Four Dead in Ohio

The Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970, were the deadly climax of several days of escalating confrontation over the Vietnam War, the draft, and President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia.

By 1970, the Vietnam War had already dragged on for years, costing tens of thousands of American lives and deeply polarizing the country. College campuses were especially volatile, as students protested the draft, rising casualty figures, and the perception that the government was misleading the public about the war’s progress.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he promised “peace with honor,” but many young Americans believed his policies were prolonging and even widening the conflict. The administration’s rhetoric about “silent majorities” and “bums” on campuses sharpened generational and political divides, feeding anger among student activists and suspicion among many older Americans.

On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were moving into Cambodia, ostensibly to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases across the border. To millions of antiwar Americans, this felt like a blatant expansion of a war they already opposed, and protests erupted at colleges and universities across the country the very next day.

Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, was a mid‑sized public campus with an active but not uniquely radical antiwar movement. On Friday, May 1, students held a rally on the campus Commons to protest the Cambodian incursion and to announce another rally for noon on Monday, May 4.

That Friday night, a combination of factors: warm weather, drinking, and tensions about the war, helped turn downtown Kent restless. Crowds, including some students and non‑students, broke windows, damaged property, and confronted police; authorities later pointed to the presence of an out‑of‑town motorcycle group and rumors of radical “outside agitators” to justify a tougher response.

On Saturday, May 2, city officials, already alarmed by the previous evening, met with a representative of the Ohio National Guard. That night, an ROTC building on campus was set on fire and burned to the ground while a crowd looked on, and fire hoses were cut as firefighters tried to respond. No one was ever definitively identified as the arsonist, but the blaze cemented the view among state and local officials that Kent State was out of control and needed military intervention.

Governor James Rhodes ordered the Ohio National Guard into Kent that weekend, deploying troops who had just been used to deal with a truckers’ strike. On Sunday, May 3, Rhodes held a fiery press conference in which he denounced campus protesters as the worst sort of “revolutionaries” and strongly implied that he would seek a state of emergency, language that led many officials to assume the Guard was now in charge and that further rallies were banned.

The university administration, under pressure from state and local authorities, printed and distributed around 12,000 leaflets on Monday morning announcing that all rallies, including the previously scheduled noon rally on the Commons, were prohibited. Despite the ban, students began to gather around midday, some specifically to protest, others out of curiosity between classes.

The Guard and campus officials saw the rally as illegal and ordered the crowd to disperse. When students did not immediately leave, Guard units advanced, using tear gas to try to break up the assembly on the grassy Commons, but shifting winds, distance, and student resolve meant many remained.

Over the next several minutes, a cat‑and‑mouse pattern developed: students moved, shouted, and in some cases threw rocks or tear gas canisters back; Guard troops maneuvered up and around a practice athletic field, wearing gas masks and carrying loaded M1 rifles. The lines of soldiers and clusters of students became increasingly intermingled across a broad area, setting up a chaotic, tense situation on a campus that had never seen anything like this level of armed presence before.

Shortly after noon, a group of about 70 Guardsmen, some kneeling and some standing, moved up a hill commonly known as Blanket Hill and then turned toward a parking lot and a broad open area near Taylor Hall. Without warning to most students watching, a portion of the Guard unit suddenly turned and fired their weapons toward the students and the area beyond.

In roughly 13 seconds, the Guardsmen fired 67 rounds. Four unarmed students were killed: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra (Sandy) Scheuer, and William (Bill) Schroeder. Nine others were wounded, including Dean Kahler, who was shot in the back and permanently paralyzed from the chest down.

Some of the students who were hit had been actively protesting, while others were simply walking to or from class, watching from a distance. Two of those killed, Scheuer and Schroeder, were more than 300 feet away from the nearest Guardsman, illustrating how far the bullets traveled beyond the immediate line of confrontation.

When the firing stopped, the Commons and the hilltop were filled with injured students, shocked witnesses, and troops trying to regroup. Ambulances rushed to the scene, and a screaming convoy of vehicles carried the dead and wounded to the local hospital while faculty members and remaining students tried to calm the situation and prevent further bloodshed.​

Within minutes, faculty marshals and student leaders worked to avert more violence, forming lines between soldiers and students and urging everyone to leave the area. Many students were in a state of shock, disbelief, and fury that the Guard had opened fire on an American campus, a reaction mirrored in countless living rooms as photographs and footage quickly circulated.

Kent State’s president, Robert White, ordered the university closed that day, and Portage County officials soon obtained a court injunction shutting the campus indefinitely. Classes did not resume in person until the summer; faculty hastily arranged mail‑based assignments and off‑campus meetings so students could complete the semester.​

Even before the details were fully understood, authorities and some media outlets began circulating claims that Guardsmen had faced a sniper, that students were heavily armed, or that protesters were charging the troops—narratives that later investigations found to be false or grossly exaggerated. Those early claims, and the way they were reported, shaped initial public opinion and hardened divisions about who was to blame.

News of the shootings sparked immediate national outrage in many quarters and grim approval in others. For antiwar activists and many students, Kent State became a symbol of state violence against dissent, proof that the government was willing to kill its own young citizens rather than change course in Vietnam.

Within days, a massive student strike swept the country. The Kent State Massacre (as many called it) triggered protests, sit‑ins, and building occupations at hundreds of colleges and universities; more than 400 campuses experienced significant disruptions, and many temporarily shut down.

The shootings also inspired a powerful cultural response. Most famously, Neil Young wrote “Ohio” for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, capturing the anger and grief with lines like “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” helping fix May 4, 1970, in the nation’s collective memory as a searing moment of the era. Photographs from Kent, especially the image of a young woman kneeling and screaming over Jeffrey Miller’s body, became enduring icons of the antiwar movement.

Yet a substantial portion of the public either defended or rationalized the Guard’s actions, seeing student protesters as dangerous radicals. Polls at the time showed many Americans blaming the students more than the soldiers, a split that reflected the broader cultural “generation gap” and the “law and order” politics of the period.

Multiple investigations followed, at the local, state, and federal levels, but they reached different, and often conflicting, conclusions. A special state grand jury in Portage County assigned primary blame to Kent State’s administration, accusing it of lax discipline and failure to control “troublemakers,” while essentially exonerating the Guard and indicting 25 students and faculty members.

The U.S. Justice Department eventually convened a federal grand jury, which acknowledged that both Guardsmen and students had broken some laws but did not pursue murder charges against the soldiers. Later, eight Guardsmen were charged in federal court with violating the civil rights of the students by using excessive force.

Those criminal charges collapsed when a federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that prosecutors had not shown that the Guardsmen intended to deprive the victims of their civil rights.