Before the shooting
What was your perspective of the war while you were attending Kent State University prior to the incident?
My personal perspective was, I was not anti-war but I did not want to participate in the war. So, just a little bit of discontinuity, but there were a number of people throughout the country who were anti-war and it was a growing movement. But Kent was a very conservative school for the most part and there was not a large amount of anti-war people who were at Kent State at the time, in May of 1970.
What was the national sentiment during this time?
Nationally, the protest movements were growing. You saw a protest movement growing in the early 60′s, primarily focused on Civil Rights and Free Speech. There was a Free Speech movement in the mid-60′s at Berkeley. Also in the mid-60′s, at about ’64-’65, they put ground troops into Vietnam so you had the beginnings of anti-war movement in Vietnam. You saw Students for Democratic Society (SDS), the Underground Weatherman, and a number of national protest organizations start to grow and they were taking root in a number of universities. University of Michigan, where the SDS was formed, was a bit of a hotbed for protest movements. Some of the larger universities like Berkeley, Stanford, University of Texas, and even Ohio State, but not Kent State. So you had a growing national movement but when an organization that had some 200 chapters, such as the SDS, tried to form at Kent State they weren’t successful. They had a couple demonstrations there and they ended up having more anti-SDS people at the demonstration than they did people supporting them.