Status Updates From Kent State: An American Tra...

‘My intention in going to Kent State,’ Tom later said, ‘was to study history, not become a part of it.’

The courtroom hushed as the bailiff played Strubbe’s recording of the terrible 12.53 seconds when guardsmen fired sixty-seven shots that killed four students and wounded nine others.

Along with this outpouring of sympathy came letters—some with return addresses—that threatened her life, that contained feces, that said, ‘People of your ilk who raise their children to be Communists should have expected this.’

He could feel nothing below his waist. ‘I knew I had a spinal cord injury. I just tried to stay calm until the shooting stopped.’…‘Someone roll me over,’ he said...‘The one thing I’ll never forget about that day is seeing the looks on the faces of the students who were standing over me, not knowing there were twelve other people out there shot, four of them bleeding profusely, lying dying on the ground.’

‘Because we’re black, and we know that when a white man has a gun and he sees a black, he gets uptight. He has a compulsion to shoot. And the black man gets shot, no matter what he’s done. Portage County is fille with immigrants from the South. To us, Portage County is Mississippi, and in Mississippi it’s easy for a black to stay indoors when whites are running around.’

He also opposed the draft—“for me, it’s Canada or jail, nothing else,” he told close friends—and considered applying for conscientious-objector status but changed his mind when he learned that if his application was rejected, he would immediately be drafted.