My terrific brother, Richard, posted this article that I wrote about being at Kent State in May, 1970...not a bad idea.... =====Rollys witness:===== For many years after May 4, 1970, I refused to speak about the events of those four days. The fact that I was a student at Kent State would come up in conversation, questions would be asked, and I would change the subject or simply say, “I’d rather not talk about it”. I didn’t want the Kent State Massacre to become cocktail conversation. I didn’t want to see myself demean the profundity of the experience. So, what was profound about it? At the time, I felt it was a profoundly pure act of civil disobedience, based on the most humanistic and idealistic precepts. Over time, that feeling has remained, and I’d pit it against the common media portrayal of the sixties, which features goofy looking kids in bell-bottoms and paisley shirts dancing mindlessly in what seems an attempt to be fashionable. While we did our share of mindless dancing, and we may have looked goofy by today’s standards (although not too many of us actually wore those paisley shirts), it is a huge disservice to truth and history to ignore the level of serious thought that went into and emerged from the student movements of the sixties. Evidently, it still serves the public relations agenda of our government today to trivialize these movements. As for the four young people who lost their lives at Kent, they may have been poor victims of capricious circumstance, and I don’t believe they represented the most political or sentient aspect of the student movement in Kent, but their hearts were in the right place. And I believe today, as I did then, that their unintentional martyrdom put an end to the war in Vietnam. That is not, as it may sound, such a grandiose claim. Consider this: Until the shootings at Kent State, the general perception, in the media and in the public eye, was that the people of America were mainly, if not totally, behind the government in its military involvement in Vietnam. Within a week of the shootings, the largest anti-war march of the era was mounted in Washington (I remember watching it on TV from the hospital room of one of the shooting victims), and, from that point on, the general perception was that Vietnam was a huge mistake, and that the government would strive to get us out of there as soon as possible. My own involvement in the happenings of that weekend was not as part of any organization. I wasn’t in SDS or any other organized group, although I did have strong political opinions. In fact, when the radical idealogues would come to the dorms and want to “break into small groups and rap it down”, I often found myself playing devil’s advocate to what I felt was an unrealistic and rigid dogma. What I recount here is, I must admit, a memory of 30 years ago, so some details may be hazy or even incorrect, but probably more true than most of the lies reported in the media. Also, I’ve chosen not to use the names of any cohorts in what might be construed an illegal action, so the term “we” means “me and whatever friends happened to be along.” On Friday, May 1st, I attended a rally on the campus which was a response to the bombing of Cambodia by the Nixon regime. It was a beautiful warm spring day, and we dropped mescaline to heighten the experience. Jerry Rubin and other Movement figures spoke to a reasonably large crowd, but it should be noted that Kent Ohio was not a hotbed of left wing activity, and the greater student population was as hostile to student radicals as the government was. That evening, I was playing guitar with Alex Bevan, a local singer/songwriter, in a club on Main St. in downtown Kent. From the makeshift stage, we could see over the half curtains and out to the street. The audience could not. There was a lot of activity on the street. On our breaks, we walked over to Water St., where a bunch of “hippies”, for want of a better word, had gathered in front of Orville’s, the one bar in town which had a sort of hip clientele. They were dancing in the street and blocking traffic. Meanwhile, most of the student body in town were partying as usual in a totally non-political fashion in the several subterranean bars along Water Street. Alex and I had begun what was probably our third set when we saw, from our vantage point on stage, that the street scene was turning into a riot of sorts. Students were swarming along the streets, and windows were getting broken. We did a quick, “That’s All, Folks!”, and headed outside to see what was up. By this time, the police had realized they were overmatched, and had called for a tactical crew from the county. It was at this moment that Kent State became radicalized. Before the bars closed, the rioting was carried on by a fairly small and very politically minded minority, but, as midnight drew near, and the tactical police descended upon Water Street, the bars closed up, and the great majority of apolitical students emerged from the subterranean drinking establishments, only to be attacked with indiscriminant police brutality. The police drove the students back towards campus, through an area which included many frat houses. Thus, even those fraternity brothers who had stayed home that evening were radicalized when they witnessed the spectacle of their innocent right wing friends being bludgeoned on the lawns of their domiciles. In two hours, the police did more to promote student radicalism in Kent than the student radicals had done in two years, and the lines were drawn: It was no longer “frat-boys versus hippies”. It was “students versus cops”. My memories of Saturday and Sunday are fairly sketchy. There was a lot of excitement and discussion among the people I knew who still lived in Tri-Towers, which was the dorm complex most associated with longhair types, and also in various group houses of my acquaintance. On Saturday night, I witnessed the burning of the ROTC building on the campus. It was exciting, and the sense of mob destructiveness and student unity hung heavy in the air, but it should be remembered that the ROTC building was basically a large wooden shack which had been erected in the forties as a temporary structure and had somehow, educational budgeting being what it was, remained standing, along with the similarly constructed Kent State Art Department, for 20 years longer than originally intended. I think it was Sunday when the soldiers arrived in force, and the command was issued for students not to congregate on campus. Of course, everyone immediately took it upon themselves to congregate. On Sunday evening, I was part of a group on the front campus when armed soldiers started marching in a formation to sweep the area clean. With a friend, I escaped across Main Street into a residential area, hoping to avoid arrest. There were