by Joe Courter
What follows is an article from the Iguana in April 1995, Vol 9, #7 we’re publishing as part of an occasional series of “look-backs.” It was published on the 25-year anniversary of the killings at Kent State.
May 4th 1995 will mark the 25th anniversary of the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University by soldiers of the Ohio National Guard. As someone who was a college freshman in the spring of 1970; and active in the anti-war activities that were happening at my campus in southwestern Michigan, these killings had a profound personal impact; they were students of my age doing what I would have been doing had I been there at Kent State. That United States armed and trained soldiers would shoot and kill students made me realize how much the government hated the anti-war movement, and this increased my resolve to oppose the U.S. policy which turned young men into killers, be they soldiers in Vietnam or Ohio. Or Mississippi, where only ten days after the Kent killings, two students were killed at Jackson State in a protest of both the war and the Kent State shootings.
