Kent State Shootings - Forty Years Later

This message contains information about a site update in the ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY section of ESLBEE.COM.

May 4, 2010, is the FORTY YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the Kent State Shootings, an event in which the Ohio National Guard shot 67 rounds into Kent State University Students over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis from the chest down.

May 4, 1970, was a period in US history when outrage against the Vietnam war was near its peak. Only a week earlier, then President Richard Nixon had announced extended bombing runs into Cambodia.

This link, http://eslbee.com/calendar/may.htm, contains a brief summary of the Kent State Shootings plus links to a CNN News report, an audio interview with John Filo, the student who took the photo of then 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, killed instantly when hit by a bullet fired by the Ohio National Guard, and a link to a Wikipedia article containing over 70 more links to original source material for those interested in further research into the Kent State Shootings. In the aftermath, for example, student riots across the country forced over 450 campuses to close with both violent and non-violent demonstrations.

Maybe you will see US Television News Reports about the forty-year-anniversary of the Kent State Shootings, but probably not.

To those of us who lived through it, those were turbulent times.