The Kent State Shootings

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard soldiers opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four students — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder — and wounding nine others. The students were protesting what they viewed as an illegal expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, announced by President Nixon four days earlier. The shooting lasted 13 seconds and was preceded by no clear order to fire and no direct threat to the guardsmen.

The killings ignited national outrage and student strikes at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, effectively shutting down American higher education for days. A subsequent student march on Washington attracted over 100,000 protesters within days of the shootings. The photograph by John Filo of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the defining images of the Vietnam War era.

The legal aftermath was prolonged and unsatisfying. A grand jury indicted 25 people — mostly students — but no guardsmen. A federal grand jury ultimately indicted eight guardsmen, but charges were dismissed. Civil suits filed by the families of the dead and wounded resulted in a 1979 settlement in which the state of Ohio paid $675,000 to the plaintiffs and issued a statement of regret. No guardsman was ever convicted in connection with the shootings.

The Kent State massacre accelerated the collapse of American public support for the Vietnam War and marked a turning point in the relationship between the government and student protest movements. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the following month. The question of who ordered the guardsmen to fire — or whether the shootings were spontaneous — was never definitively resolved. A 2010 acoustic analysis suggested a Guard officer may have ordered the shots, but the analysis was disputed.