Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: What Happened at Kent State?

Episode Date: September 28, 2019

On May 4, 1970, four days of anti-war protests at Kent State University in Ohio culminated in the unthinkable when Ohio guardsmen opened fire on protesters, killing four students. How could this tragedy take place? Learn more in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen this episode on the history of the Kent State Massacre, a somewhat unknown, surprisingly,

and definitely largely misunderstood moment in American history and kind of a bummer. So prepare, but it's a good one. Enjoy. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, and it's snowing outside, which means it's Stuff You Should Know, snow edition. Snow edition, yeah. I know, and we're like, we gotta record and get out of here because this is Atlanta and snow kills us. I just mainly don't wanna be locked away from the snow. I wanna be able to like look out the window and see it.

I can now, but not as well as I'd like to. For me, it's just a traffic thing. Like people are probably leaving work right now. People have already left the office here. Well, maybe everyone will be gone by the time I get out there. Yeah, okay. You'll just be the lone guy trudging through the snow.

That's right, yeah. Like if you go Mortensen in the road. Yes. Although he was not alone. And there wasn't any snow. No, it was just nuclear ash. Although there was snow because Charlie's there and kills herself by going out into the snow.

But that's before everything really takes a downward turn. Spoiler alert, retroactive spoiler alert. Chuck, are you familiar with Kent State? Yeah, man, I've been singing that Neil Young song all day. How can you not? You cannot by having never heard it like me. Shut up, you know that song. Never heard it.

I never listened to Neil Young. You've never heard the song, Ohio? No, I know the Pretender song, but I don't think that's about Kent State. I'm shocked. Okay. I mean, you don't have to listen to Neil Young without like a...

How's it go, homiform? No, I'm not gonna... Maybe I have heard it. 10 Soldiers and Nixon. Okay, yeah, yeah, I've heard it. I didn't know that was about Ohio. Four Dead in Ohio? Yeah, okay.

I had no idea. All right. I didn't know what that song was about. I was just like, oh, Neil Young. Really? Yeah. Oh man, get ready to hear it. I'm sure.

All right. I'm used to it by now. You're bulletproof. Well, so you're familiar with the Kent State shootings. Sure. May 4th, 1970, four students were killed. I believe another 11 were injured. Yeah, including one was paralyzed,

like some pretty severe injuries. And this was a big deal. Well, that would be a big deal in and of itself if it was just some sort of campus shooting or something like that. Like it'd be a very big deal these days. But what made the Kent State shootings, for those of you who aren't familiar with them,

such an enormous deal, was that the shootings were carried out by National Guardsmen. They were Americans firing on Americans. Americans on one side of the equation, firing on protesters on the other side. And it was one of the darkest points in American history, modern or otherwise.

Yeah, I think what's so upsetting is it was random. It wasn't, that guy's coming at me with a bottle or a brick, shoot him. It was random shooting into a crowd. That's the kind of thing that would happen in countries under dictatorships, not here in America. But it did happen here in America. And not just at Kent State.

There was another similar incident just 10 days later that we'll talk about as well that gets overlooked. But yeah, it was a very dark moment in American history and it came out of the tensions over the Vietnam War initially. But I think it was more than that. It was also, we should say, that's the kind of obvious thing that led to it.

But also there was a real tension also between the establishment and the anti-establishment. And the people in control and the people who weren't in control, students, elders, there was just a lot of tension between two sides and the dividing line, the obvious dividing line was the Vietnam War. Yeah, and I think if you're not of that generation,

you may not know the full story. You might know that four people were shot in a protest and that's about it. Maybe even if you're from that generation, you may not know the full story. But we're about to tell you. Okay. Let's take it back a little further than 1970.

All right, Vietnam, a country which had, when it's independence from France in the 50s. Have you ever seen Weaver Soldiers? Yes. With Mel Gibson? It's almost like a snuff film. It's one of the most graphically violent movies I've ever seen in my life,

but it's about that transition from France leaving Vietnam and America coming in. Yeah. And initially. Go ahead. Well, just initially serving as advisors. Oh, right. And then becoming embroiled in the war.

