Seen through the prism of today’s pandemic, the anti-war student demonstrations that erupted 50 years ago today do not seem as significant as they seemed at the time. But the fact that the National Guard killed four students at Kent State was stunning. How had we reached the point that students were being gunned down on our campuses?
I was a freshman at Michigan State University. Curiously, May 1, 1970 also was a Friday. The following is an excerpt from my quasi-memoir, The Global Curmudgeon:
Starting in the winter semester of my freshman year (it was a three-semester system), I got an internship on the State News, the student newspaper with a daily circulation of 40,000. I did things like going to get coffee in the rain for the top editors or running stories over to the pre-press shop where the stories were laid out on a board. We used offset printing technology.
I began looking around at the things that were happening on campus and what the newspaper was covering. I noticed a great deal of anti-war activity—meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and anti-ROTC gatherings, for example. (The Reserve Officers Training Corps trained students how to become soldiers after they graduated.) There were so many threads of the whole anti-war movement including women’s rights and African-America rights. They were all wrapped together. Having filed for Conscientious Objector status, I obviously was against the war. But I tried to maintain critical distance.
Incredibly, the newspaper was not really covering these issues. It’s an age-old problem in news organizations, as I would discover later in life: they are set up as bureaucracies with different desks and different beats. They often are slow to respond to issues or stories that challenge the bureaucracy because that is uncomfortable and forces difficult decisions about turf and personnel and budgets. (I like to think that I’ve been able to do this my whole career—spot a story or an issue that news organization bureaucracies are slow to respond to.)
By spring semester, I was a full-time reporter and I kept on covering the same types of things. There was a People’s Park on campus where a lot of pot was getting smoked and LSD getting dropped. A lot of people were sleeping in tents. There was incredible ferment.
On May 1, a Friday night, I was at the International Center where students were protesting. President Nixon had just expanded the war by invading Cambodia. The presence of ROTC on campus was thus a hot issue. The International Center was a scene of chaos because nobody was in charge and there were competing agendas. Some people thought the major emphasis should be on women’s rights, others on African-American rights. But the anti-war voices seemed to be the most persistent.
Hundreds of people were there, but no other reporters from the State News. Speaker after speaker got up and spoke passionately about the issues. Finally, one young man got up and said, “Like my back’s up against the wall. I’m tired of not doing anything. I want to do something. I wanna go out into those streets.”
That’s how incoherent it all was. But people streamed out and took to the streets. I went with them. They broke into different groups. I was with one group on Grand River Avenue, which formed the northern border of campus, when police fired tear gas at us. That was my first taste of tear gas.
I was with another group at the Administration Building, which had a great deal of glass—glass doors, glass windows, etc. Here I found something curious—young men were ripping up stanchions that held chains (protecting patches of grass in the plaza in front of the building) to try to smash in the glass doors of the Administration Building. I didn’t understand how trashing the building was going to have any impact on the issues we all were talking about. There seems to be a fringe of violent, destructive people everywhere who take advantage of protests and movements.
I wrote up a detailed blow-by-blow report and presented it to George Bullard, the editor of the paper, on Sunday. It was in the style of “First I saw this, then I saw that.” We had to get ready for Monday’s newspaper.
He read it and came out of his office to the main newsroom and said to me, in front of others, “This isn’t what I want. I don’t care where you went and exactly what you saw. What does it mean? What does the Administration have to say? Put this in context.”
It was one of the best lessons I ever learned in journalism. I did what he asked of me and my byline, and only my byline, was bannered on the front page of the paper the next morning, Monday May 4. It was the same day that the National Guard killed four students at Kent State University in nearby Ohio. It seemed like all of America’s campuses were erupting. Student demonstrators were on the cover of Time magazine, which was still very influential, and their protests were prominently displayed in newspapers and other forms of media all across the country. I was completely hooked on the power of journalism.
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