a rank-and-file member of the IWW behind our black and red banner. Although riot equipped police were on
hand, they were kept largely out of
sight. Officers lining the route wore standard blouses and soft
caps. Their batons were kept under their coats. The march and
rally went off without a serious hitch or any violence, which is more than can be said of marches in other
cities.
Later, I reported on the events in
the pages of the Industrial Worker.
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