Word: kente
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FOUR YEARS AGO Saturday, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. Trouble had been building at the university for about a week, beginning when students set up roadblocks during a strike for admissions of more black students and an end to on-campus ROTC. Ohio governor James J. Rhodes was hard-pressed in his campaign for the Republican nomination to be senator. He was running against a Taft, his administration had run into some financial scandal, and he was pushing "law and order" issues hard, brandishing the National Guard at campus demonstrations like a new, improved...
...National Guard's roughness starting to recede, President Nixon sent American troops into Cambodia. Spiritually, he explained, he was maintaining his "scrupulous" respect for "the neutrality of the Cambodian people." Most Americans didn't know that their planes had been bombing Cambodia for over a year. But some Kent State students got angry enough to burn down their ROTC building, anyway. The next day, about 20 National Guardsmen marching up a hill away from an antiwar demonstration wheeled and fired at the crowds. They said a sniper had started it, but no one else ever found any evidence of that...
...there was that investigation--something not even thought of for most of the other confrontations of the '60s, not even for the Jackson State University killings with which Kent State used to be paired. The continuing fascination with Kent State is comprehensible because Kent State was unique, the only time the forces of order forthrightly killed middle-class white American students in order to stop a challenge to their legitimacy...
...DIFFICULT to see that American liberal protections--the rule of law and civil liberties--don't extend to everyone. That's why Jackson State was less surprising than Kent State, or why no one paid much attention when Justice Douglas tried to stay the bombing of Cambodia so the Supreme Court could rule on it first. If he'd stayed an order to National Guardsmen to shoot down student demonstrators, presumably he'd have been upheld...
Except that Kent State, and reactions to it like those of the state jurymen who exonerated the Guard and indicted the students, suggest that the presumption isn't correct. It suggests that comparatively well-off people, even in the United States, are willing to discard the restraints of law when they think the dissent it makes possible threatens them enough. And that suggests that some radicals' rhetoric was right all along, that you can't divide freedom, that as long as this country's rulers are willing to kill black demonstrators or Cambodian peasants they'll necessarily be willing...