I forgot all about that movie. Yeah. You know, in Apocalypse Now, there are some deleted scenes of them meeting up with a French family in Vietnam and like having dinner. Really? Yeah, and I remember when I heard about that, I was like, what?

Why were they French? And then I did a little more homework on it. Oh, oh yeah. If you eat Vietnamese food, like it's very clearly like French influenced. Well, most food is, but yeah. Sure. So anyway, in the 50s,

they split between communist North and non-communist South Vietnam and America didn't want communism spreading throughout Asia. No, we had a policy of containment. Yeah. And so Richard Nixon, when he won the 68 election, part of his promise was something called Vietnamization. It's kind of an awkward word.

And that meant to transfer the combat duties from our soldiers to the South Vietnamese. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? It does. But what happened was at some point, he said, you know what, in 1970 in April, he said, I want to send our soldiers into Cambodia. And that caused sort of a firestorm

because it was a bit of a reversal of what he said he was going to do. And it really embroiled us in the middle of things. Well, yeah. He escalated the war in Vietnam, which was already a very contentious issue in that it was a war, but also it was a war that Congress never openly declared

war. So that's why historically speaking, it's referred to as a Vietnam conflict. Right. And so Nixon gets elected partially because he's saying, I'm going to get our boys out of there. We're not going to let the communists win. We're going to prop up the Vietnamese,

but we're going to get out of there and instead he escalates things by invading Cambodia where the Viet Cong were stationed. And that led to immediate protests. That was April 30th, 1970, that he announced that we had invaded Cambodia. And the next day is when the first protest takes place at Kent State.

Yeah, and Kent, the article points out that it was not the most likely place because it was a little more blue collar than like say Ohio State nearby, the Ohio State University. And... Man, I'm sorry. What? That is so stupid.

Sorry, OSU alums and fans and students, but it is stupid. And everyone outside of Ohio State thinks it's stupid. They take a lot of pride in that V. I know, which I think just kind of fans the flames of derision. Yeah.

You know? I can just start saying the University of Georgia. That makes a little more sense. Does it? Yeah. Why was the difference? The Ohio State University. The University of Georgia.

So if it was the University of Ohio State, that would make more sense. Yeah, a little more to my ear. I got you. Your ear, right there. See it? It's very nice. Thank you.

At any rate, Kent State was a little more blue collar and you wouldn't think there would be like protesting, but there was protesting at schools all over the country. There were, and you can read between the lines here. Kent State had a lower hippie population than Ohio State at the time. Yeah, can we just come up right out and say it? Right.

But there were protests there. There was a protest on May 1st and it was a standard war protest. Yeah, three days before the shooting. So it was kind of when things got kicked off. Right, but these kids were still pretty good. They were at school holding a protest in the commons, I believe, which was the,

AKA the quad or like the big grassy area in between in the middle of campus. And they said, you know what? This went pretty well. Let's take the weekend off and we'll meet back here Monday and have another anti-war protest because we're really steamed about this. And everyone said, okay, let's do that.

And for tonight, let's go out and hit the bars in Kent. Yeah. The first one, they buried the constitution as a symbolic gesture. Oh yeah, thank you. And the second one, they got drunk. Right. Not at the protest, but later that night.

Right, so that Friday protest is when they buried the constitution. Yeah. This is like a real protest, not just walking around. There's like stuff going on and like, you know, there's symbolic acts. It was a real protest. Yeah, and if you combine alcohol and protesting,

things might get a little rowdy. So bonfires broke out. They started throwing bottles at police cars, breaking windows. It's really a little rowdy. I mean, that's pretty, that's a riot. When you set like bomb fires in the streets and like throw bottles at police cars

that you have just basically said, we've drawn a line in the same. What are you going to do, cops? That is one way to look at it for sure. The mayor, Leroy Satrum, said, this is an emergency situation people. I need to call the governor, James Rhodes. We need some help.

I'm going to close the bars, which, you know, isn't going to make anyone very happy. No, and it had an exacerbating effect apparently because that meant all the people who weren't rioting in the streets, who were busy drinking in the bars, were now suddenly in the streets too and joined the protests and AKA the riots, right?

