Cost of Freedom , livre ebook

The Cost of Freedom
The Cost of Freedom
Voicing a Movement after Kent State 1970

EDITED BY SUSAN J. ERENRICH

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2020 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-60635-401-8 Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Foreword by Kenneth Hammond
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: MEMORIES
Anniversary, May 4, 1988
Piece by Elaine Holstein
A Tribute to Arthur Krause: Delivered at Kent State University, May 4, 1989
Speech by Kendra Lee Hicks Pacifico
May 4, 2000, Commemorative Program Speech
Speech by Barry Levine
PART II: PHOTOGRAPHS OF MAY 4, 1970
Guardsmen Beginning Advance on the Commons
Photo by Chuck Ayers
Guardsmen Throwing Tear Gas
Photo by KSU News Service
Prentice Hall Parking Lot
Photo by KSU News Service
Four Students Killed by the Ohio National Guard
Photo by KSU News Service
PART III: EARLIER ACTIVISM BEFORE MAY 4, 1970
Thy Tears Might Cease
Piece by Anthony Walsh
Save the Pooch
Piece by Robert Stamps
PART IV: THE SHOOTINGS: MAY 4, 1970
It’s Alright, Ma, I’m Only Dying: An Eyewitness Report from Kent State
Piece by Constance Nowakowski
A Reminiscence Thirty Years Later
Piece by Rolly Brown
A Short Reflection
Piece by Curtis Lee Pittman (Jeter)
PART V: RESPONSES NEAR AND FAR
The Battle of Washington
Piece by Tom Riddle
A Very Young Activist
Piece by Patricia Moseley
May 1970: North and South, Mountains and Deserts—and Blood
Piece by John Hunter Gray
PART VI: HALLOWED GROUND
Kent State: Destruction of Civil Liberties
Piece by William G. Arthrell
Where Were You on May 4, 1970?
Piece by James Huebner
PART VII: LEGAL MANEUVERING AND THE COURTS
The Ruse of the Kent 25 Indictments
Piece by Roseann “Chic” Canfora
May 4, 1988, Speech
Speech by William Moses Kunstler
The Big Chill: The Stifling Effect of the Official Response to the Kent State Killings
Piece by William Whitaker
Eulogy for Galen Keller Lewis
Delivered by Rev. Barbara Child
The Kent State Shootings after Nearly 50 Years: One Lawyer’s Remembrance
Piece by Sanford Jay Rosen
PART VIII: TESTIMONIALS BY SOME OF THE WOUNDED STUDENTS
My Life Was Forever Changed
Piece by Dean Kahler
Speech on May 4, 1984
Speech by Tom Grace
May 4 Recollections
Piece by John Cleary
Russell and Me: Surviving Kent State
Piece by Joseph Lewis
PART IX: TROUBADOURS OF CONSCIENCE
The Kent State Massacre
Piece and Song by Barbara Dane
Twenty Years Later
Piece and Song by Holly Near
Kent
Song by Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino (Magpie)
An Eyewitness Recollection Thirty Years after the Shootings
Piece by Terry Leonino
You Carried Us: For Professor Glenn W. Frank (1928–93)
Song by Greg Artzner and Terry Leonino (Magpie)
PART X: ANNUAL RITUALS AND HISTORIC MARKERS
The Candlelight Walk and Vigil
Piece by Jerry M. Lewis
Parking Lot Dedication Remarks
Piece by Carole A. Barbato
Preserving the Site and Story of the May 4, 1970, Kent State Shootings
Piece by Laura L. Davis
PART XI: LASTING LEGACIES
Why Is It So Cold in Northern Ohio?
Piece by Mark Rudd
The Greater Kent State Era, 1968–70: Personal Transformations and Legacies of Student Rebellions and State Repression
Piece by Darlene Clark Hine
Simple Themes and Complex Realities in the Spring of 1970
Piece by Tom Dietz
Message from a May 4 Baby: (P)reflections on the Fiftieth Commemoration of May 4, 1970
Piece by Idris Kabir Syed
Appendix: May 4, 1970, the Struggle for History and the Internet
Piece by Michael Pacifico
Index
Foreword
Find the Cost of Freedom
KENNETH HAMMOND
Kenneth Hammond attended Kent State University beginning in fall 1967. He joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1968 and wrote the SDS weekly column in the Daily Kent Stater through spring 1969. In May 1970, he took part in the demonstrations at Kent and was one of the Kent 25 indicted by the Ohio grand jury. He teaches history at New Mexico State University.
While growing up in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s, the town of Kent and Kent State University were part of my consciousness. My father liked to take us for Sunday drives, which often had as their turnaround point a late lunch or early dinner at the Robin Hood Inn in Kent, at the corner of Main and Depeyster, right across from the university’s Prentice Gate. When I was in high school, taking part in the annual science fair, the regional competitions were held in the old gym at Kent State University, so I became familiar with the rolling hills and ivy-covered halls of the campus. When the time came for college, I had aspirations to go to schools in Washington, DC, or in upstate New York, but like many families, mine could not afford the high tuition costs, so I made my way once more down the thirtyfive miles to Kent State to begin classes in the fall of 1967.
