Kent State day of remembrance honours Virginia Tech tragedy of 37 years later

[struggle4progress]

Source: Associated Press

Thomas J. Sheeran, Canadian Press
Published: Friday, May 04, 2007

KENT, Ohio (AP) - Campus tragedies separated by more than a generation linked Kent State and Virginia Tech universities Friday, as students on the Ohio campus marked the shooting deaths 37 years apart.

A bell on the campus of Kent State - rung each year to mark the Ohio National Guard shooting deaths of four students during anti-war protests on May 4, 1970 - first rang out 32 times to honour victims slain April 16 at Virginia Tech by a rampaging gunman.

"I choked up. It's an emotional thing," said senior Sarah Lund-Goldstein, who is part of the campus group that organized the commemoration. "We feel it's very important to understand that a grieving campus is not just one from 37 years ago."

The ceremony came days after a survivor of the Kent State shootings, Alan Canfora, claimed that an analysis of static-filled audio from the 1970 campus shootings disclosed a military order to open fire. It has long been a mystery what prompted the 13 seconds of gunfire. ~snip~



Read more: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=5f963066-0a46-4606-86bc-03ce7ff8b7d7&k=13894

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Kent State marks 37th anniversary of shootings
Posted by Terry Oblander May 04, 2007 11:24AM

~snip~ Kent -- On the 37th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, the campus air is filled with talk about war. But not the Vietnam War, the backdrop for the 1970 confrontation between students and Ohio National Guardsmen.

This time, the talk is about Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker for a noon commemoration rally in commons area of the campus in front of Taylor Hall.

On Thursday night, former students from the 1970s delivered anti-Iraq War sermons to current students. Mary Ann Vecchio, the 14-year-old runaway girl featured in the famous 1970 photo, talked how the shootings destroyed her life.

http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2007/05/kent_state_marks_37th_annivers.html


Activist Hayden speaks at KSU
By Dave O'Brien
Record-Courier staff writer

~snip~ Speaking briefly about the effect the May 4, 1970 shootings had on him as a student and activist, <Tom> Hayden "co-founder of the 1960s protest movement Students for a Democratic Society and later 18-year member of the California legislature" said the lessons of the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement can be applied to today's Iraq War protests.

Hayden said he felt "something in the air not of our making" on May 1, 1970 as he and 25,000 others protested Vietnam and the incarceration of Black Panther Bobby Seale on the Yale University green in New Haven, Conn.
Surrounded by armed troops and thousands of like-minded people, Hayden said he became "the voice of a national student strike ... a genuinely spontaneous, fervent uprising from below of the privileged and protected sectors of our many campuses." ~snip~

Students of the 1960s "had to revolt on behalf of a more-relevant education," Hayden said. But with African-American, Latino, women's and lesbian and gay studies classes now offered on campuses across the nation and increased rights for all Americans, "what was on the outside has blended in."
Hayden said society needs to remember the history and lessons of the 1960s and the Vietnam War era in order to survive the Iraq War and the War on Terror.

"Whenever self-induced or the controlled amnesia of the military-industrial-entertainment complex strangles the memory, it threatens democracy and peace," he said. "To expect the media to tell our story is going too far. We have to tell our story." ~snip~

http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/1955251


Cindy Sheehan urges KSU crowd to 'a new revolution'
By Jim Carney
Beacon Journal staff writer

~snip~ ``I wish college students cared enough about what's going on in Iraq and our country to be as committed as the students were in 1970,'' Sheehan said in an interview an hour before she was to address a crowd at Kent State University on the 37th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.

Sheehan, 49, whose son Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq in 2004, said she does not wish for any protest to become violent, but she said, ``I think we need a new revolution.'' ~snip~

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/17179156.htm


Assessor remembers Kent St. shootings
By KAREN KELLER
HERALD NEWS

CLIFTON -- Early in the evening the week before May 4, 1970, Jack Whiting's buddy had a favor to ask: He needed someone to walk his girlfriend to the library. ~snip~

"All of a sudden, everybody was screaming and running," said Whiting, the city tax assessor since 1971.

Whiting turned in horror to find Ohio National Guardsmen charging at him and other students with bayonettes mounted.

