Monday, May 4 will be the 50th anniversary of the anti-war demonstration on the campus of Kent State University in which four students died when they were shot by Ohio National Guardsmen. An elaborate commemoration of the anniversary was planned around 2020 graduation events, but graduation has been canceled -for the first time since the shooting in 1970. The school is just now coming to terms with its place in history, as the polarized views of the shooting have matured somewhat.
The Kent State shooting remains a watershed moment in American history. It sparked a nationwide student strike shortly thereafter and reverberated throughout the final years of the Vietnam War and the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18. Folk rockers Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young quickly released a song about the shootings. The incident was also regarded as a seminal moment in the founding of the band Devo—many of whom were from the area; founding member Jerry Casale was in the crowd during the shootings.
But for decades afterward, both the university and the town of Kent had a complicated relationship with the event. Civil and criminal cases resulting from the shootings wound their way through the courts in the ’70s, and the university sponsored commemorations for the first five years after the shootings but stopped—and then built a gym on part of the parking lot where students were wounded and killed. The university commissioned a sculpture by pop artist George Segal, then refused to display his creation, “Abraham and Isaac.” (It’s now at Princeton University.) The school even tried to rebrand itself as “Kent” because the next word in many people’s minds after “Kent State” was “shootings.”
Read how history -and Kent State University- has dealt with the fallout and changing attitudes toward the shooting that thrust the campus into the national consciousness at Smithsonian.