Honoring Spirit of Kent, Jackson State

April was a month for anniversaries.

It has wrung us out emotionally: the 40-year-old scars of imminent victory, Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of Germany, and the fresh wounds that President Reagan’s planned Bitburg cemetery visit opened; the still-raw 10-year-old sores of slow defeat in Vietnam, and the force-feeding of memories many people think we should keep always before us, and others would just as soon forget.

But May, too, has its anniversaries.

At a lunchtime rally 15 years ago, on May 4, 1970, below “Blanket Hill,” a sunny, grassy slope at Kent State University in Ohio, four students were shot to death and nine were wounded by a panicked handful of Ohio National Guardsmen.

And on a balmy evening 10 days later, during a fracas on the predominantly black campus of Jackson State, in Mississippi, a college student and a high school youth were killed by a skittish group of Highway Patrolmen, whose bullets also wounded a score of others.

There was a time when the admonitory phrase, “No more Kent States,” was heard around the country as often as “No more Vietnams” is now. In the recent rush to make unarguably overdue amends to the veterans--”Forget the War, Not the Warriors” is the slogan on a best-selling T-shirt advertised in a Vietnam vets magazine--we cannot afford to push aside the memory of the home-front casualties.

I went to both last month--Kent and Jackson--as I traveled the country for The Times’ Vietnam retrospective. For the young people nonchalantly going to class in those places, the 15-year anniversaries are scars that never felt a wound. For those old enough to remember, though, Kent State, in particular, eclipsed the Vietnam War; it became the Vietnam War in microcosm, right next door.

Town ‘Under Siege’

In the weekend before the Kent shootings, students suffering spring fever and students protesting U.S. presence in Cambodia somehow came together, racketing through town, making a lot of noise and breaking a lot of windows. The townsfolk felt “under siege,” and Kent pharmacist Jim Myers, reflecting on that weekend, said he remembers “welcoming the National Guard, thinking ‘Thank God, they’re here.’ ”

That weekend, like Vietnam, the helicopters crisscrossed the skies of Kent, and like Vietnam, people went about fearfully, not knowing who was the “enemy” and who was not, a little Midwestern town, says Myers, “that suddenly was not your own.”

And on Monday, when students showed up for a campus anti-war rally that someone had decided to rule an “illegal assembly,” the tensions spilled over: Tear gas provoked some badly aimed rock-throwing, and that provoked unauthorized gunfire from nervous local Guardsmen--some not much older than the students they shot. One dead student had shouted a vulgarity at a guardsman; another was walking to class a long way away. The blood flowed in a parking lot of a Midwestern university, as it was flowing in Vietnam.

Ten days later, it happened again at Jackson, whose rare anti-war rallies had been reassuringly attended by the university president, Dr. John A. Peoples Jr. It was an unlikely campus, in a part of the country where the military is a well-respected career--”a young black second lieutenant was something to behold,” Peoples says. But here, as in Vietnam, there was edginess. And when young “street kids,” not college students, started harassing motorists and setting trash fires, and firemen and lawmen arrived, students began leaving a concert (the gunfire-punctuated “1812 Overture”), a bottle got thrown, the shooting began. And again, the blood flowed.

Lingering Bitterness

Peoples spent the night with his distraught students, singing, praying, talking. “It was not the same intensity as at Kent State,” and eventually, “it tended to bring things together in town.” In Kent, the bitterness was deeper, more lingering; some townspeople said darkly that the guardsmen should not have stopped shooting at four.

There were monuments, of course, set up a full decade sooner than the veterans’ memorial in Washington. The first one, at Kent State, was stolen, and returned defaced. On the marble marker outside Jackson State’s Dixon Hall, the Plexiglas sheets over photos of the dead youths have been smashed.

There were speeches on these campuses, unlikely martyring grounds to big-city activists; Ed Muskie went to Jackson State and found most of the students had gone home, Peoples says. Kent State, which became “one of the stations of the cross” in the anti-war movement according to sociology professor Jerry M. Lewis, drew Sargent Shriver, who noted how glad he was to be “here at Penn State.”

