54 Years Since 'Four Dead In Ohio,' Now Armed Police And Military Are Again On Campuses In America

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

It is rarely a good idea to deploy soldiers to college campuses. This is so even (or perhaps especially) if those soldiers are wearing state police uniforms instead of combat fatigues. We should know this from the infamous example of the Kent State massacre , in which four students were killed in 1970 for protesting the slaughter in Vietnam. Their names and legacies have become dimmer with the passage of time, but here they are:

Alison Krause, age 19

Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20

Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20

William Knox Schroeder, age 19

We’re finally on our own

It seems authoritarians are incapable of learning from history. So once again, troops are being deployed to college campuses all over the country to address the growing menace of anti-war protests. Here in corn country, at least 33 students and three faculty members at Indiana University have been arrested as of this writing. Many of them have been banned from campus for “trespassing” at their own public institution. GOP ghouls are desperate to send the National Guard. It’s like 1970 all over again.

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

And two more at Jackson State College in Mississippi, just ten days after Kent State:

Lafayette Gibbs, age 21

James Earl Green, age 17

Forty years later, one of the Jackson protesters explained why they were there:

Young Black males were being sent to Southeast Asia in disproportionate numbers, and we were concerned about that, in addition to the historic racism there in Jackson, Mississippi. So there were several nights of protests. And I was thinking that there would just be some taunts and jeers at the law enforcement officials present and thinking nothing would happen, but shortly after midnight, on that third night, early in the morning, May 15, actually, those students were fired upon at Jackson State.

This story is even more lost to history than Kent State, for reasons that should be all too obvious.

Gotta get down to it

Still less known is the massacre of students by police in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1968. Space prohibits listing all 31 victims shot by state police and the National Guard after a week of protests over continued segregation, but three young Black men were killed. Their names are:

Henry Smith, age 18

Samuel Hammond, age 18

Delano Middleton, age 18

Soldiers are cutting us down

This isn’t hyperbole; these are soldiers cutting down college kids. It was the National Guard in Ohio a half century ago. If it’s not the Guard today, it's quasi-military organizations within local and state law enforcement units, made heavy beyond reason with surplus gear from the Pentagon . Most of these state cops have no formal military training, but all the gusto of a GI dropped into a war zone and trained on an indigenous enemy. 40 officers fired hundreds of rounds in Jackson. There were tanks on the ground at Orangeburg. Now they’ve got batons in the chests of twentysomethings and snipers on the rooftops at the Crossroads of America .

Should have been done long ago

So far as I can tell, there have been no killings of protesters on an American college campus since Jackson. One might be led to believe that police have gotten better about responding to peaceful protests. It may be more accurate to say that campuses, with the help of courts, legislatures, and other power structures, have gotten better at suppressing them. It may also be accurate to say that the latter half of the twentieth century taught students, and the working class in general, to stay in their places. If you think there's a better-than-average chance you'll get shot at school for protesting a foreign war, you might stay home. Your mom might beg you not to go. Even your professors might encourage you to forcrissakeshut up .

On second thought, maybe authoritarians do learn from history.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground

As we see more protests, we will see more state violence. Soldiers are still willing to build pressure cookers around protesters and shoot them when the boiling starts. At least two people were killed by brute squads during Breonna Taylor Summer. Their names were:

David McAtee, age 53

Sean Monterrosa, age 22

The fact that death hasn’t happened recently on a university campus is a happy accident, but it is inevitable if militarized response to protests continues. That’s what the soldiers are there for.

How can you run when you know?