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Allison Krause Believed "Flowers Were Better Than Bullets." Kent State Proved Otherwise
The lessons of the Kent State shooting still haunts America.
It was May 4, 1970, and Kent State smelled like burnt coffee and fresh-cut grass. The ghost of yesterday's tear gas still clung to the breeze. The Commons, a student gathering place for last-minute cramming, was filled with chatty teens and frisbee games.
These students weren't radicals. Many of them had voted for Richard Nixon. He had promised to end the war. Instead, he escalated it in Cambodia.
Still, most students couldn't identify Cambodia on a map. The internet didn't exist, TVs were not in dorm rooms, and the radio had little news that interested college students. But they knew that their friends were getting drafted, and they knew their friends were dying.
The protests started small, almost lazy. There were a few signs, some scattered chants, and a bonfire where a couple of kids torched draft cards, more as a joke than a rebellion. At first, it felt like any other college spectacle—more Woodstock than a war zone. Bands played, and people laughed. But something shifted as the weekend went on.
Two days earlier, the governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, compared the protesters to Nazis "worse than…
