I'm heading to Kent State University this weekend. It amazes me that it was five years ago today, on the 40th anniversary, that I initially posted the first episode of this 19 part series (still incomplete!) on the greatest campus explosion this country has ever seen. It is an attempt to reclaim that remarkable upsurge, today mainly remembered for the May 4 murders of four Kent State students by the National Guard, from the great American memory hole.
If you can't wait to read (or reread) the whole thing day by day, it's chainlinked, with illustrations, over at Fire on the Mountain.
MAY '70: 1. FINALLY ON OUR OWN...
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own...
Forty-five years ago, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."
Nixon's announcement kicked off the most intense wave of campus struggle this country has ever seen, a month of bitter and exhilarating clashes which triggered huge changes that echo to this day. May, 1970 also changed forever the lives of some significant number of the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of students and others who took part.