Kent State Shootings

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others. The students had been protesting the Nixon administration's announcement, four days earlier, that U.S. forces had invaded Cambodia — an expansion of the Vietnam War that shattered whatever trust remained between the antiwar movement and the government that was conducting the war. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds. Two of the four killed were not protesting at all; they were walking between classes.

The photographs taken that day — particularly John Filo's Pulitzer-winning image of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller — circulated around the world within hours and became the definitive image of American political violence against its own citizens. Campuses across the country erupted. More than 450 universities went on strike or closed. Nixon's public response — suggesting that violence was an inevitable consequence of student protest — added presidential contempt to the trauma. The shootings accelerated the decline of public support for the Vietnam War and deepened the cultural fracture between Americans who saw the Guard as restoring order and those who saw it as committing murder.

No guardsman was ever convicted of a crime. A federal grand jury indicted eight guardsmen in 1974; the charges were dismissed on procedural grounds. A civil settlement was reached in 1979 in which the state paid $675,000 to the victims and their families and issued a statement of regret. The four killed — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder — were 19 and 20 years old. The site at Kent State is now a National Historic Landmark, and the university holds an annual memorial. The question of who was responsible has never been legally answered.