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May 4: What If You Knew Her and Found Her Dead on the Ground?

lawrencebush
May 4, 2014
0Three Jews were among the four students shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on this date in 1970. Two of them, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, were protesting President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia; two other students, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, were bystanders. Nine Kent State students, all unarmed, were wounded. Twenty-nine out of seventy-seven National Guardsmen fired their weapons in a fusillade of sixty-eight rounds. In the days that followed, dozens of synagogues wrote letters of support and consolation to the families of the slain, and protests spread to more than a hundred college campuses. Eleven days after the Kent State killings, fourteen African-American student protesters were shot by city and state police at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi; two students died. “What if you knew her/and found her dead on the ground?/How can you run when you know?/Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own. . ./ Four dead in Ohio” -Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young