That's right. And the police were called in, they used tear gas and said, go back to your dorm rooms basically, get back on campus. And that was Friday, now we move on to Saturday. Yeah, and the mayor's obviously a little jumpy. He's hearing rumors circulating that there's going to be another, the scene from the night before

is going to happen all over again on Saturday. So he calls the governor of Ohio and here enters the person who in my opinion is single-handedly responsible for what happened at Kent State. This eş expressing them to the land. It was fated to hear this old man'slaughter. Also, he said we can't have music

until they really big show. We're in New York. We can't help a lot of people because we don't have the same mood in the east of the city. But if we have Glasdorff, decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like Poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So the National Guard arrives, um, there were about a thousand protesters, um, that actually burned down an ROTC building on campus, which is pretty bold move.

And um, they didn't find out who did that exactly, but they did cut fire hoses so they couldn't put out the fire and basically burn it to the ground. Yeah. The protesters set it on fire and then cut the fire hoses. Like they wanted that building burned. And apparently, um, that's when the, the National Guard shows up a couple, like an hour or so later, right? Yeah.

And they, they, you know, broke everything up, obviously. And then, uh, come Sunday, you've got about a thousand National Guardsmen and you've got Governor Rhodes arriving and holding a press conference and kind of flaming the fire again by calling, uh, the protesters the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Yeah. He compared them to the brown shirts, Mussolini's brown shirts, um, the, uh, communists, um, pretty much anybody he could think of that was, that would be disparaging. That's who publicly at this press conference compared them to, um, and you mentioned that

the, the on Sunday morning, the, um, National Guard was on campus kind of keeping order and everything, but apparently like the relations between the Guardsmen and the students were pretty amicable. Like people were chatting friendly. Like there was no tension. It was just kind of like, Hey, I'm 19. Hey, I'm 19. I'm a student at Kent State.

I'm in the National Guard. Let's hang out. And it wasn't until the governor showed up and held this press conference that things took a very sudden turn for the worst and it wasn't just the brown shirts, calling them the brown shirts are the worst element that America harbors, but also saying, I may also declare martial law. Yeah. And that, uh, I may message never quite got through and those confusion as to whether

or not that actually happened. And basically the National Guard believed that that had happened and they took control of the campus and said, we're running the show now. And not just the National Guard, but the university officials too, the people running the university said, Oh, well, martial law is declared. And they knew that there was a protest scheduled for the following day, Monday. So they printed a bunch of flyers and pamphlets saying, Hey, your constitutional rights have been suspended because the university is under martial law.

So all assembly is banned. So don't protest. And that kind of fell on deaf ears. I guess you could say come Monday morning because the students showed up to protest. Yeah. That definitely didn't work. Um, by noon, there was about 3000 people, about 500 actively protesting another thousand just there to be supportive.

And, um, and it cuts it's a college campus about 1500 people just checking it out. Yeah. Stopping on their way to class or whatever, you know, like what's going on. I would have done the same thing probably. And we should say also our, um, our buddy stuff, they don't want you to know, um, host and sometimes a producer, Matt Frederick, his parents were students at Kent state and they stayed home that day. They did.

They were like, there's some bad stuff that's going to go down and they were right. So the article points out it was less an anti-war protest at this point and more of a protest of the draconian occupation of their campus. Yeah. Martial law. By the army. And, um, which is not even real, which is just a misunderstanding. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty much. So the general, um, Canterbury says, you know what? This rally's over. Drive me around in a Jeep and give me that bullhorn. Let me tell everyone to go home because that'll work. Yeah. I mean, let's go back to this, where these tensions came from in the first place.

It's establishment versus anti-establishment. Yeah. And establishment is the type to stand in a Jeep and be driven around with the bullhorn telling people to disperse. I don't know if there's ever been a message relayed via bullhorn that doesn't fall on deaf ears. Yeah. Yeah.

You know? It has the opposite effect. And less like, I guess, in like a FEMA situations, if you're trying to like organize people and stuff that helps. But I always think of bullhorns as stuff like this, the general riding around the Jeep yelling at people to go home and people saying, no, you don't understand why we're here in the first place. Right.