Like Vietnam, no blame was ever really, officially fixed. Grand juries convened and dispersed, lawsuits came and went. Like Vietnam, the willingness to remember faded, even if the memory itself did not. For pharmacist Myers, one of the happiest days of his life came when he told someone where he was from, and the man said, “Kent, where’s that?”

My job last month was to collect people’s feelings and memories. I found I had a few of my own.

I was in high school in May, 1970. I, too, was too young to vote in that era where--to revive the cliche--an 18-year-old could be sent to fight and die in a war he could not vote against until he was 21.

Creating Awareness

I believed in the civil-rights-movement principle, the right to dissent; that when there is no other way, when one is young or poor or disenfranchised, protest can create awareness, and awareness can create change. I believed in all that as surely as I believed in the right to bear arms, a right we practiced on pleasant Sundays after church, shooting the groundhogs that destroyed our corn fields.

And then, on that hot spring afternoon, four students died in an “illegal assembly” on their own campus, and it suddenly seemed that the ugly war that was killing boys in Southeast Asia while we barely noticed had crackled right around the globe and grabbed us all by the throats.

Of course some anti-war elements went too far; someone always does. There is no moral high ground to a bomb set off here to protest bombings over there. But Kent! This was Ohio, for God’s sake, 100 miles north of my hometown, on a campus whose middle-class students were often the first in their entire family to go to college, as I was. These were not the high-profile folks--Jane Fonda, Joan Baez. These were students who felt the war was wrong, just as the campus apartheid protesters do now.

No wonder the anguished slogan sprang up: “Don’t shoot, we are your children.” It could have stood equally well for teen-agers in camouflage as for teen-agers in blue jeans.

Last month, 15 years later, I was there at Kent, stalking in eerie pantomime up Blanket Hill as the guardsmen had done, walking across the parking lot as the students had, taken through the paces by professor Lewis, who has spent much of the past 15 years writing a book and teaching a class to keep May 4 in the realm of fact, not myth.

It was a sad and terrible thing for me to see, a week later, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington the loving notes from a mother to her dead son taped up across his name. It was a sad and terrible thing to read, at a New Mexico Vietnam veterans’ memorial, a letter a dead Marine had left behind in a dresser drawer, telling his family in his young, earnest script that he would always love them and they would all someday meet in a place where there was no hate.

And it was a sad and terrible thing, too, to read a vicious, anti-Semitic letter sent long ago to Arthur and Doris Krause, parents of Allison, one of the Kent State dead. It began by asking, “She felt our war in Cambodia was wrong, but was that any of her business?”

There it is, right there. Was it any of our business--in Vietnam? At Kent State? . . . At Dachau?

Now, everyone says yes, it was; we should have monitored Vietnam, we should have asked questions. Back then, we didn’t. Vietnam did not touch our daily lives like World War II. No one here really had to take a stand, or pitch in to help the war effort. My mother planted oleanders, not a Victory Garden. We saved our pennies for Beatles records, not war bonds.

So perhaps some of us resented the protesters, the people in our own streets, our own living rooms, who made us think about an unthinkable war and confront our own feelings. When the Another Mother for Peace group came along, my mother was shaken: Could apple pie and the flag be far behind? Was it possible we were wrong ?

There are some who say that because we listened to the protesters, more soldiers died, and that that long black wall in Washington is longer than it had to be. There are some who say that if we had listened to them sooner, that long black wall would not be so long as it is.

I felt at Kent State that day what I felt at the Memorial a week later: a sense of gravity, of grief, of intimate loss. Six people on college campuses; 58,000 in Vietnam. They were all casualties of the same war--all victims of the doubts, the fearfulness and divisiveness that were gnawing away at us. Let us be healed of those things, by all means, but let us not forget what made the scar.

At the Memorial, finally, we are beginning to listen. We should listen at Kent, at Jackson, too. We must try to absorb the reproving silence of these shattered places, to learn what lessons the dead can whisper to us when we bother to hear them.