Editorial: Kent State shooting should teach lessons for dealing with protesters
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The students were upset. They wanted to be heard. They were emphatic that the university listen to their demands. They were opposed to a war half a world away and wanted to do something.
And then people died.
In May 1970, U.S. college campuses were rife with protests regarding the war in Vietnam, the draft of young American men to fight in it and the participation of universities in related activities.
For many, those protests were summarized in one image: the picture of a young girl, a shocked cry frozen on her face, kneeling over the body of a dead protester after National Guard troops opened fire on a demonstration at Kent State University. The picture was taken by Natrona Heights native John Filo, a Kent State student who had worked summers as a Valley News Dispatch intern.
The question today is what have we learned in the decades since that picture was taken?
Today, the nation’s colleges are similarly taken with protests over foreign conflict. This time it is the Israel-Hamas war. It began with an atrocity committed in October in Israel by the militant Hamas organization that governs Palestinian Gaza. That has been countered by months of bombing and siege of Gaza by Israel, to the point of famine. About 35,000 have been killed on both sides — mostly civilians, many women and children.
In New York, Columbia University students have camped out, demanding their school divest from Israeli support, including a Tel Aviv campus. Other events are happening at schools including Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., not far from the White House; the University of Chicago; Yale; and more.
Among these is an encampment in Schenley Plaza near the University of Pittsburgh. The Pitt protest has been comparatively tame. Two people, including one student, were arrested Sunday.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., said last week that “lawless” activities in the protests needed to be quelled, including the possibility of calling in the National Guard. His comments were countered by senators from both parties in Sunday news show appearances.
Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said “maybe you just call the police.” Many of the protests have had a police presence, including at Columbia and Yale, where dozens were arrested.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was more pointed, recounting the May 1970 lesson of Kent State, where four students died and nine more were injured.
“I think that would be a very, very bad idea,” he said on “Meet the Press.”
It would be a bad idea. The last thing the country needs — while torn between the inhumane behavior on both sides of a terrible war, as well as the growing specter of antisemitism at home — is a new, digital image of a student struck dead by a soldier on an American campus.
The students need to be heard. They also need to listen. The same can be said of the colleges — and lawmakers and the Biden administration for that matter. There also has to be recognition that refusing to concede points and acknowledge wrongs has gotten Israel and the Palestinians nowhere for decades, so it is unlikely to work on a campus.
Filo’s picture won the Pulitzer Prize for catching the Kent State shooting in amber and preserving it as something we cannot ignore. Now is the time for leaders to prove they learned that lesson.