I entered Kent State with an already active interest in politics. I had spent the summer between high school graduation and the beginning of the fall semester volunteering for the campaign of Carl Stokes, who became the first black mayor of a northern city with his election to mayor of Cleveland that November. I was also very much aware of the war in Vietnam, where my older brother was flying missions off the USS Yorktown in the South China Sea. I had grown up in a home where political affairs were not a common topic of discussion, but some stimulating high school teachers and my own rather scattered and random reading had begun to raise questions in my mind about the ways power and privilege worked in our society. I was raised in a liberal Methodist church and had been drawn into some early activity with civil rights when my high school was desegregated during my senior year. And like many American families in those years, we often had dinner while watching the evening news on TV, which brought images of war, urban unrest, protests, and demonstrations from across our country and in other parts of the world into our living room. Arriving at Kent State, I was eager to begin my studies and found the freedom of college life exciting and energizing.
My freshman year was one of great transition and increasing awareness. Some of this took place in the classrooms at Kent State, where I took courses in political thought and history and began to read more critically and systematically. But much more was the result of encounters with other students, many of whom would become comrades in the radical movement at KSU over the next few years. Conversations about Vietnam, racism, poverty, police violence, and the connections between the many issues facing our country and the world were amazingly stimulating. I became aware of the weekly vigils of Kent State’s Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which were held outside the old Student Center on Wednesdays at noon, and by the spring of 1968, I had stepped across the divide and joined those who were silently protesting. I began to read Marx and other radical thinkers, and to search for the connections between the ideas and experiences I read about, and the things I observed in the world and the community around me.
In March 1968 I saw a poster announcing a meeting to form a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Kent State. I went to the meeting and was swept into the rising storm of activism that was coming to KSU. SDS became the focus of my life for the next year and a half as I consolidated my ideas about politics and economics and became dedicated to the radical transformation of American society and the wider world. The friendships and bonds of support and loyalty forged in SDS would be sorely tested in the struggles ahead, but we were a community of radical activists sharing a vision of a just and equitable world, to the creation of which we dedicated ourselves. This dedication was shared with other activists outside SDS as well, as the accounts included in part III of this book recall.
From the fall of 1968 through the spring of 1969 the movement at Kent State increased dramatically. Weekly SDS meetings regularly drew the attendance of two hundred or more students. We held rallies, showed films, hosted speakers, and took part in marches and demonstrations both on campus and in the community. By the spring of 1969 rallies often had a thousand or more participating students. A set of demands, designed to highlight the links between the university and the injustices and exploitation in the wider society, were developed and presented to the administration. Confrontations took place between protesting students and university authorities. In April, at the Music and Speech building, students protesting against repressive disciplinary hearings were trapped and had nowhere to escape the police, so they were arrested in a crackdown, which resulted in SDS losing its campus charter; fifty-nine students faced charges of trespassing, and a few were arrested on more serious counts.
In the wake of the repression of SDS at Kent State, the national organization self-destructed in June. Theoretical divisions over the nature of the political situation in the country and the proper strategic and tactical way forward led to the collapse of SDS and to a reduction in radical activism at Kent. The antiwar movement was growing, with hundreds of thousands of people marching in the great semiannual demonstrations in Washington. Militants of the Black Panther Party were struggling against racist police in cities across the country. But at Kent State many young people chose to step back f