So they started throwing rocks at the Jeep, not surprisingly. And, um, well, think, you know, tensions at this point, this was day four. Yeah. I think, though, though, I'm not justifying, I'm just saying. No, no, I know you're not at all, but I think it's really easy to, um, to, to kind of choose one side or the other, especially once you know the outcome. But I don't think it should be overlooked that like people are throwing rocks at this dude while he's driving around on the Jeep.

People have burned down a building. Yeah, sure. People have rioted in the streets of the town, the college town. I mean, like, these are real huge events that scared the pants off of the people who were running the town, the state, the country. Yeah. And, I mean, to, to say that they were unprovoked as historically inaccurate. Yeah.

I totally agree. Not justifying, but I think a lot of people might think the story is people got together to protest and the army came in and shot them. Right. Or, yeah, and, and that it was either the protest or fault. They shouldn't have been protested. Right. They shouldn't have burned down that building.

Or, you know, it was entirely the National Guards' fault and you, whatever historical event you're looking at, it's never just one side or the other. No, it's usually gray. There is, it's always gray and you have blinders on if you think otherwise. You should write a history book called, It's Always Gray, Josh Clark's History of America. I'd buy that. Thanks, man. All right.

So where are we? They were throwing rocks at the general. He, at this point, ordered his troops to load their weapons, get the tear gas going. He said, they threw rocks at me, you guys load your weapons. That's basically what happened. Not because his feelings were hurt. Right. Yeah.

Although, I imagine they were. I guess. No matter who you are, I'm sure people throw rocks at you, you're like, I take that personally. So the National Guard came in, they pushed them back past the commons over a steep called Blanket Hill and into a parking lot of Prentice Hall in a practice football field, then basically the guardsmen found themselves cornered by a fence, retreated back up the hill. When they got to the top, 28 out of the 70 turned and began firing their guns into the crowd.

Yeah. So. Well, not all of them into the crowd. We should point out most into the air or the ground actually, although some fired directly in the crowd. What if I were directly in the crowd, there would have been a much higher blood count or body count. Oh yeah.

I'm sure. Yeah. And I mean, the protesters were about a football field away from them. And the fact that they started to walk up the hill and then turn and shot me, not just an attack of Americans on Americans, but a surprise attack of Americans on Americans. Yeah. I would say the students were definitely did not expect bullet retaliation. Look about 13 seconds, four students were killed, Allison Krause, not the Allison Krause,

obviously. Jeffrey Miller, Sandra, Shure, and William Schroeder. And it's all tragic, but even more tragically, Shure and Schroeder were just walking to class. Yeah. That makes it so much worse. They weren't even part of the protest. Yeah. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And like I said, nine people were wounded and one Dean Coller was paralyzed. Yeah. Go ahead. So those shots, they shot into the air and into the ground, but also into the crowd. And over about 13 seconds, they fired between 61 and 67 shots. I think that could be categorized as a hail of gunfire. Yeah. 13 seconds, 60 shots.

What is that? That's like a lot of shots a second. Yeah. You know? That's true. And just from 28 guns. Yeah. And apparently there was a professor named Glenn Frank who did a lot to quell the crowd

and did talk them into not escalating this thing any further. Right. So this article really kind of glances over this guy's role. And it wasn't just him, but he was the head of the faculty marshals whose job it was, was to basically keep an eye on the protests. Yeah. They were like the university's liaison between the university and the students, the protesters. And this guy and his crew basically single-handedly prevented like a massacre because they saw very

quickly that if they didn't insinuate themselves between the guardsmen and the students, the students were going to be like, holy, holy God, they just fired live ammunition on us. And they're standing right there. Let's get them. Yeah. And the consensus is the students would have attacked out of anger and that the guardsmen most definitely would have fired again when being attacked. And this faculty member and his team saw what was about to happen and slid in and was like,

wait, they first, they spoke to the guardsmen and said, stop firing, we have to go talk to the students. Then they went and spoke to the students for 20 minutes and got them to calm down enough to stop provoking or to not provoke or advance on the guardsmen in retaliation and saved a lot of lives probably. I wonder if there's a Glenn Frank statue on campus. There should be. I agree.

