What followed was an unprecedented, though largely forgotten, revolutionary moment in U.S. history. Over two weeks, millions of people walked out of classrooms, blocked highways, and in dozens of cities set fire to military recruitment centers.

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Panicking officials deployed National Guard soldiers to college campuses across the country, leading to the events for which the period is most remembered: the shootings of student protesters at the universities of Kent State in Ohio and Mississippi’s Jackson State.

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Rapidly deteriorating situation forced Nixon to backpedal. US troops mostly withdrew from Cambodia within 90 days without achieving main objective. Within US borders, violent repression of the movement of May 1970 triggered a struggle over the legacy of the movement & war itself.

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Kent State shootings

By May 2, protesters had set fire to the ROTC office at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. At the behest of university and local officials, Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes ordered the National Guard onto campus, declaring on television,

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“I think that we're up against the strongest well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.”

On May 4, with tear gas failing to quash large daily demonstrations, the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of protesters with live ammunition,

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killing four students: Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison B. Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheurer. Nine more were injured, with one paralyzed permanently. The dead were all aged 19 or 20 years old.

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National Guard retreated from campus. But the shootings quickly sent a shockwave through the country. Following Kent State’s lead, repression expanded nationwide in the following days. Police wounded a dozen protesters at the State University of NY at Buffalo with shotgun fire.

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National Guard troops attached bayonets to their rifles before charging demonstrators in both Albuquerque, New Mexico and Carbondale, Illinois...

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“It was a full-scale uprising against the war,” says Fight Back! editor Mick Kelly, whose participation in the May 1970 movement as a youth started him on the revolutionary path. He explains it wasn’t only students walking out: thousands of faculty effectively went on strike.

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Many universities closed for the remainder of the year. On May 8, 100,000 protesters descended on Washington, D.C., at one point forcing Nixon to flee to Camp David, with the 82nd Airborne Division reportedly prepared to deploy in the city.

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In the streets of New York, huge groups of anti-war demonstrators brawled with mobs of bootlicking pro-war strikebreakers. The movement weakened the U.S. war effort itself. Thousands of drafted soldiers deserted.

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Many more began to engage in sabotage and covert disobedience, a trend which would continue through the remaining years of the war.

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Black liberation alongside anti-imperialism

Previously, the state had reserved deadly force for repressing uprisings in the Black community – repression which many connected to the plight of the Vietnamese.

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“There’s a misunderstanding about the character of the core of the anti-war movement. People weren’t pacifists or ‘Let’s get out of Vietnam’ types,” explains Kelly. “You weren’t chanting, ‘Peace now’, you were chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is sure to win.’”

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The NLF was the National Liberation Front – the so-called ‘Viet Cong.’

“It was a near revolutionary period,” he says. “You had a powerful Black liberation movement in the streets, everywhere. There’d be people selling the Black Panther Party newspaper.

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