helicopters with arc lights patrolling low over this neighborhood, and we thought we were in pretty deep trouble until some nice young women called from their porch and allowed us in to spend the night in their living room. (Thanks, again, ladies, wherever and whoever you are!) On Monday, May 4, the word went out that there would be an impromptu rally on the commons at 11 or noon. We arrived early, and, when the time came, we decided to ring the bell which was lodged in a small brick wall on the commons. The bell brought people out, and the stage was set for the tragedy to follow: Soldiers on one side, students on the other, the rubble that had been the ROTC building sitting alongside. Someone from the military read the riot act over an electric megaphone. The students responded with boos and bravado. Then there were tear gas cannisters, which some brave students managed to throw back at the soldiers. The air was thick with the stuff. At one point, essentially blinded, I retreated to Dunbar Hall, where I was washing the tear gas out of my eyes at a water fountain when we heard the shots. Once we knew what had happened, there was a mixture of disbelief, outrage, and fear. The rest of that day was pretty much a blur. The school was officially closed, students were automatically evicted from both on-campus and off-campus housing and ordered to evacuate the area, and we mostly grabbed our stuff and ran. In Ravenna, we were stopped by vigilantes and held at gunpoint while they searched our car. Finally, we made it back to Cleveland, where I became involved, over the next couple weeks, as co-chair of a group called Kent In Exile, which was given space to operate on the Case Western Reserve campus near University Circle. Our purpose was to provide a place for displaced Kent students (many of whom were from the Cleveland area) to reconnect and process the events that we’d been involved in, and, as such, we held several meetings to that end. I also spoke at rallies at Cleveland State and at Oberlin. I remember nothing of what I said. I’m quite sure it was very critical of the government and of the war in Vietnam, and also that it emphasized the point that the rioting was not purposeless, but that the demonstrations were a protest against the immoral actions of a militarized government run amok, i.e. the bombing of Cambodia. This, of course, was true and not so true. On one hand, you could say that most of the students could have cared less about Cambodia and were responding to the police brutality. On the other hand, you could recognize that brutality as a much-closer-to-home manifestation of what our government was doing in Cambodia. The great majority of Kent students may have been oblivious to the United States government’s politics of force on the morning of May 1, 1970, but I assure you that they were profoundly aware of this issue by the evening of May 4. For me, that felt like the end of my college education. Oh, I spent the summer in Kent, and took a course or two during the fall and winter quarters, but I was already gone. A group of us left for Cape Cod in the spring, and I worked various jobs, musical and otherwise, for the next ten years. It would be another quarter century before I got a college degree. The events of May 4th made the rest of my college experience seem incredibly meaningless and divorced from real life. There was no single reason to bother finishing. I’ve thought a lot, over the years, about the personalities who made up the “Left” at Kent. As is the case in any political movement or faction, there were various kinds of political people at Kent. Some were temporary true believers. Others were deep thinkers. Some were just trying to get laid, or to attain notoriety. For some people it was just a whim, but, for many, it was the beginning (or middle) of a lifelong dedication to humanism and/or nonviolence. Today, when I hear an interview on the radio with some former sixties leftists who are now Reagan-esque Republicans, and whose message seems to be, “See, all of us former radicals now realize that we were just young and foolish back then!”, I can hear immediately that they were among the fanatical and mindless “true believers”, and that their allegiances were never based on a deep conviction. In 1985, there was a reunion in Kent, Ohio. It wasn’t held at a vanilla monument, and it wasn’t sanctioned by any university organization. It wasn’t even held on campus, but at a little park in town. No one gave any speeches, or sang any songs of protest. It arose by word of mouth, and included a number of people (maybe 25 or 30) who had lived in Tri-Towers between 1968 and 1970. It was a large circle of old friends, who had travelled from all over the country, and it was interesting to learn where our paths had led us after that spring afternoon in 1970. Here are some of the things I noticed: A curious number of these folks had ended up marrying the person they were with at the rally on May 4. The great majority of us had careers in the human service sector. Few, if any, worked in the corporate or government areas. Many owned their own small businesses or worked as subcontractors of some sort. I don’t believe that anyone there had really undergone any polar reversal of their former political views. No investment bankers. No Wall Street types. No political aspirants. It is my belief that those of us who “survived” Kent will rarely put our faith in a large organizational structure of any kind. We largely see ourselves as working around the system, but not in the system. We’re very skeptical of anything we read in the newspaper. We believe in a power structure which works from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Maybe we were just always the sort of people who didn’t want to take orders from anyone. Maybe we got that way in college. Maybe we got that way after seeing the results of the “from-the-top-down” style in the Ohio National Guard in May 1970. For me, I’ll never be able to “make sense” of these events. Not Kent State. Not Vietnam. Not the Cultural Revolution in China, or the Cold War here in the West. There simply is no sense to be made! It’s not a political issue. It’s a humanitarian one. I mourn the deaths of Jeff and Sandy, who I knew, and William and Alison, who I didn’t know. And of those who perished in Vietnam as well. How could you not mourn the deaths of so many who died so young? For me, I’ve decided that all I can manage is to try and make sense of my own life; to find a way of living (and making a living) which is life-affirming, and to try not to be part of the senselessness. I suspect that many of the people who lived through Kent State feel somewhat the same. Rolly Brown New Hope PA March, 2000
Posted on: Sat, 03 May 2014 20:13:04 +0000
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