So they closed school not for the day or the weekend, but for the rest of the semester. And a lot of colleges did the same as far as shutting down. Well, because a lot of students went on strike. Oh, yeah. Like they were forced to, the universities were forced to shut down in the following weekend. A hundred thousand people went to DC to protest. Neil Young News to Josh wrote a song about it.

On the podcast, pay dude, the nineties called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay. So the, um, the shootings just happened, the crowd has been quelled, the dead and moon

had been taken away in ambulances and now we've reached the aftermath. That's right. Immediate and otherwise. Yeah. Um, president Nixon wasn't super compassionate. He had earlier been overheard calling them bums. This wasn't in his press release, obviously, but it definitely got out in the press, did not bode well for his reputation.

And, um, he said, when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. That was the official line. That was the official line, which is pretty cold. That's the president. Like, you get what you, what you pay for. Yeah. Pretty much. The vice president, um, Agnew said it was predictable, um, also not super compassionate.

No. Considering this, these were Americans that were shot and killed, uh, two of which were just walking to class. Uh, he called them a bunch of scared kids with guns, the National Guardsmen. Well, that was Ray Price, the speech writer for Nixon. Yeah. Which is true. Yeah.

But so basically the whole, the whole again, it's gray, you know, it is like they probably were scared for sure. And, uh, and yeah, I think that's fair. I think also though, it's, it's one sided too. Like he's, he's not saying, and then also the other side were a bunch of scared, angry kids with rocks. Yeah. Like the only way, and you can't even remove the gray, but you'd have to find out each

person who shot and what their motive was. Right. Cause some were probably scared out of their mind and reacted. There has been some people later on that said that they, some got together and decided to do this. Some of the guardsmen. Right. So when they, they had been pushing the crowd back onto the practice football field, apparently

while they were loitering there, there have been allegations that a couple of the guardsmen said, Hey, when we march back up the hill, we're going to turn in fire. Right. It's never been proven. Um, but a few, more than a couple of historians have leveled that accusation. Um, there was also a immediate word that the guardsmen said that they were acting in self-defense because they, there was a sniper on one of the rooftops and that they were being fired on.

They found out that there were audio recordings of this and, um, that was quickly changed to, well, it was self-defense because these people were throwing rocks at us. Yeah. There was a presidential commission, obviously, um, and they concluded it was quote, unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable. And then, uh, an FBI investigation found that the guardsmen fabricated their defense and that they were not in true danger. Right.

That was the FBI. So the presidential commission and the FBI investigation both said like, this shouldn't have happened and like it's on the guardsmen, but, uh, that wasn't the mood of the nation for the most part. There was a Gallup poll that was conducted shortly after and, um, the majority of Americans said that it was the protesters' fault for protesting. Yeah. I mean, it went to trial too.

It wasn't just like, oh, well, this happened and it's super sad. Uh, and in the federal trial, it was dismissed because of, uh, what was called a weak case by the guardsmen. And then the grand jury in Ohio put the blame on the university officials and the protesters and not the guardsmen. And then there was a civil trial in, uh, 1979 settled out of court where the victims and families, uh, got a collective sum of $675,000, uh, collective sum, meaning I guess that was for all of them, right?

Yeah. Yeah. They all split that. And no apology was, uh, apology was ever issued. Um, they did issue a signed statement expressing regret. You want to hear it? Yeah. So this is the signed statement that the, that was, that came out of the civil trial

that the Ohio National Guard released to the families of the victims. In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4th, 1970 should not have occurred. The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and in order to disperse. These orders have since been determined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to have been lawful. Some of the guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed

their own, in their own minds that their lives were in danger. Mindsight suggests that another method would have resolved the confrontation. Better ways must be found to deal with such a confrontation. We devoutly wish that a means had been found to avoid the May 4th events, culminating in the guard shootings and the irreversible deaths and injuries. We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others which resulted. We hope that the agreement to end the litigation will help to assuage the tragic memories regarding

that sad day. I don't know, Apology. No. Sort of like. We regret. Hindsight being 2020, we might have should have done something differently. Right. Saying we regret instead of I'm sorry is a big flashing light.