He pushed his buddy's girl through a first-floor window of the library, then ran for his life. He made it around the building to the front entrance and ducked inside. He and the girl waited for a good hour, until it was quiet outside. ~snip~

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkzNTcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTcxMjc4MTgmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkz


Why four died in Ohio: Governor Rhodes and his relationship with the FBI
May 4, 2007
Bob Fitrakis

Ten days after Governor James A. Rhodes assumed office on January 14, 1963, a Cincinnati FBI agent wrote Director J. Edgar Hoover a memo stating: "At this moment he is busier than a one-armed paper hanger . . . . Consequently, I do not plan to establish contact with him for a few months. We will have no problem with him whatsoever. He is completely controlled by an SAC contact, and we have full assurances that anything we need will be made available promptly. Our experience proves this assertion."

Why would the FBI assert that the newly-inaugurated governor of Ohio is "completely controlled"? Media sources like Life magazine noted the governor’s alleged ties to organized crime and the Mafia in specific. Gov. Rhodes’ FBI file, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that it may be because of the FBI’s extensive knowledge of Rhodes’ involvement in the numbers rackets in the late 1930’s that the Bureau could count on his cooperation.

FBI declassified material suggests that the Bureau’s extensive influence over Governor Rhodes, perhaps due to their knowledge of his ties to the numbers rackets, may have played a role in the Governor’s hard line law and order tactics that led to the deaths of four students at Kent State in 1970.

A November 19, 1963 FBI memo, again from a Cincinnati agent to Director Hoover, outlines specific allegations from a Bureau’s confidential informant about Rhodes’ involvement in the numbers racket between 1936-38. The informant, a bagman for local organized crime, gave detailed information about pick ups at a cigar store located between Buttles and Goodale Avenues reportedly owned by Rhodes’ sister. Rhodes purportedly was running the gambling operation. Years ago, a Dispatch reporter told the Free Press that the governor had run a gambling operation in the Short North, called Jimmy’s Place. ~snip~

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2007/1538

[Kolesar]

1. So, the FBI "blackmailed" Gov Rhodes because they had the dirt on his Mafia connections?

:wow:

[Decruiter]

2. I saw Abbie Hoffman speak at Kent when I went there

He gave essentially the same message as Cindy: "You're not doing enough. You're lazy, and kids today don't appear to want to revolt with thousands of their compatriots anymore." Cindy's call for a revolution seems to still resonate with me. Getting shot at means you're winning.

Abbie reminded us that the student activists are the most powerful ones because they have the one thing no other group does -- impatience. They want it NOW.
This is the critical element in forming critical mass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yippie

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. Kent State was not an entirely unique event

The Augusta, Georgia massacre that occurred shortly after it, as well as the Jackson State shootings are barely ever mentioned.

In Augusta, Georgia, Charles Oatman, a retarded minor who weighed only 104 pounds was arrested and put in jail. He was found murdered in his cell, with cigarette burns covering his body and the police apparently had had their fun with him. Officially, the police said he died when he fell off his cot in his jail cell. Over strenuous police objection, the Oatman family ordered an autopsy and it should that he had been beaten to death, almost beyond recognition. The next day, there was a massive demonstration in the Black community and six (6) men were gunned down and killed by the Augusta, Georgia police. All six dead Black men had been shot in the back, while trying to flee the scene after the police had launched tear gas at them.

Also in that same year, 1970, students demonstrated at Jackson State university and two of them were shot down.

I'm not trying to take anything away from the brutal and infamous incident at Kent State. I'm certainly not suggesting we should ever forget it. But it's as though it occurred in isolation, when plenty of brutality was taking place including the police killings over the terrible murder and torture of a minor child Charles Oatman who no one seems to remember.

[struggle4progress]

4. Thank you for remembering

[Kolesar]

5. Was Oatman involved in an antiwar protest?

Or was this more correctly described as a Jim Crow/Night Riders type hate crime?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

7. I don't remember why Charles Oatman was arrested

I don't think it had to do with an anti-war rally. I don't know if you can differentiate between anti-war demonstrations and civil rights demonstrations that were taking place all across the country in the late '60s and early '70s. A lot of demonstrations had activists from both movements as well as from others. They had speakers at these demonstrations representing many causes. The incidents regarding Charles Oatman came at about the time of Kent State and I remember the students at Meritt College in Oakland being completely up-in-arms about the murder and torture of Oatman and the killing of 6 black men who demonstrated against the police the following day. The deaths of 6 black men at a political demonstration went virtually unnoticed in the American media while the killings over the Kent State demonstration grabbed all the headlines. However, I'm proud to say that I was among the hundreds who marched through the city of Oakland where I was then living, in protest of the terrible violence surrounding the torture and murder of Charles Oatman and the 6 black men who demonstrated for civil rights.

[slampoet]

6. Kent State and Virginia Tech have nothing to do with each other.

Mentioning them at the same event is SHAMEFUL.