On the day of May 4, 1970, the campus of Kent State University, Ohio, was turned into a firing range as weary National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four and injuring 10. At the same time John Enos, my father, was a senior at Walsh College (now university) in Canton, Ohio, not far away from the bloodshed.
Joan Enos
I was a senior at the time and my friends and myself were at a party at Kent State. There had been a lot of demonstrations there throughout the past weeks. Most had nothing to do with the war. The school had just voted to increase the tuition, and that led to most of the campus trouble. There was also an uneasy feeling in all of the schools around because of the Teamsters Strike. These truckers had been shooting at cars off of the highway overpasses, so now the National Guard was out and on all of the overpasses.
There was also tension on the Kent State campus itself. It was a very small town (the town of Kent) around a very big school, and some of the residents of the town were mad about vandalism and parties from the campus. (The law in Ohio at the time allowed people from the ages of 19-21 to have lower percentage alcohol beverages and 21 years old and up, to drink normally). Now there was group on campus called the S.D.S., or the Students for a Democratic Society. This was a far left group that now was mad about the tuition hike on top of everything else.
Anyways, the school had just built a brand new library complex in which was housed the R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer's Training Corps) and Kent was one of the only schools left that hadn't thrown the R.O.T.C. off campus. So while I was there, the S.D.S. tried to burn down the library with a series of small fires, and when the Fire Department tried to put out the fires, they (the S.D.S.) cut the hoses.
Sometime during the night after I had left, the police and fire chief called in the National Guardsmen off of the overpasses and into the Kent campus. The next day when they (the National Guard) were following this demonstration, they were very tired, and all of a sudden they found themselves trapped between an upsloping area and a building, so they got scared, turned, and fired.
When I woke up during the next day, my campus was crawling with police cars. Not only was the main campus where I had been the night before so close, but there was a satellite campus of Kent right down the street from us. When I heard what had happened, I remembered the discussion that some people were having when they heard that they were calling in the Guard. They said, "yah, but they're only using blanks."
I was a senior and we only had a week left of classes. The administration said it was up to us whether or not the school would close, but if they did, they wouldn't reopen till September and all of the seniors would have to come back then. So we decided to stay. The police presence also stayed until graduation.
I felt shocked and a little scared. I was student teaching at the time, and I couldn't believe the attitude of my co-workers. It was repeatedly said, "They should have shot more of them."
Even though I wasn't directly effected by the incident, I somehow knew I would never be the same.
John Enos
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