Yeah, it's a big diff. And for many years, the university itself wasn't quite sure how to handle moving forward in memoriam and otherwise, in the 70s, the officials at Kent State failed, they tried to, but they tried to commemorate it just once every five years instead of every year. And everybody who held the vigil was like, well, then you have nothing to do with this and they kept showing up every year. Right. Like, what are you going to do?

Call the National Guard and remove us. Yeah. And they went, do. Right. In 1979, there were hundreds of arrests because the university tried to bulldoze the place where it happened to build a gym. That didn't happen. And it took all the way up until 1998 to keep cars from driving over the spots in the parking

lot where the students were killed. Right. And then finally, in the mid 2000s, the university has finally reversed its position and just kind of goes with the flow. And in 2013, they opened a visitor center that is all about commemorating this event as a historical event. But also, I get the impression from the descriptions of the visitor center, kind of the spiritual aspect of it, the spiritual aspect of tragedy, you know.

Was that just last year? Uh-huh. Wow. Now, the university, they say, is the nation's leader in courses of nonviolence and democracy and peace studies and conflict resolution classes were all established. So they, you know, are trying to lead the way forward in at least being a symbol of, you know, peaceful protest. Right.

And people are still trying to figure out what happened. There's still lots of debate. Oliver Stone unsurprisingly favors a theory that the government placed a sniper in these protests and that there were government plant agitators who pushed the protests over the line. And this idea is supported by the fact that there were policies by governors and the president to crack down on dissent on student anti-war protests. So there definitely was a policy that was like, if you want to get dirty, we'll send

our goons to beat you up. But a lot of people think that the presence of a sniper is totally unsupported. But then a cassette emerged fairly recently that's an actual audio recording of that day that says supposedly you can hear the phrases, get set, point, and fire, which means that this wasn't a surprise knee jerk shooting, that there was an officer commanding the guardsmen to shoot. Yeah, and it also, you know, with modern analysis, they think that there may have been shots fired before, I think 70 seconds before the guardsmen fired.

There's a Kent State student named Terry Norman, who was a photographer on campus taking pictures and he also had a handgun, a loaded handgun, and he denied that he discharged it. But he has been accused of triggering this by firing shots, and I think they found audio evidence that there were shots fired and they think it may have been Terry Norman that kicked it all off. Man, can you imagine carrying that around? No, I could not. And then Chuck, a lot of people say that Kent State was the beginning of the slide toward

Watergate for Nixon. This is like the beginning of the end forum. And then we should also talk about what happened at Jackson State because race relations in this country are so messed up that everybody talks about Kent State where four white students died and no one talks about Jackson State, which happened 10 days later, and two black people died, black students. Yeah, and could have been a lot worse. They basically riddled a dormitory with a hail of gunfire.

Yeah, so 10 days after Kent State at Jackson State University in Mississippi, they were also carrying out anti-war protests, but there were also protests based on racism as well. And when these students were doing a lot of the similar stuff, a lot of the same stuff that was happening or had happened at Kent State, they were rioting. They had burned a building on campus down, and when firefighters came out to put out the flames, they started to get worried that these protesters were going to harm them, so they called the cops. Well, the cops came out, tried to disperse the crowd.

The crowd didn't disperse, so they opened fire. And like you said, they riddled the building that served as the backdrop to this protest with bullets, something like 460 rounds hit the building alone. There's no telling how many went on the sides or anything like that, but 460 rounds. Yeah, they said every window was broken on every floor with bullet fire. Right. On a crowd, a crowd of students, and amazingly, only two people died. Yeah, Phillip Gibbs, he was a pre-law major and a father of an 18-month-old son, and

James Green, he was 17 years old, and he was a high school student walking home from his job at the grocery store. Which again, the fact that he's not involved in any way and still died makes it so much worse. Yeah, and this one also, I don't think we pointed out, started out because of misinformation. There was a rumor that the mayor, Mayor Charles Evers, and his wife had been shot and killed, assassinated basically. Oh, yeah.

It was not true. A relative of Medgar Evers, right? Yeah, he was his brother. And so that's kind of what sparked everything in addition to the anti-war protest. Right. And it was very much about black and white. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah. So this is a historically black college.

