* Kent State, May 4, 1970, premonitory of American mass shootings to come.

Ohio National Guardsmen open fire
on student protestors and bystanders,
Kent State University, May 4, 1970



(Clockwise: William Schroeder,
Sandy Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause)
These photos were chosen by parents
 of the Kent State murdered students,
 as the photos they wished to be displayed
in memory of their children, two years after the killings.
Particularly poignant was the  photo choice of the Schroeders for their son Bill,  a shirtless portrait, exuding a Huck Finn zest for life.

As program coordinator for the Center for Peaceful Change, the University's memorial to the slain students, I arranged for  creation of 
The May 4th  Resource Room
in the KSU library which would display these photos.

Note at link above that the Library declines to refer to the murders instead euphemizing them as "the May 4, 1970 events."

 






Barry Levine and Allison Krause
outside Eastway dorm complex,
 Kent State, 1970





Barry and Allison
were
Romeo and Juliet
 to many of us
living in
Eastway complex,
always in each other's arms,
a joy of liberated affection.


(Allison would bleed to death in Barry's arms.)


 



(Jeffrey Millier lies on the asphalt altar of the Kent State human sacrifice. A grieving female bystander, as streaming blood puddles behind her,  seems to express the eternal loss of mothers everywhere.)

When I saw how much blood had drained from 
Jeffrey Miller's head, 
and then found the telephone lines to be dead in Eastway complex,
I got in my car and abandoned my job and the campus.

The FBI took over  the entire campus and ordered all 18,000
resident students to leave town, frantically  and vainly searching the dorms for evidence of a conspiracy and "weapons." 

 My assistant as a resident counselor in Manchester dorm was a geology major.  His rock collection was taken and later displayed as "evidence"  by the local grand jury that students had been planning a riot at Kent State


 



In the insanity of the moment,
a student protestor jumps up and down
in the slain student's blood.