May 4, 2019, marks 49 years since the infamous killings at Kent State University. On that day, students were participating in a protest against the United States' invasion of Cambodia (an offshoot of the Vietnam War effort that spawned years of protests around the country), when National Guard troops opened fire on the protestors, killing four and injuring nine.
According to the Ohio History Central, the protest came after days of intense anti-war resistance on the Kent State campus. By May 3, roughly a thousand National Guard troops were there. At a May 4 demonstration, armed guardsman advanced on the crowd and 29 opened fire for 13 seconds, shooting off 67 rounds. Students Allison Krause (19), Sandy Scheuer (20), Jeffrey Miller (20), and William Knox Schroeder (19) were killed. Scheuer and Schroeder had been walking to class and not even participating in the protest.
"They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America,” then-Ohio governor Jim Rhodes had said of the protesters, many of whom were college students, the day before the shooting. “I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America." The Vietnam War was often viewed through a Cold War lens as a fight against the spread of global communism, so those opposed to the war were viewed suspiciously and often tied to communism.
Nearly half a century later, the Kent State shooting remains a touchstone moment of the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. But this horrible tragedy is not the only moment of protest worth remembering from the Vietnam War era, which spanned the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. Here are six other famous protests from that time everyone should know about.
Students across the country went on strike in an action planned before the May 4 Kent State shootings. A poster in Cornell University’s digital archives lists campuses across the country where students walked out on May 6. A New York Times report from May 5, 1970, indicates that thousands of students walked out at several universities across the northeast on May 4, as well. The University of Washington’s Antiwar and Radical History Project reported that thousands walked out on their campus on May 5. At least one school, Ohio University, shut down in May 1970 as student protests continued.
Coming in 1970, the Kent State killings were following on years of anti-war protests. One of the best-known protest tactics of the era was to burn draft cards, something those who were eligible for the draft, which was also called Selective Service, would do to show their unwillingness to be conscripted into military service.
A 1963 New York Times article tells the story of 22-year-old Eugene Keyes, who burned his draft card on Christmas Eve and used it to light a candle “for peace on earth.” The same day, he was mailed a notice that he had been drafted.
“The Selective Service is for organized violence,” Keyes told the Times. “I do not want to obey orders in any system of violence, not even orders to carry a draft card.” The draft ended in 1973 with the end of the Vietnam War.
- Celebrity StyleKit Connor Just Buzzed All of His Hair Off
Students weren’t the only ones to get involved in the anti-war movement. Some celebrities of the era were also quite vocal about their opposition to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Perhaps the most famous example of this was legendary actress and singer Eartha Kitt’s famous January 1968 confrontation with first lady, Lady Bird Johnson at the White House during a luncheon that was supposed to be about juvenile delinquency.
“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” Kitt told the First Lady, whose husband, President Johnson, had overseen the U.S. efforts in Vietnam transformed from support and advice to full-scale war. “They rebel in the street. They will take pot … and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam," said Kitt.
Kitt told The Washington Post in 1978 that she was effectively blacklisted from the U.S. entertainment industry after her outburst upset the First Lady. According to a 1975 New York Times article, the CIA had already been looking into Kitt since the 1950s. She would eventually return to fame in the States in the late ‘70s.
Kitt wasn’t the only famous name to get involved in the anti-war movement. In April 1967, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. military through the draft, which resulted in him losing his boxing license and being effectively exiled from the world of boxing, where he was king, from 1967 to 1970. Later that year, he was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for his refusal. His case would eventually make it the Supreme Court, where his conviction would be overturned in 1971.
- Celebrity StyleKit Connor Just Buzzed All of His Hair Off
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” Ali said in 1966, explaining his refusal. “They never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father," he said of the Vietnamese.
Founded in 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) tapped into a rich vein of anti-war sentiment coming from the very service members who had gone to Southeast Asia to fight. According to an article from the group’s publication The Veteran, the power of VVAW was perhaps most potently on display in D.C. in April 1971. It was there that Vietnam vets gathered for a protest called Operation Dewey Canyon III — a reference to secret U.S. operations Dewey Canyon I and II in Vietnam’s neighboring country Laos.
According to The Veteran, local chapters from across the country came together. During their six-day protest in D.C., they had their veteran status questioned thanks to President Richard Nixon’s White House, they occupied a senator’s office, and over 100 were arrested. By the end of the demonstration, more than 1,000 protesters had gathered. They marched on the Capitol and, as an exclamation point to their protest, tossed thousands of war medals at the building.
“In all, literally thousands of medals were thrown back at the government that had sent each of the veterans to fight for the U.S. ruling class. Never before had such a demonstration occurred by war veterans,” The Veteran remembered. “The sentiments of the vets was expressed best by one veteran who tossed his medals away and stated: ‘If we have to fight again, it will be to take these steps.’”
- Celebrity StyleKit Connor Just Buzzed All of His Hair Off
Celebrities, veterans, parts of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, feminists, the Gay Liberation movement, the labor movement, and so many more were involved in anti-war activities during the Vietnam War. But it is often students, specifically those in college, who are best remembered for their activist work of the era — and not just for the tragedy at Kent State.
Consider, for example, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the group, founded in 1959, started working in the Civil Rights Movement and would evolve into a major force in the anti-war movement before it split into factions in the late ‘60s. But it was an April 1965 march on Washington that solidified SDS’s place in history. Estimates on crowd size range between 15,000 and 25,000 people; it’s widely regarded as the largest peach march in American history up to that point.
“What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions?” asked SDS founding member and president Paul Potter, then a University of Michigan grad student, in a famous speech called “Naming the System” at the march. “We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it. For it is only when that system is changed and brought under control that there can be any hope for stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a murder in the South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innumerable more subtle atrocities that are worked on people all over — all the time.”
According to a 1965 article from The New York Times (which noted that the SDS was “left-leaning but non-communist”), the group picketed the White House and prepared a petition to present to Congress to stop the war.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Vietnam Commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the My Lai Massacre