The cops had just opened fire on a bunch of students. Twelve people were hit by, injured by gunfire. Yeah. Two were killed. And the ambulances weren't called until the police picked up all of their shell casings and left. And then the National Guard came in. Yeah.

After that, the police denied they even took part. I'm not sure how that panned out. How can you deny that you shot up a building? So it was Mississippi in 1970, and then historically black college. And you probably never heard of Jackson State for that very reason. To be honest, until we started researching this, I hadn't heard of it either. And there was only one source we used that made reference to it. That's how I heard about it.

So that's great. It's just fantastic. That's what happened against it in Jackson State. In Jackson State. You got anything else? I got nothing else. There's got to be a better ending to this than this. I mean, these things happen, but there has to have been some lesson learned.

I think so. It hasn't happened since. Yeah, that's true. I wonder. I wonder if it is. I at least saw it on a campus. We should do one on the battle for Seattle. Dude, they didn't fire live rounds at that, though, did they?

I'm pretty sure they didn't, but yeah, we should do one on that as well. Yeah, my friend John was there. Agitating. Was he a black shirt? Now, he had these funny protest signs that reference to Simpsons I can't remember. Or black block. That's what they got. He got the pictures.

Really? Yeah. Well, I'll have to interview him then. I don't know. It would yield much information. Oh, fine. I think he was just goofing around. I got you.

All right, well, if you want to learn more about Kent State, you can type in that name into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. We also encourage you to go look up Jackson State as well. Let's see. Since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail, right? Yes, sir. I'm going to call this a prison guard wrote in. Hey, guys.

For the most part, I found the episode on capital punishment pretty even-handed and interesting. I couldn't help but notice a bit of venom in your voices whenever you mention prison guards, especially an instance of an inmate taking his own life with a razor blade while he was being observed on Death Watch. The implication was that the guard on duty negligently gave the inmate a razor in order to encourage him to take his own life. I don't think we implied that, did we?

No, it wasn't implied. It was more just like what kind of thing? Why did that happen? Right. As a former prison guard that worked on Death Row, I have to tell you that couldn't be further from the truth. It's a civil right for inmates to have access to razor blades for hygienic purposes. I was required to allow an inmate on Death Row to keep the disposable razor for 30 minutes,

despite the fact that he had nearly killed another inmate and murdered a prison official with a razor blade while serving his sentence. I'd imagine an inmate even on Death Watch would have similar rights, but I can't confirm through experience guards that worked on Death Row weren't allowed to serve on Death Watch. This is because it was feared that we'd form an emotional bond to the inmate set for execution and might cause a scene. So yes, prison guards have feelings and can have empathy for others. A pop culture nearly always portrays guards as heavies and villains, and even smart portrayals

of prison life like Orange is the New Black, as every prison official character as a comic book, mustache, twirling villain, or a mouth-breathing idiot. It's a hard job and should be respected as much as other high-risk civil service careers. Little disappointed you guys continued this trend, but I'm used to it, so don't sweat it. So that is from Craig, and he let us off easy, even though he feels like we insulted his job. Well, thanks, Craig. I think he did exactly what we were kind of searching for right then.

We were just disgustedly confused. Yeah. We're disgustedly ignorant, one of the two. Yeah, I will say that he is probably right on the money as far as movie portrayals. It's pretty one note if you're a prison guard in a movie in general, unless it's the green mile and that movie has problems of its own. Or Oz. I never watched Oz.

What? Yeah. That was the first. That Oz is the show that kicked off all the shows you love in Binge Watch now. The idea of Binge Watching a show began with a show like Oz, because there was nothing like it ever created before. It all started with Oz. The wire, the shield, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, everything, every breaking

bed, all of them can thank Oz. You can thank Oz. You should go watch Oz, man. Thank you, Oz. It's good. Great. Man, this one is something, I feel drained a little bit. Yeah.

Emotionally exhausted. I'm still not happy with the ending. I feel like we could have ended it a lot better, but I'll have to think on it. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can hang out on our Facebook page, facebook.com. Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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